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Jet Strikes Drone Near Heathrow Airport (marketwatch.com)
smooth wombat writes: "A British Airways flight Sunday appears to have collided with a drone on a flight bound for London's busy Heathrow Airport in what may be the first such incident involving a major airline," according to MarketWatch. "The flight from Geneva, Switzerland to Heathrow, Europe's busiest hub, is believed to have struck a drone, the London Metropolitan Police said in a statement. The plane landed safely following the incident, which occurred around 12:50 p.m. local time. 'It was only a matter of time before we had a drone strike given the huge numbers being flown around by amateurs who don't understand the risks and the rules,' said BALPA flight safety specialist Steve Landells... 'Much more education of drone users and enforcement of the rules is needed to ensure our skies remain safe from this threat'."
I hope everybody is ok. This bodes very poorly for drone ultraregulation and enforcement. As the summary says, it was only a matter of time.
There has been no evidence presented that it hit a drone. Just speculation at this point
Of course I get all my aerospace news from MarketWatch... However, other sources suggest the pilots saw it bounce off the nose:
After landing, the pilot reported an object - believed to be a drone - had struck the front of the Airbus A320.
As someone who works at a major Air Force bace that flies "heavies", I can tell you that often there is no physical damage and the only way to confirm a "bird strike" is the blood left behind, and small drones do not have blood.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If shooting them down is illegal then running them down with a 747 has to be illegal too.
Nullius in verba
There are lots of "common sense" things, especially in US manuals, such as don't iron clothes on your body or while taking a bath.
Obviously plenty of people need reminders.
Putting in a general notice such as "limits may exist in your part of the world, look them up before flying this thing", and maybe even spending a few hours online to get links to rule making bodies in their major export markets, shouldn't be too much to ask.
What a moron. We have wait until an airliner crashes, then we do something, right? You'll notice that the thing was not sucked into an engine, and that the 747 was landing, not taking off. If both those criteria had been met then your post might read a little differently. You appear not to notice the research that has been conducted on bird strikes on large jets for many years. You also seem to be unaware of the unlucky passengers of light aircraft who have had large birds land in their laps, along with chunks of perspex and aluminium. The pilots are asking for more research, but you'd rather not find out because, hey, your rights trump everything and everyone.
"We don't worry about the dangers of birds"
Excuse me?
Civil aviation spends millions trying to avoid birds near the major airports.
"perhaps it should actually show that small drones that weigh a few pounds really aren't more dangerous to aircraft than birds."
Except that:
1) We know (and act upon) birds *are* quite dangerous to aircraft.
2) We know drones have a distintive characteristic that may make them more dangerous: they have an intelligent will backing them up (i.e.: adding explosives and/or the ability to crash on purpose).
You don't put a grill over the engine, because all that would do with a large birdstrike is add bits of metal into the mass of bird going into the engine.
Airports can, and do, put a huge amount of effort into clearing birds from around their runways, due to the risks that birdstrike presents during takeoff and landing. To quote from one of Heathrow Airport's own documents:
Birds can present a safety risk if they become caught in aircraft engines. Heathrowâ(TM)s bird hazard management team aim to make the airport as unappealing as possible for birds through habitat management, disturbing birds using distress noises, letting off flares and, as a last resort, through culling.
Bird populations can even influence the siting of airports. When a major recent UK study ruled out the construction of a new airport in the Thames Estuary (to the east of the capital), the scale of the bird-management that would be necessary was one of several reasons cited:
The operational risk to the airport posed by birdstrike could increase the scale of compensatory habitat required as it would require it to be sited further away, ideally to a minimum of 20km away from the site, and certainly outside of the 13km bird safeguarding circle, increasing the uncertainty as to its suitability as replacement for the habitat lost. It may also necessitate additional mitigation measures to be put in place. If any remaining bird habitats within the 13km safeguarding circle (that is those not already displaced by the airport's direct impact) were considered to pose an operational safety risk additional mitigation measures would be needed and it may ultimately be necessary to remove those habitats, increasing further the environmental impact and cost of compensation.
