Plane damaged after being hit by York police drone at Buttonville Airport
toronto.ctvnews.ca
toronto.ctvnews.ca
https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/172-substantially-damage...
There's also a copy of the incident report here:
https://wwwapps.tc.gc.ca/Saf-Sec-Sur/2/cadors-screaq/rd.aspx...
More generally, I really hope the drone manufacturers invest in genfencing off controlled airspace and installing ADS-B receivers as part of a sense-and-avoid scheme to avoid potential collisions entirely. As a pilot, I'm impressed by the work DJI has been doing in this space.
(Though it's worth noting that sense-and-avoid won't solve the problem entirely, since there's a fair number of aircraft that are not transponder equipped. Canada also doesn't yet mandate ADS-B equipage.)
Soooo these clowns either had no clue at all about the licensing, or just straight up didn’t care. The IR says that Nav Canada (ATC) wasn’t informed of the flight ahead of time, so pretty unlikely that an SFOC was involved.
If the drone operator reported those numbers, they'd only be 100ft outside of where they should be legally.
Since both '500' and '1' are pretty arbitrary numbers, any reasonable margin of error puts a ton of range for the drone to be flying in safety while the pilot being at error. Or both.
This seems to be a 'threshold' issue, not some arbitrary invasion of space, but we'll have to wait for Transport Canada, hopefully the drone will have precise information. Correct me if I'm wrong.
There is no lower limit for aircraft in the process of taking off or landing. I’m much more familiar with US aviation law, so I’ll give you US citation there, but it’s not likely to be wildly different elsewhere.
A fairly typical approach slope is 3°, which would put an aircraft around 320’ above touchdown zone elevation at 1 nm. There is of course some variation above and below that.
There’s no incentive for the pilot to shade or cheat their reported position. They would be legal at 419 feet and 1.625 nm just as well as 500’ and 1 nm.
Canadian regs (US are different here) require that if this were an airport without a control tower, the drone would need to be a minimum of 3 miles away from it. With an operating control tower, the drone operator needs permission and active radio contact with the tower.
The general safe altitude law in the US is 91.119*, which begins: Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes: (Necessary is consistently interpreted somewhat broadly rather than extremely narrowly.)
So it's probably that it happened somewhere near those numbers, and they were the references the pilot readily knew of.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27618757
I was admonished that I was describing the behavior of only the most psychopathic individuals. So clearly my fears were unfounded.
From the avweb article: "The police department has not commented any further on the mishap except to say the drone was part of a police operation in the area."
Perhaps someone would care to explain how the department's response is substantively different from "opsie daisy"? Is it just that the pilot happend to get lucky this time, and the mid-air collision only caused a massive dent on the engine cowling?
A pretty apt description of the cops operating that drone...
To be honest, I kinda hate the fact that DJI won't bring Airsense to the smaller drones. I love my Air 2S and I've seen it in action many times, helicopters often give you a 30-40 second window to get out of the way before you even see them.
Personally I’m hoping for some basic radar functionality, but that is going to be tough in smaller drones!
Perhaps DJI could be being overly conservative in their algorithm, but the airplane that’s in the ADS-B transmission really is where it says it is.
It’s literally worse than useless, as it makes gives alarm fatigue. I’ve also had 3 sudden aircraft just showed up and almost ran me over events in Class G airspace, including one with a very expensive helicopter running nap of the earth - none of them were running transponders. But at least the helicopter pilot had some bitching sunglasses on.
Neither does the US in an overwhelming majority of airspace under 10,000’MSL.
I chose to equip as I’m based at an airport in airspace that requires it, but if I were willing to move airports about 20 miles up the road, I could conceivably operate for years without ever needing to access airspace where ADS-B is required (and waivers are, anecdotally, readily granted at least for now).
“See and avoid” is the law in VMC, not “sense and avoid”. FAR 91.113.b*. (That’s US law; I suspect Canada is similar**.)
* - https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.113
** - Transport Canada, TP 14371E, Transport Canada Aeronautical Information Manual (TC AIM) (26 March 2020), RAC – Rules of the Air and Air Traffic Services, section 4.5.6. (Probably not regulatory, but likely based on a regulation.)
This is a bad take. It’s required in all controlled airspace. That’s what’s important.
It’s like saying there are no traffic laws on majority of land in the US. It’s moot.
