Brit upstart releases free air traffic app for drone operators

A very good question. I'd like to know how a 747 could respond if one of the larger, heavier drones were to hit the windscreen during descent / takeoff or got ingested into an engine. If they are able to bring such a plane down then the loss of life could be enormous, not just the passengers, but on the people in buildings below.

Planes can kill planes, birds can kill birds, and there are now drones that kill drones. Additionally, planes have killed birds, birds have killed planes, and birds have killed drones. Therefore, logically a drone can kill a plane. It's your classic trilemma symmetry!

(This excludes drones intentionally designed to kill planes since it's a little harder for civilians to own SAMs.)

> it isn't a head-in-the-sand attitude at all but a very realistic and safe one to ignore these pilots crying wolf.

As a former pilot and investor in a drone company, amongst other relevant things, I would like to warn the audience to ignore the idiot who wrote the sentence quoted above.

> RC flying clubs have operated on and around active airfields for decades without planes spontaneously falling out of the sky.

RC clubs operate *from* generally small, non-commercial airfields, at low-traffic hours which are agreed and published, and in close cooperation with the airfield operator. They also know what they're supposed to do when an aircraft turns up, and are almost without exception (in my experience) a highly responsible bunch, plus many are pilots themselves. They are not a problem at all.

The problem are people who get a ready to fly drone from the internet one day, walk out to their garden, and start flying the thing. A very small percentage will be born imbeciles with too high an opinion of their own miserable selves to listen to anyone else, like the fellow AC I am quoting, but the rest, the vast majority, will simply be people who have not had the benefit of receiving proper and reliable information about good and safe practices. That's something we in the aeronautical industry have to work on, to reach those people and provide them with the information they need, and somehow encourage them to practice their hobby safely (as RC clubs do). The work being done by the company mentioned in the article seems like a step in the right direction: it is not just useful, but also presented in an engaging manner.

Yeah, thanks, whether or not a drone being ingested into an engine during a critical flight phase can cause a catastrophic failure - btw Concorde crashed because of a small strip of metal - frankly, as a passenger, I'd rather that pilots were entirely undistracted by things buzzing them outside the windshield while they're on final approach to an airport like LHR, FRA, LAX etc.

In addition to what the second AC has said, I'd like to point out that birds tend to be squishy and easy for fan blades in aircraft to chop up as required. Drones, on the other hand, are made of rather harder metal and plastic bits and engines have NOT been tested to cope with ingesting them.

The consequences of a drone strike to an engine could be catastrophic and may have the potential to bring down an aircraft - having a high stage compressor disk rupture because a metal tube has gone int there is not something a plane is designed to resist and it could lead to worse damage than that Qantas A380 that got a hole in the wing.

Re: drones at 000s of feet

The height is plausible, but the regularity is not.

Only high-power remote-camera drones would be pilotable at that height, and not the wifi ones. So the majority of these would have to be uncontrolled or accidental.

A multirotor 'copter has a battery longevity of about 20 minutes. It'll fly for that long, then it will crash.

It is plausible that some owners have lost control and had their copter fly away and 'jam the throttle' (bad failsafe), and as they are self-balanced it could keep climbing rapidly until it reaches a very high altitude ceiling.

It'll stay until the battery goes flat, then it will fall straight down.

A fixed-wing R/C aircraft is also inherently stable, however they generally can't climb quickly and are much harder to fly.

However, there do not seem to be any reports of any drones falling out of the sky, or any drone wreckage being found near where the near-misses are claimed to have occurred.

As nobody has produced that evidence, and it would be very stupid for the CAA etc not to go looking, one assumes that in most cases there was no evidence to find.

So while there probably have been a small number of genuine near-misses with planes and drones, the vast majority of these reports must have other explanations.