Record-Breaking 11000ft Flight Sparks Criticism In Pilot Community

An anonymous reader writes: In an attempt to break the world 'how high can you fly a consumer drone' record, an anonymous person from the Netherlands flew a Phantom 2 Quadcopter to a height of up to 3.4 km. That is more than 3 km above the maximum European Union legal height of 120 meters, which has applied since July 1, 2015 to hobby drones. Undoubtedly he set a new record of sorts, which also led to substantial discussions among the drone pilot community on the safe use of drones. At a height of 3.4 kilometers or 11000 feet you can indeed run into regular air traffic, or cause a lot of damage in case of a crash. Fortunately not in this flight -- but the battery had only 4% capacity at the moment of landing.

Comments

So what you are actually saying...

[tlambert]

So what you are actually saying... "but the battery had only 4% capacity at the moment of landing" ...is that these things need better/bigger batteries.

Get a permit/file a flight plan

[davidwr]

Air-traffic authorities should provide for this sort of thing by allowing trained (licensed?) hobbyists to file a flight plan ahead of time, to give the authorities time to say "no, the airspace is busy at the time you requested" or "yes, go ahead, we've put you in the system and will alert other airspace users of your presence. Please use transponder code ABCXYZ."

Re:Would it really matter?

[rwyoder]

Google Image search of "birdstrike aircraft": https://www.google.com/search?...

Now explain to all those birds that they should have been deflected around the aircraft.