Drone Hits Plane — And This Time It’s A Real (Police) One!
source link: https://hackaday.com/2021/08/23/drone-hits-plane-and-this-time-its-a-real-police-one/
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66 thoughts on “Drone Hits Plane — And This Time It’s A Real (Police) One!”
Irresponsible and stupid as it would be, it would be great to really prove the point and have that same collision, or a near miss caught on camera – so much the same evidence with a private pilot… See just how different the reaction is… When the mear suggestion such a thing might have been in the air around an airport shuts it down and gets innocents arrested, with no proof at all you would hope such a well documented case would create a similar witch hunt for while, so they can get it out of their system and realise they are making a panic over bugger all, there are so many bigger dangers in modern life that barely get a mention…
As when a presumably rather large police drone – as I can’t see the police being able to make any practical use of the tiny ones with their correspondingly tiny flight times and payload capacity only dents a very light aircraft it also kind of proves another point, that multirotor and other RC craft are not some magic instant plane killer the way the reporting would have you believe should some idiot get their hands on them or something go wrong, any more than a bird is, infact you would have to argue they are massively safer as birds don’t understand the concept of no fly zones…
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ThisGuy says:
“infact you would have to argue they are massively safer as birds don’t understand the concept of no fly zones…”
Neither do a lot of humans apparently, even ones that really have not excuse not to have known better, like the police officers in this case. -
Jake Brodsky says:
When an airplane such as a Cessna 172 is on final approach to landing, it is flying pretty slowly. The flaps are usually extended all the way, the engine is usually at low throttle, and the airplane attitude is slowly being pitched up for lift. Typical landing speeds at the beginning of final approach are around 55-60 knots.
Normally these planes cruise at about 120 knots. So there is a big difference between hitting something at landing speeds versus hitting something at full cruise speed. Further, a Cessna 172 is a relatively slow, sedate airplane. Landing speeds for high performance piston aircraft may be around 90 knots on the beginning of final approach, and if you’re flying anything like a business jet, you could be setting up for speeds of around 125 knots.
The impact of something like a drone at the latter speeds is quite significant.
Birds are a known issue. In fact, I have hit a bird in flight (it was probably a seagull) at cruise speed. It didn’t do any damage. But when you have hard parts that may weigh a couple kilos, it is entirely possible for it to make a hole in the windshield. Larger birds such as turkey vultures have been known to do this to aircraft. It is a very serious thing. First, you have debris in the cockpit, but worse, now you have to land with the wind in your face and NO GOGGLES. See how well you can see at highway speeds your head out of the window and no eye protection. Now think about landing an airplane that way. Finally, this may sound weird, but if you break enough of the windshield, the aerodynamic performance of the airplane can degrade quite severely. You may not have the necessary climb performance to go around safely.
What I am trying to convey to you is that the pilot and the instructor were LUCKY. They were very lucky that nothing went through their windshield. They were very lucky that they were already going quite slowly and that they didn’t need the engine to perform to specification (because it may not have been able to).
I’m also not trying to tell drone pilots that they have no business flying in controlled airspace, but for the love of all that is good in this world –TALK TO AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL!
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LordNothing says:
i can imagine the police changing up their drone use procedures due to this. like if you are within x distance from an airport, you ought to be required by law to inform the local atc. or at least have a transponder installed. though i can imagine criminals use sdr technology to sniff for said transponder as a tip off that the police are watching.
i for one live right under the approach to the water near the local float plane dock. and some of them planes are flying very low. if i were to hover a drone up there (i know my rc heli can do it), its a very good possibility that a strike would occur. so im rather supprised that small aircraft on drone collisions haven’t happened more often.
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three_d_dave says:
Oddly enough – THIS WAS POLICE. Hobby drones have had, in ratio, 0.000% the rate that the Canadian police have had, previously with a POLICE helicopter that ended up with $200k in damages.
Why isn’t a small plane with a delicate windshield equipped with backup goggles for the pilot? They can afford Ray Bans, cause those look good. One plane had the windshield cave in during flight and was initially blamed on a drone – turned out it was sun damage to the plastic from being stored outside without a cover that weakened it so that it could not withstand the relative wind.
In the meantime piloted planes kill people frequently; multi-rotor drones, not yet.