Edit: I'm wrong, read below.
That is incorrect. ADS-B out is required in class A, in and above classes B and C of controlled airspace, in the class B mode-C veils and class E controlled airspace that over both 10K MSL and 2.5K AGL.
It is not required in class D controlled airspace nor in the overwhelming majority of class E controlled airspace which isn’t covered by the prior paragraph.
* - https://www.aopa.org/go-fly/aircraft-and-ownership/ads-b/whe...
You are of course correct. But that's getting into the finer details of the FARs, and there's only so much comment space here. We could also talk about aircraft which don't have an electrical system. ;) I did mention that not everyone in the US was equipped, which seemed sufficient.
> “See and avoid” is the law in VMC, not “sense and avoid”.
"Sense-and-avoid" actually is the the correct term in this case. This is part of how the FAA wants to integrate commercial drones into the NAS. The idea is that future drones will have an ADS-B receiver and maneuver to avoid known traffic.
See the section on "detect and avoid" strategies here: https://www.faa.gov/uas/research_development/information_pap...
Though again, as mentioned... there are a good number of aircraft are not equipped, so this doesn't cover all possible cases.
You did mention some aircraft are not equipped with transponders, which I took to mean the common use of the term in aviation: a 4096 code mode A/C transponder, not ADS-B out.
Slightly under half of general aviation aircraft are not equipped for ADS-B out (the overwhelming majority of these do have a transponder) and at this point, it seems fair to conclude most of those will never be equipped. (If you chose not to equip for the Jan 2, 2020 requirement, all that would compel you now to take on the upfront and recurring expenses associated would be change in usage requiring regular access to 91.225 airspace. In fact, for many non-ADS-B out airplanes, 4096 code transponders now provide little value, so the first time they need non-trivial maintenance, I’d expect some portion of those to be removed instead of repaired because they’re now primarily a convenience item and don’t on their own provide access to any airspace by rule.)
I can readily imagine a future where UAS operations are allowed under 500’ AGL over cities (aircraft are already blocked from operating there except during takeoff and landing). I don’t expect a near-future where class E airspace is open to drones unable to reliably see/sense and avoid aircraft that don’t have ADS-B out. There’s just too many such aircraft and will be for decades to come unless 91.225 is substantially expanded.
> The cause of the collision is not known.
I'll give you long odds that the cause was the drone being someplace it was not supposed to be.
I still wonder how this happens. The only theory I know of is that if they don't give them positive coverage then they'll never get comment form them again, but is that really sufficient for it to be so universal and why have so few papers gone adversarial on this?
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...
I don't see how the two situations compare.
If you are shining a laser light towards an aircraft, you are deliberately trying to inflict harm upon the pilot, and could easily cause an accident.
The police drone pilot screwed up, badly, and was possibly criminally negligent, but wasn't intending to down a plane, though that could easily have been the result.
I expect the people that we give guns/drones to for the purpose of enforcing laws to understand the laws they're enforcing and the consequences of their actions.
Yes, it's not the right thing to do and shouldn't be happening, but let's not blow the risk out of all proportion. Of course I do understand why such behavior needs to be illegal, because otherwise whole neighborhoods could band together to distract pilots and bring down aircraft. But by the same token we don't need to send in the SWAT team for a teenager with a laser pointer.
Cue all the keyboard warrior pilots telling me how a 747 will instantly fall out of the sky if touched for a millisecond by a handheld AA-powered laser.
edit: actually just the downvotes, whatever.
eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoj3H7LMy2k
And because this happens at night, the pilot looses their dark adaptation - they will have difficulty seeing for a minute or longer after each flash.
So, no, the airplane won't instantly roll over dive into the nearest building. But it is still quite dangerous.
And it doesn't speak to the quality of the reporting when it shows the alarmist message "THIS FOOTAGE SHOWS A LASER ATTACK ON A PASSENGER PLANE", combined with footage that is clearly not from a plane but a helicopter.
In my younger, stupider days I've played with laser pointers with my young, stupid friends, trying to shine them into each others eyes from across a park. It's really not that bad because you can't hold it steady enough and in a moving aircraft from a large distance would be a non-event. A helicopter would be more vulnerable however, and as I said a group of people all ARMED with laser WEAPONS to ATTACK.
