Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

People have been flying models for a long time. But originally, model planes, etc. were expensive and relatively hard to fly. So people often knew each other and could have a mostly self-policing community.

Then quadcopter were made to be very easy to fly, and popularity made them cheap.

So now we have people flying them everywhere. Quads with cameras make people nervous. Quads flying over large groups of people, make people nervous. And quads flying very close to planes is just a very bad idea.

So it makes sense to have some rules. But governments go completely over board. And instead of investing in enforcement, they introduce painful administrative requirements.

2: Military discover "Thing" and develop a way to use it for evil and/or killing

That ordering is not correct.

My issue with these stories, is that there generally is no go-to organisation for the new "Thing", so all the news articles end up quoting 'Jim , the self proclaimed expert on Thing"'

This is real journalism:

"Flight X234 had to emergency land due to a collision with an unidentified object right after takeoff. It is not unusual to hit birds or other objects, but at at this time we don't know what it was."

This is pimping news for money: "OMG, terrorist drone bought at 7/11 was navigated by attackers into plane to kill citizens."

Why is libel misused to silence people, while so-called journalists can lie?

It doesn't affect me personally at the moment, but many other types of model flying become very hard. And the people violating the rules, mostly don't know them anyhow, so keep violating the rules.

"Drones" are the new UFOs at this point.

My favorite conspiracy theory is that the idea of conspiracy theories was subject to a multiple decade long attack by certain government groups to make conspiracy theory equate in popular culture to crack pot theory. Governments benefits when theories like the CIA bringing in drugs or the military doing non-consensual human experimentation on soldiers are classified under the same moniker as the theory that lizard people control the government and aliens exist but the governments of the world cover for them.

But that is just a conspiracy theory.

To calculate the odds of hitting a drone, you have to divide the odds of a bird strike by population, altitude overlap and by spatial density when a flock of birds vs a single drone is encountered. This is why betting on a drone strike is, currently, a sucker-bet. Anyone who thinks a report of a drone strike is real is way way too credulous and/or biased.

It just seems to be being used as a catch all scare mongering term for all RC aircraft though - and given how long they've been around with a perfectly fine track record, it's becoming a bugbear.

(From the submission guidelines.)

That's purely a total-airframe valuation estimate, excluding revenue being generated by commercial use of drones.

If you want to use that type of valuation then the loss of an A320 ( as reported in the original story ) would be around $98 million.

http://www.airbus.com/presscentre/pressreleases/press-releas...