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Comment by ececconi | Hacker News Reader

If a bird strike through an airplane engine can cause major damage to an engine, it's not hard to imagine a drone being able to cause damage. I think there's got to be some education about no fly zones near airports. Lots of this seems to be common sense, but anyone with some cash can buy a drone and fly it in improper areas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike

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I think birds are more destructive than drones because they travel in flocks, increasing the potential for a catastrophic complete loss of power during takeoff.

Drones can also travel in flocks and carry dangerous payloads.

That's what happened in the incident that ended up with the pilot successfully landing on the Hudson River. He lost both engines going through a flock of geese.

I imagine also that skin and bones are much harder than PCBs and paperthin plastic / styrofoam most drones are made of.

It would seem that, at airplane speeds, mass would be the primary concern. While the first thing you hit on a drone is its cheap plastic propellers and superstructure, at its core is a dense battery, which can be fairly heavy on the common DJI phantom drones (DJI 3 weighs 1280 g (=45 oz. ) with battery.) For comparison, a common pigeon (is that the bird that gets hit?) weighs ~9-13 oz.

Having said that, I don't know if these are the drones that pilots are spotting. They're the most common enthusiast drone (~$500-$1k), though I'm sure they're outnumbered by the junk toy variety.

I agree, the birds really need to be educated about no fly zones.

Bird law does not follow reason.

It would be cool if the drone's software can block the usage close to no fly zones automatically. I'm not sure how many have GPS (I assume the more expensive ones?).

It would be cooler for airports to have their own attack drones and/or guns and lasers to destroy any drones entering its airspace.

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