Yes, people who shine at planes are doing the wrong thing, but it's not bad enough to warrant alarmist all-caps warning messages and pretending it's anywhere near as much threat as physical impacts with drones, drunk/sleepy pilots, crappy maintenance or plane UI (lol, I watch Air Crash Investigations TV show), or anything else.
I'm assuming that these were 1w red laser pointers? Have you ever played with those new 5w and 10w green lasers? They're a whole other ballpark. One of the big issues is that while a red light doesn't affect your night vision a green laser will.
I have seen the 5mW green lasers and you're right, I wouldn't play with them aiming them at people's eyes, but I still wouldn't call in an airstrike if my plane was hit by one for a split-second.
The fact that you're "unconvinced" of something that is a documented danger that could literally kill people is astounding to me. When people talk about this they're not talking about 747s or private aircraft 10k feet in the air. They're talking about small planes in airports and low to the ground.
You're getting (rightfully) downvoted because you're making ridiculous ignorant comments about things you obviously know nothing about.
20 seconds seems like an extraordinarily long time to be able to hold a handheld laser on a moving target. Exaggerate much?
You seem to think it's a world-ending danger. I don't. That's fine, I don't fly so whatever.
I volunteer for the test (parachute group). Will you volunteer for the control group? There's been no peer-reviewed scientific evidence to date that parachutes actually help. We'll be advancing the cause of science!
tl;dr no significant difference in results with vs. without.
I should have been more specific: Jumping from a plane from a significant altitude, say 2000 feet AGL.
I suspect most people who shine lasers at aircraft are just being stupid and don’t intend to inflict harm on the pilot.
I’ve been hit by a green laser in a high-wing. At 3000’, the beam is wide enough that it lights up a substantial fraction of a wing, (quite brightly at night). I suspect that looks pretty entertaining to the laser wielder on the ground. I turned off my position lights, reported their location to ATC, and hope they’re caught, but I think it’s way more likely that they were being a bored butthead (probably a group thereof) than them actually trying to hurt me.
That really smacks of being intentionally obtuse. If I said “look at all the people prosecuted for pointing their guns the wrong way when discharging them” you wouldn’t buy it…
The police will likely get a slap on the wrist, or a token fine.
That said, my immediate thought is they (cops) were fooling around with their new toy.
I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection, and solely zoned in on real crime? And what is real crime? I guess murders, white collar crime, organized gangs. It's not drugs.
What you or I think of being the “real crime” that cops should focus on may or may not be what the laws define as real crime, which itself probably doesn’t map to what cops spend all their time doing
Most cops just let it slide while their "bad apple" colleagues do those thing. And are therefore complicit in perpetuating them. So you're still right about it being unreasonably generous to all cops, even if not all of them do that shit.
My cynical point is that socially we tend to define “real crimes” in such a way to reinforce existing power hierarchies. Steal from the register and face prosecution, steal from your employee and maybe be forced to pay it back (maybe). Shoot your neighbor and get executed by the state, poison the river and face a civil case, starve foreign infants and face no consequences whatsoever. Morally all of these are awful things, but which ones get criminalized and prosecuted is extremely selective. The rich and powerful often not only get selective treatment when prosecuted, but the kind of violence that can bring is often not even criminalized at all.
My most horrifying example is the fact that until the 1990s it wasn’t legally possible for a man to be charged with raping his wife in some states. 13 states still treat marital rape as a lesser crime than rape of a non-spouse. I think we’d all agree that punishing rape is a good thing for the justice system to be doing, but that’s hardly sufficient when the law has such obvious holes in it.
In general, people are more likely to believe the word of a woman over the word of a man. So if a woman accuses a man of something, unless he can prove his innocence, he's got I would estimate a 3/4 chance of being found guilty of whatever the crime is. I think we need some way to rebalance that.
All laws and prosecutorial systems should be designed with misuse in mind, because misuse will happen. We should always think, "if I felt wronged by some person and wanted to get revenge, using the system as a weapon and being willing to lie, could I successfully use the system to get my revenge?" And I think in many cases in our current systems the answer is yes, misuse is very much possible. I won't even bother to describe any scenarios, because I'm sure we can all imagine them. Well, here's one [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDpvwWWzJuk
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLowHT_ytBs
Other links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGE-3ioAlmQ
Lots of people have lots of opinions on what those things even are. Most of those opinions are utterly ridiculous.
