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Watch What Happens When A Drone Slams Into An Airplane Wing (sacbee.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Freshly Exhumed writes:
Researchers at the University of Dayton Research Institute [Impact Physics Lab] have shown in a video what can happen when a high-mass, consumer-level drone strikes the wing of an aircraft. They provide visual evidence of the damage a 2.1-pound DJI Phantom 2 videography quadcopter would have upon the wing of a Mooney M20, a small, private aircraft. It is not difficult to extrapolate the effects upon an airliner in a similar situation. "We wanted to help the aviation community and the drone industry understand the dangers that even recreational drones can pose to manned aircraft before a significant event occurs," said Kevin Poormon of UDRI.
The video -- titled "Risk in the Sky?" -- simulates a collision at 238 mph in which the drone tears open the wing's leading edge.
"While the quadcopter broke apart, its energy and mass hung together to create significant damage to the wing," said Kevin Poormon, group leader for impact physics at UDRI.
The video -- titled "Risk in the Sky?" -- simulates a collision at 238 mph in which the drone tears open the wing's leading edge.
"While the quadcopter broke apart, its energy and mass hung together to create significant damage to the wing," said Kevin Poormon, group leader for impact physics at UDRI.
wouldn't it be better to test a drone crashing into the engines of an F-35, or a commercial airliner? That may be somewhat more relevant.
Provided no critical electrical or fuel lines are pierced in the process. And that looks like a worst-case scenario impact. That said, still wouldn't want to be flying on a plane that has a collision.
And more, how does this compare with a bird-strike test
Is this actually the worst case? How about hitting an engine or windscreen
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
It didn't seem like that much of the wing was impacted, and the plane would still be flyable. For a jetliner with a much larger wing, even less of the lift surface would be impacted...
I was wondering in fact if the material of a larger jet would would be strong enough to come through the impact even better than the small plane.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
DJI Demands Withdrawal Of Misleading Drone Collision Video: https://www.dji.com/newsroom/n...
The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was caused by foam hitting the wing at high velocity. Though I suppose anyone younger than about 20 can be excused for not knowing materials in high-velocity impacts don't behave the way we're used to them behaving in everyday life. (e.g. metal bullets "splash".)
A Mooney M20 has a top speed of 165 knots and a typical cruising speed of around 130. If this is intended to provide facts why not show the results of a collision at 100, 130, or 165... nah, letâ(TM)s show almost 250 mph so we can hype the shit out of this and win the argument with people who donâ(TM)t actually know or understand what they are seeing. Maybe for the next test slam a drone into a perfectly perpendicular windshield at 1200 mph, thatâ(TM)ll really scare some folks into supporting more regulations.
Full disclosure: I am a pilot with hundreds of hours of experience. I also fly RC and build my own self piloting aircraft. I have some minor/small concerns about midair collisions with typical consumer drones, but I am far more worried about this power grab by the FAA and the long term impact it will have.
Yeah, lets use government to fix problems that don't exist yet rather than to fix actual problems.
The number of drones out there is dwarfed by the number of birds, and aircraft are already expected to survive bird strikes. In the unlikely event that an aircraft ever hits a drone, we can expect similar damage to a bird strike. Some common sense mitigation is fine - don't allow drones where there are low-flying aircraft. Next....
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Are bigger airliners made with stronger materials? I thought with weight considerations, all commercial jetliners (not military aircraft) would be similarly fragile—it's not like larger aircrafts could be made with steel airfoils.
The scaling question probably has to do with the construction of the wing, not the net mass of the aircraft. The video shows the drone penetrating the sheet metal covering of the wing; I don't know if that would be more robust on an airliner, but I expect it is. However that leaves the question of the effect on an airliner, which travels at greater speeds, quite open.
The thing about research is a lot of the time what you're looking for isn't answers, you're looking for questions that should be asking, or trying to justify funding for questions you think need addressing.
Now bird strikes have been part of aviation since the beginning, but drone strikes are a new phenomenon. Are they pretty much analogous, or do we need to start thinking about drones differently? What the researchers actually did here was compare the damage done by a simulated bird strike to a drone strike, and found that the nature of the damage in their test rig was different. Birds made a bigger hole in the skin, drones made a bigger dent in the wing's structural members. This doesn't autoamtically scale to something like an A380, but it makes sense to do a scaled down test with cheap surplus light aviation wings before applying for funding to do it on a larger scale.
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There is a reason they choose a Mooney M20. It's one of the smallest possible piloted airplanes out there. It also has wooden wings! There is debate if this thing should even be considered safe to fly even before the question of drone strikes. I am calling this click bait and fake news!
http://www.mooneypilots.com/ma...
I think there are bird strikes experienced with heavier birds, and no crashing planes. Now show me this video with a deep-sea 10 wing, and I will be interested...
Airplanes have been in danger of bird collisions since forever. Birds can weigh 2,1lb or more as well. There is no real difference to a drone.
If they have to survive bird collisions, they can survive drones.
Are bigger airliners made with stronger materials?