In the USA drones are prevented by the FAA from broadcasting their location on ADS-B OUT. Seems like that would be one thing they might be required to do to alert ATC and other aircraft – but then that’s not in accordance with the pure rage anti-drone spitting-mad that is going around.
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Robots Everywhere Riley says:
It’s the same thing in Canada with firearms. We had a 30+-year period of not having a single range accident in the ENTIRE COUNTRY, with the exception of the police. I believe it finally ended in the mid 2010s.
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m_a_s says:
Wow. One of the worst comments I have seen on HAD in quite some time. You are waiting for actual deaths before you will even entertain reigning in of your precious multi-rotor drones. It’s only a matter of time before one of these kills someone, because they have injured people—innocent people that had nothing to do with the drone’s operation.
Airplanes aside, until now I was relatively indifferent. However, your comment has convinced me that this type of craft needs to be kept away from anyone who doesn’t want them flying around them. I believe that the unanimous consent of everyone that will be within 1000 yards of an operating drone should be obtained 1 week before it is allowed to fly in the public space at the appointed time. Violating these rules should be treated like a weapons violation—i.e. a felony with prohibitive first-offense requirements.
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Elliot Williams says:
I’d absolutely go so far as to say that drone pilots shouldn’t fly in controlled airspace. That’s the “controlled” part. The ATCs need to be sure where everything is. The local police (obviously) should have contacted them.
But it’s also true that the drone panic has been used to push through laws onto hobby flyers, winged or rotored, that are far in excess of what was previously agreed. And that’s a bummer.
Did I tell you about this one time that we were leaving San Diego and hit a flock of geese? Plane limped up the coastline to LAX at low altitude. They explained it to us once we were on the ground — they had a cracked winshield up front. Good choice: it was a flight to Europe, up over the pole and across the Atlantic and all that. You know how you watch that crack growing and growing…
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Foldi-One says:
Didn’t say they were not dangerous in a collision, as of course they are – but a bird doesn’t know it shouldn’t be there, most humans will obey that restriction, and most drones are actually quite a bit lighter than birds.
This was a pretty heavy impact – sure nothing on if the cesna had been a faster aircraft, but still a relatively high closing speed. And against a very lightweight plane – the way the media has been reporting drones you would expect the cesna to instantly be uncontrollable at best, an probably instantly a massive fireball on the strength of the reporting against drones. This is nothing but some pretty minor (if expensive) damage, and with the timing even if it had breached the window an emergency landing at an airport is disruptive but much less likely to be fatal.
So I would agree in one sense they were lucky their billion to one back luck of actually colliding with a drone turned out with no major harm done. But equally lets not oversell it, that really rare collision would only cause serious harm to the aircraft one in several hundred thousand times (if not more) so actually they would need to roll a serious string of nat 1’s to come close to the required level of bad luck to come to harm! (The number of bird hits vs actual effect on the aircraft is a pretty good indicator of what drones can do)
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John says:
Well the rarity of the event is somewhat dependent on the controller of the drone. If someone were hell bent on colliding with a plane, the rarity goes way down. If they’re super cautious, the rarity goes up. If they’re a stupid cop, it’s a coin toss.
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Foldi-One says:
Actually hitting something moving so fast, with your relatively slow RC flyer, even if you really really want to is going to be far from trivial… It will obviously shift the probabilities some but its such a challenging task I would still expect it to be nearly impossible to succeed at, the sort of thing you would have to try actively for a week to actually hit once…
When you look at how often experienced RC pilots hit static objects marking their course rather than fly through the gap, now try to find the right spot of air and arrive there at the right moment when the target is moving and you wouldn’t actually be able to see it easily to adapt to its changing course…
It is however certainly possible, and I’ve got some ideas on how it could be done deliberately with pretty good reliability. But it wouldn’t be a human pilot, we just don’t have the depth perception needed to calculate the required trajectory – folks have a hard enough time crossing the flight path with the very much faster moving and larger danger area projectiles from anti-aircraft guns, and to be reliably effective when you did hit would take some extra onboard nasties…
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neville says:
If the story is true then the aircraft was extremely lucky that it didn’t hit its prop. Pretty sure it would have destroyed it.
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