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...
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.