Shutterbug drone biz fined $1.9m for buzzing New York City, Chicago The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has slapped a record fine on a photography company accused of conducting more than five dozen unauthorized drone flights. The FAA said it wants to dock SkyPan International $1.9m for flying drones over the skies of New York City and Chicago without permission. The fine will be the …
If personal flying cars ever become available they will NOT be under the control of the passengers. They'll be centrally controlled so they can work with all the other flying cars, and other flying stuff in the area.
I think the FAA is right to slap these guys with a fine. If they let them get away with it, the skies will be lousy with drones flying around in big cities, and it will only be a matter of time before one gets ingested into a jet engine or suffers a failure and falls somewhere that causes a big problem.
"A self-driving flying car makes a lot more sense than a self-driving ground car. AI can handle air travel with its known variables. But down in the ground clutter, oy..."
Clearly you have never been the pilot of an aircraft in busy airspace. Once you add a 3rd dimension things get REALLY complicated very fast. Keeping track of vehicles on a pretty much 2 dimensional surface is quite doable. Being surrounded by 9 different ground vehicles is a daily occurence for a lot of people and won't really give them any sort of mental challenge. Keep track of 9 different aerial vehicles with different speeds, ascent rates, courses and altitudes is very taxing even to a human pilot. Personally I don't believe we're even close to being able to developing a self-flying vehicle that could handle being autonomous in a busy section of airspace.
The complexity is why "flying cars", if we ever get them, will not only be self-flying, they'll be centrally controlled in any busy airspace. Pretty much like how air traffic control works now, where pilots don't just decide how and when to approach the airport, but are told what to do by air traffic controllers.
If you go from having a few dozen planes in the area of a busy airport to a few thousand flying cars in the of a big city, obviously it will be beyond the capability for any human to participate without fucking things up. It will have to be automated.
It wouldn't be simple software either, but it is a lot easier for a program to track thousands of moving objects than a human. They'd probably want to force the cars into defined ranges to make it simpler (think Jetsons, where George's flying car rises up and joins a conga line at a certain altitude, and you can see other conga lines traveling in various directions at different altitudes)
"Witness the outsized hassle these drone outfits are getting for merely flying their little toys over a big city."
(emphasis mine)
The problem is that the public perception of the drones used is that they are just little toys. If you've ever actually seen these things they are pretty darn big. Most are octocopters (8 rotors/motors) carrying a pretty hefty high resolution camera, often a full size DSLR. They are very heavy and pose a significant risk to any other air traffic and to anyone on the ground if they ever get out of control. A lot of drone operators however will never consider the fact that a drone can get away from them because it has never happened to THEM and anyone it HAS happened to was just an idiot who didn't pay attention in their opinion. There are so many very willing operators in a fast growing and only just beginning industry, but they're getting a bad rep because of the cowboys like Skypan who operate without any consideration to air traffic laws.
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"We have the safest airspace in the world...."
Says the organisation that presided over four airliners being deliberately flown into solid objects.
You also have to remember that they'd still have the world's worst aircraft collision against them, were it not for KLM trumping them in spades at Tenerife.
I'd like to know what liesdamnedliesstatistics they're using that even get them into the top ten.
You're cherry picking a few isolated incidents out of a whole mass of data.
"On any given day, more than 87,000 flights are in the skies in the United States. Only one-third are commercial carriers, like American, United or Southwest. On an average day, air traffic controllers handle 28,537 commercial flights (major and regional airlines), 27,178 general aviation flights (private planes), 24,548 air taxi flights (planes for hire), 5,260 military flights and 2,148 air cargo flights (Federal Express, UPS, etc.). At any given moment, roughly 5,000 planes are in the skies above the United States. In one year, controllers handle an average of 64 million takeoffs and landings."
- National Air Traffic Controllers Association webpage
Given how few accidents there are, I think that counts as pretty damn safe (and a lot less risky than being on the roads!)
My fear is that a jetliner full of people will be on final approach, and an engine sucks in a drone flown into the plane's path by some idiot. After that disaster, they'll probably make it a prison offense to fly a drone without serious training and licensing. Unfortunately people will probably have to die before this happens.
FACT (I was there working security and know about this): There was a major flap at an air show recently due to reports of a drone reported flying around the runway. Can you imagine what would happen at an airshow if a jet sucked a drone into an engine?
You know what will happen if a drone is sucked into an engine on landing? The aircraft will land and someone will be sued for damaging a very expensive aircraft part. The engines are mostly at idle during approach and landing anyway.
But let's say this happens at take-off. Engine sucks in a drone and poof, engine is destroyed. What will happen? The aircraft will continue the take off, circle back and land single engine. This already has happened- with birds.
And since drones are less likely to be in a flock of hundreds of other drones, birds are far more dangerous. Aircraft are built/designed/tested to withstand these events.
"But let's say this happens at take-off. Engine sucks in a drone and poof, engine is destroyed. What will happen? The aircraft will continue the take off, circle back and land single engine. This already has happened- with birds."
Even if that aircraft is a single-engine design? The kind you often see at air-shows?
I'm more worried about a drone going through a windshield or control surface. Planes are built to just about be able to withstand a collision with flying bags of water (otherwise known as birds). A drone with it's metal parts is probably going to do a lot more damage. Especially the heavy camera drones used by a company such as Skypan.
Too many drone operators are purposefully ignorant about where they can and cannot fly. They are poor airmen because they don't (want to) understand the rules of the sky and where they can and cannot operate their drones safely.
There was a major flap at an air show recently due to reports of a drone reported flying around the runway
I went to a few airshows this summer. There were many announcements over the PA that drone flying was not permitted.
And yet there were still plenty of stalls selling drones...
Vic.
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