I was sideswiped by a car speeding and passing illegally, that then fled the scene. Dashcam caught the license plate. No charges filed. I was lucky they were insured, and that their insurance company socked them for my repairs.
For that, you need political change. Many a constituency has elected to rip off their people with absurd policing tactics - including asset forfeiture abuse - that primarily target poor people to fund their operations, instead of properly raising taxes, because raising taxes is a hard sell "thanks" to decades of small-gubmint, trickle down propaganda.
Then I would suggest you do not look up the statistics on how many "real crime" cases get solved. Murders, most of which are done in the moment and not planned out at all. Even premeditated must be understood to mean "X tried to extort Y, fight ensued, knife was used, Y died", and very much not "the butler, after 2 years of slowly preparing for the moment, set in motion his plan ..." like in the books.
Of all murders, the police solve about 60% of cases. Every other crime it goes down significantly (and theft is far below 10%).
There's a reason actual premeditated murders usually make the news for a week.
The work of The Innocence Project makes me question how many cases they solve versus how many they found a targetable person to scapegoat instead.
Certainly a lot of the "science" that gets used to identify who the killer is pseudo-scientific bunk. Very convenient for looking for a conviction, very bad for actually catching bad guys.
If you find yourself in a suit before a jury you're likely to have a bad time.
This is the damage done to the airplane.[2] It will require body work and an engine tear-down (prop struck the drone). If the drone had been a bit higher, it could have done major damage to the prop or worse the windscreen and possibly pilot.
1 - https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5728426-york-regional-pol...
2 - https://s30121.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/plane-hit-...
Your statement also belies a couple of other misunderstandings in that 1) Police don't make the law and 2) 'go after organized crime' ... when almost all organized crime activity is actually drugs.
Some drugs like mushrooms we can probably move off the watch list, others, like MDMA feel like there should be options, but we are just not structured well for it, but most of the more potent ones just won't work in society irrespective of how a relatively small group of conscientious burningman-ers can 'handle their stuff'.
As for the drone - it was involved in some kind of operation, we have no idea the parameters of the situation or what kinds of risks were taken, why, or even where the civilian plane was at the time, hopefully we will. The Police obviously operate under a completely different set of parameters so it's hard to fathom what's going on.
What's 'wierd' to me is how people can use such casual thinking to make such broad social assessments kind of devoid from reality. I think it has to do with the fact that all systems are imperfect, and when we see an imperfection from the outside, we tend to extrapolate that to the entire system and don't have a developed intuition at all for the material reality of it all. I'll bet anyone most police skeptics, were they to just ride with police for a few days, would be bored out of their minds at the relatively mundane applied pragmatic reality of it all.
From the CADORS report:
"The instructor for a Canadian Flyers International Inc. Cessna 172N (C-GKWL) reported that they had just turned from base leg to final for Runway 15 at Toronto/Buttonville, ON (CYKZ) and were established and stable at 1100 ASL, or about 500 AGL, when they felt a jolt that pushed them back on their seat. "
Pretty sure there's an extremely narrow left/right window either side to the runway centreline and a somewhat less narrow but still quite accurate distance from the runway that the plane could have been at "about 500 AGL" during it's landing approach.
There is zero doubt that the police were operating illegally and recklessly here. No amount of "operational security" or "war on drugs" or "qualified immunity" can _possibly_ apply to or excuse anyone, police included, for operating a drone directly in the landing approach flightpath of an active airport, and especially not without notifying the air traffic control and all aircraft in the vicinity. Any attempt to argue otherwise is without doubt an "assessment kind of devoid from reality".
I said 'we don't really know' - and objected to arbitrary arguments about cops complicity, and narrow arguments about 'because drugs' as some kind of justification of lack of credibility in policing.
So you're 'pretty sure'? Well maybe there is some doubt.
From my limited understanding but referencing government sources - 500AG exactly the lower threshold for pilots, don't you think it's odd that they reported that they were 'just' at the threshold? Because if they were at 499AG they would breaking the law. So can we hate on civilians for 'always being so reckless?' if it were true. Or rather, even if that was true, we might want to assume it was probably a mistake? And those happen?
The other key detail is that they reported '1 nautical mile' from Buttonville, funny, because that's the exact distance from the airport for which 'Advanced Operations' drone flight is allowed, and it's highly probably the Police wold have this authority.