The CE logo is protected, and there are fines for using it withoutwithout certification. So instead they use one that is very similar: In the proper one the circle described by the C intersects the one described by the E such that the outlines (if they were present) would overlap exactly.
Anything that has the other logo is colloquially known as Chinese Export.
What's really dumb is the general public is largely ignorant about the difference. If your house burns down due to a faulty CE certified device you can have redress. If your house burns down due to a faulty Chinese Export, well it was uncertified so tough shit.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Wow you would think the PHD level engineers that have been designing jet engines for decades would have thought of that ... and maybe if it was so easy, they would have done it by now ?
There's only about a billion reasons it wouldn't work, and one of the first that springs to mind is that jet engines are sucking in air - at a huge speed (in many cases several times the speed of sound)... you stick a grill in there, you are reducing the possible airflow. That grill will have to be made of something incredibly (probably impossible) strong just to prevent it getting sucked in itself (seriously - you have no idea the force a jet engine generates -it's not like an air-conditioner - those things put out hundreds of KILONewtons in thrust). And if you actually build your super-grill, you will hugely weaken the engine because it will not be able to get air in as fast. Even most basic grill that actually does something useful will be at least a 30% reduction in engine power (50% is more likely for anything strong enough to do the job)... so now you'll need twice as many engines. Which means twice the fuel, and of course you've greatly increased the weight of the aircraft so you have to increase the wing-size massively to compensate... but that means you have to go *faster* to be able to generate enough lift which means you need more engines...
They don't call it the tyranny of the rocket equation for nothing.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Oh, yes, definitely, the manual for the Chinese drone should include all the relevant air safety laws for your location. Just like my Japanese Supra came with a copy of the California Driver Handbook. Oh, wait, it did not!
Knowing the applicable laws is the user's responsibility. The drone's documentation should contain what's applicable to the drone, not a compendium of all laws governing the use of airspace from the North to the South pole. Even if the local regulations required that the relevant laws are included with the drone, it would be probably left to the local distributor to do so.
No good deed goes unpunished...
1) The first rule of DDD: drones cannot cause any problem ever in any situation.
2) The second rule of DDD: always defend drones as harmless no matter what the circumstance. For example if firefighters call off aerial retardant drops because drones are flying in the fire zone: the missed drops didn't make any difference and/or drones didn't pose any interference and the authorities should have just kept flying.
In the current post three of the major denial themes are stated.
1) It wasn't a drone.
2) If there was a drone, nothing happened.
3) If there was a drone interaction, there was no actual damage.
It's so simple even the dullest of Slashdot Pundits can execute it with ease.
BTW, I've actually participated in a project with the FAA addressing bird strike mitigation. They take any physical impact on a aircraft very seriously. It's not just birds, but any strike by FOD (Foreign Object Debris). That includes anything on a runway, like trash. At DFW airport in Texas, they have a problem with foxes who live in the airport and are stuck by aircraft. They collect and monitor the corpses, and have a burial location for their bodies. The FAA has records of rodent strikes, when their carcasses are found on runways. Anything hitting a aircraft is considered very significant. Saying that it's not important is just a pledge of allegiance to the DDD. A true blue cult member.
Why is Snark Required?
And, do you really think that if someone wants to use a drone to try crashing a plane, the regulation is going to stop them?
Might as well take that stupid "murder" law off the books as well, then, eh?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Totally wrong. Pilots regularly train for engine failures at all stages of takeoff, and unless spectacularly mishandled, does NOT lead to the plane crashing.
Also, losing an engine in cruise does NOT cause the a/c to start losing altitude quickly. Sure, you'll have to drift down to a single engine cruise altitude but it's not nearly as harsh as the poster seems to think.
This is bullshit. All you have to do is park your car on the side of the highway close to the teavel lane to experience the extreme buffeting that shakes the entire car as every single vehicle goes by at high speed 6 feet away.
Yes, as the vehicle passes, not before it gets there. I see why you didn't log in, son.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"