Slashdot Mirror
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.
You don't know what you are writing about. I have worked for 30 years in the aerospace field (specifically testing high performance aircraft). There is a HUGE difference between soft tissue and metal parts and highly-dense batteries. Any turbine engine would be utterly destroyed by a 1-2 lb drone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
DJI Demands Withdrawal Of Misleading Drone Collision Video: https://www.dji.com/newsroom/n...
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.