It seems slightly odd that the report was 'just within altitude' and 'just within' safety range for advanced op. drone flight.
Because if the drone reported those numbers, they would be just barely out of legal bounds.
If the drone reported 1NM and a slightly lower altitude, then they'd be totally legal, and the airplane would be doing the 'unsafe flying'.
1 NM seems a little arbitrary. Maybe it was 0.5, or maybe it's 1.5, in which case it wouldn't take much 'stretching of the envelope' of either party for an accident to happen.
'We'll know' about the specifics of the issue when Transport Canada has done the investigation - was it a civilian contractor? A poorly designed flight path? Was there tacit knowledge that someone was breaking the rules? Was something wrong, was the Pilot actually in error by flying too low? Was the drone just barely above ceiling and this happened?
I don't think we do know yet, and there's a lot of ways accidents can happen in any discipline.
I don't think it's reasonable to jump to arbitrary malicious conclusions and then pile on with low grade 'I don't like cops 'cause they stop me from doing things!' rhetoric.
So we wait for Transport Canada's report for more details, and 'war on drugs' just isn't part of the equation.
I will admit to not being an aviation law expert, but I'm "pretty sure" the "lower threshold for pilots" who are landing at an airport is zero feet above ground level, and that there is a well known path via which pilots pass through 500 and 499 feet on their way there.
I live directly under a flight path, about 3km out. Do you know how much 'stretching of the envelope' there is on aircraft approach paths? Very very little, they are always flying down what I estimate to be a corridor probably less that 10m sideways deviation from each other, and as far as my untrained eye can tell always the same altitude. They're all aiming to hit the same near end of a ~2000m long runway that's about 50m wide. They are not "maybe 0.5nm short, maybe 0.5nm long" - where I am, 0.5nm short means they crashed into the houses on the airport outskirts. 0.5nm long is probably just a really bad landing - at least for planes that don't need more than 2/3rds of the runway to land safely.
> there's a lot of ways accidents can happen in any discipline.
Sure.
But I fail to understand why you think there's _any_ reason at all to suspect the "accident" here involved errors on the part of the plane political, when it's so obviously a fuckup of the part of the drone operator that's 100% at fault here.
Why is it that you're so insistent on exonerating the cops here?
The police don't get fined - the taxpayer does.
When an RCMP (Canadian federal police) drone collided with their own helicopter, they took 4 months to report the incident:
https://skiesmag.com/news/rcmp-drone-flying-wrong-altitude-c...
https://www.toronto.com/news-story/8102547-video-peel-police...
Nearby Peel ON has a drone unit and probably flies similar equipment to York
They didnt ask
Suing their department would do no good, beyond maybe getting his repairs paid for.
I have a DJI drone that will not power up at my house, I'm about 3km out and 7-800m to the side of the runway centreline of my nearby airport. I've been known to test fly and pid tune small (sub 150g) drones in my backyard at lower-than-tree-height or about 3-4 meters up max, but even that "feels wrong" to me if there's a plane I can see on approach or on FlightRadar, so I'll land and wait for a gap.
You simply do not fly drones anywhere near an airport without coordinating with the relevant air traffic control authorities, and this is exactly why. The people in the 172 could have been killed. Every person operating a UAS needs to be positive they aren't doing so in restricted or conflicted airspace, even casual hobbyists flying tiny sub-250g drones.
Equipment failure is usually not an excuse (for the operator) either, since the limits and failsafes on the drone should always be set to prevent it from ending up somewhere it shouldn't be. Every time I'm going to fly one of my drones, I evaluate these settings and choose new values tailored to the situation and "mission". This includes disabling automatic return-to-home if there is any chance of that function causing it to fly a dangerous route, e.g. one over people.
^[1] https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/172-substantially-damage...
I brought in the other source to verify the claims in OP's article, but the fact that the manned aircraft was literally on short final makes this incident even worse than the first article implies. It escalates the police misconduct from serious, likely criminal (by "civilian" standards, at least) negligence to something so absurdly over the top that I'm not sure what to call it. There is no more dangerous place to operate a UAS than in the glide slope of an active runway.
The term "reckless endangerment" comes to mind.
I don't know much about CTVNews specifically, but I hope we can both agree that especially in this day and age it's not uncommon for news organizations to use language in such a way to make an event seem more dramatic than it actually was, so I stand by my original statement that there wasn't enough info in that article to go on.