They are both made from aluminum, usually an alloy such as 2024-Aluminum which is stronger than pure aluminum.
But an airliner will have thicker sheeting. A Cessna class plane may use 0.7mm. sheeting. A big airliner will use up to 3mm sheeting on the wing near the fuselage, tapering to about 1mm near the wingtip.
In the future, aircraft skins may be made from syntactic foam, which has a higher strength-to-weight ratio, can absorb impacts better, and does not propagate cracks or tears. But the tech isn't mature enough yet.
The destruction of Columbia was caused (as anyone actually reading the wikipedia entry you so thoughtfully linked will see) by reentry stress and super-heated plasma burning through a relatively small flaw in the heat shield. The cause of that damage was indeed foam, but trying to compare this to a drone strike on an aircraft traveling an order of magnitude slower and not experiencing reentry stress is just as much an exercise in sensationalism as the video currently in question is.
Also, it should be noted, since you place such an emphasis on the damaging item being foam (in a clear attempt to show that a seemingly dismissive substance can be extremely dangerous) that the kind of "foam" which caused the heat shield damage on Columbia was essentially the perfect item to cause the maximum damage. It was extremely strong foam, and very light. It's lower density meant that the air was able to decelerate it greatly causing a much higher velocity collision than something more dense would have, and its strength meant that it maintained cohesion long enough to cause damage.
And finally, your dismissive use of age and the assumption that the superior knowledge of someone older must surely validate your rather spurious comparison is a pretty great example, itself, of sophistry. Well done.
What's the ratio of birds and drones in the air? Should not we be worried about birds in the first place?
Despite all this talk of the theoretical danger posed to manned aircraft, and even demonstrations like this, the risk from "drones" still pales in comparison to the existing risk from civil aviation pilots doing stupid things which happen all the time. For example traditional regulation requires aircraft to stay above 500' AGL unless near an airport (descending). Yet small aircraft regularly incur below that altitude without waivers. Furthermore casual pilots often ignore or don't read NOTAMs, causing interesting incidents. Xjet documented with video a plane from a local flight school that ignored the posted NOTAM about the airport being closed for a drag race and attempted to land anyway. Only after noticing equipment on the runway did the plane land on the grass next to it, running over several strung-out electrical cables. The folks setting up for the drag race gave him quite a talking to. This is but one of many incidents. Point is, talking about regulating toy RC vehicles is a bit silly when the rules governing full-scale aviation are breached regularly, or at least enforced unevenly, especially when such breaches are a far greater risk to life and property. If a small plane flied below 500 feet and encounters an rc aircraft, who's at fault? Obviously they will come down hard on the toy's owner. But the pilot was doing something wrong.
There are folks doing absolutely inappropriate and illegal things with drones, and documenting them on youtube. I think we already have enough laws to go after them and hit them hard for endangering the public.
Are Airlines made out of wood? Last time I checked they weren't so extrapolation from a small wooden wing to an airliner is not possible.
Because you don't own an invisible column straight up to infinity - that's why. You rent a small patch of land from the government, and only the surface dirt. Other people can go over or under you - you don't own a small portion of the earth's core, either.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I grew up a couple miles from a Lockheed facility. I've seen f117s amd in painted f22s flying just w couple hundred feet over my head. And that doesn't even count the countless Cobras I've seen at low altitude
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
F35 radar is sensitive enough to pick up a small drone and implement countermeasures to prevent a collision or worse
What's the long term solution here? A person with a reasonable command of engineering principles could, over the course of 10 years and maybe $150k, develop a credible device for downing low/slow aircraft with off the shelf components. In 20-30 years the ability to develop bio-weapons at home is going to be materially better than it is today. In 100 years the ability to cobble together a nuclear device might be within the realm of the home gamer. Is this the beginning of the Great Filter? It seems untenable without borg-like control of each individual.
Birds, any bird, is a master of the sky. They can and regularly do see and avoid aircraft very well.
And yet, every year there are over 10,000 REPORTED bird strikes. And what? Zero drone strikes? I mean, QED? You claim to be a pilot, but I can easily see you are talking shit here.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
An A340 has a takeoff speed of 180mph. Some larger planes might have a high speed but a lot of smaller planes will have a lower speed (737 is 150mph) and the plane they used has a takeoff speed of 70 mph. Landing speeds are lower than takeoff speeds. The Phantom has a max speed of 56mph.They fired the mass at an empty wing rather than one that was filled with fuel.
It should be abundantly clear as to why the test results really aren't that useful.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
This seems like the wrong approach to take. Why show what it looks like when a drone and an aircraft collide? There are already rules about operating things around airports... or are we to assume that drones are routinely flying at 20,000+ feet in normal flight patterns?
It seems that there are already laws that cover the physical issues with drones... so why all the made-up hand wringing? I am guessing that there are things that can be observed fairly easily with drones that were not so easily observed before and that some people do not want those things to be observed, possibly because they are illegal.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Please don't clog up Amazon's valuable airspace with your pathetic toys. If you ignore this warning we will have to stage a dramatic event to make it clear how important this airspace is to our business model.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target