It's tragic if it's true about the drone. It's my worst nightmare whenever I'm flying these days.
We've all got our irrational fears, but whether you're flying in a jumbo jet or a single-prop bug-smasher this one is very irrational indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_aerial_vehicl...
Maybe if someone is deliberately flying near an airport and moves into the exact right position at the right time without first being spotted
But in practice, mainstream drones are GPS locked to not fly anywhere near airports and it's not really realistic to just accidentally get a drone too close to an airplane anywhere else. Also, the sky is a massive place and drones have limited flight time. I think the drone-airplane collision fears are greatly exaggerated outside of unique low-altitude specialty flying like airshows.
Hitting a drone is your worst nightmare while piloting small aircraft?
Or hitting a plane is your worst nightmare when flying a drone?
A small GA aircraft hitting a drone has a very high fatality chance, particularly in the stages of flight most likely to encounter amateur drone operators (ie. takeoff and landing).
Which is where most strikes occur. Low speed (relative for an aircraft) and low altitude.
A bird hitting the prop, sucked into an engine, tail strike, windscreen, etc... all can be devastating for any aircraft, be it GA or commercial.
A drone strike isn't somehow going to be better for the aircraft...
Albatross or pelican?
I think 12.1 feet is the world record.
Multiple planes crashed with fatalities vecause of birds, as far as I am aware none have done so because of a drone.
The fear of drones had led to pilots reporting drone sightings at 10,000 feet in the middle of the Ocean, thousands of miles from shore.
"Several commenters noted that the AMA analyzed those reported ‘incidents’ and found that out of the 764 reported records, only 27 (or 3.5%) were identified as a near mid-air collision, with nearly all of those involving government-authorized military drones"
We do have confirmed strikes from drones, and the damage has been devastating. We do have confirmed strikes with fatalities from birds. There is not much difference between a bird and a drone when an aircraft strikes it at speed...
These drones are often operated by folks with zero training and zero deference for the law or aviation safety (highlighted by the fact they're operating near an airport). It's just a matter of time... if it hasn't already happened right here in this Dallas incident.
Anything is possible, there is a guy that was killed by his beard, shot by a dog and every year several people die from being tangled on bedsheets. Lets keep things in proportion.
I, for one, am unclear why we immediately jumped to regulating drones, but when Tespa autopilot kills people, nobody seems to care?
The real point is that people in this thread are too quick to blame drones, when geese outnumbet them 1000 to one. I live near an airport and a huge flock of geese is constantly here. When I see people with real drones, they tend to know whay they are doing.
The only people I see fooling around are people who buy a tiny drone for $50 on Amazon and the worst those drones can do is get aruck in your hair while filming nudes.
But these points don't mean it's any less fatal to hit a drone in a small plane than a goose.
Hitting things in aircraft isn't a recipe for a good time... ever.
Yup.
> There is not much difference between a bird and a drone when an aircraft strikes it at speed...
Open to debate.
Even if true: There's a whole lot more birds near airports than illegally operating drones. So even if there's some tiny, absolute risk, the relative risk appears low.
The claim was, hitting a drone has a high chance of being fatal - the same high chance hitting a bird has... particularly in vulnerable stages of flight. Nothing you, or anyone else has offered counters this claim, because it's just reality. Hitting things in aircraft is never a good thing, and is always a significant cause for concern.
We've been lucky so far more idiots haven't flown drones closer to airshows or airports. There are plenty, and there have been collisions with devastating damage but luckily no fatalities (perhaps yet). There are plenty of pictures on the internet if you want to compare damages to bird strikes.
Sure there is. On average there are about 13000 bird strikes a year. What fraction of those result in a fatality? The FAA says a bit under 400 pilots die every year, however since 1990 there have been just 292 fatalities globally that can be attributed to wildlife strikes (and not all are birds).
That is a pretty clear repudiation of any claim that hitting a drone has a "high chance of being fatal."
It's unclear whether it's the same chance hitting a bird has. You assert it is.
As to a high chance of fatality from bird strike: no. There's >10k bird strikes per year in the US and most years there isn't a single bird strike related fatal accident. Estimates of death are on the order of 1 death related to bird strike per billion flight hours.
Even if drones are the same risk per collision, drones are much rarer near runways than birds.
There's no such thing in the world as zero risk, but if drones are a small fraction of a risk that's less than 1 death per billion flight hours, I'd say that we have bigger fish to fry.
I tell everyone these things are not for kids, especially the $1K+ drones capable of high altitudes and speeds. If you go online and find a video of someone doing something stupid, you’ll find an army of enthusiasts telling them so in the comments because they want to preserve the hobby.
I assume you mean ADS-B in? Is the receiver in the drone itself or in the ground station/transmitter?
I imagine a similar distribution with drone strikes, as most drones do not weigh as much as a goose, at least of those in the hands of a typical idiot (who would fly in the path of a plane).
That's why 'very high fatality chance' doesn't seem right to me, but I can't find any statistics on it.
That's because there have not been any: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_aerial_vehicl...
Really? Very high? My uneducated guess is that there's a very high chance of damage to the airplane, but not of crash landing, and certainly not of death.
You're way to more likely to be killed by a midair in the pattern at an uncontrolled field than anything drone related.
Although possible, war planes should not be as affected by strikes.
Why do you think it's a drone?
Usually, when I see a reasonable but dead comment, I vouch for it. If the commenter is shadowbanned and their other most recent comments are also reasonable and civil, I (sometimes) alert them to their status.
There is nothing special about a war plane that makes it less affected by strikes of any kind, be from birds or drones alike.
Doubly-so if it's a several pound metal ball...
You don't want to hit anything in an aircraft, ever.
The P-63 did (example picture [0]), like many others that were designed to attack bombers and/or ground targets.
Regardless, modernly speaking, very few (if any) aircraft have bullet proof windshields. They are impractical for a number of reasons, including weight, size, thickness (distortion of picture), and efficacy. If a pilot is within small-arms distance they generally are already in trouble...
https://warbirdsnews.com/warbird-restorations/caf-bell-p-63f...
But, I would not be surprised it was tried, particularly with WWII era machines. There's very little actual benefit to having one on any aircraft, even CAS aircraft. A modernly restored version meant for airshows and racing probably would have replaced it for something more modern and lighter weight.
There's no particular reason for wikipedia to mention it because it was a very common feature in this era. It would be like mentioning that it had self-sealing fuel tanks. It was also a feature that could be present or not between different models, and could even be retrofitted to a plane once it was in service.
Regarding the wreck-finder below: he likely does know exactly what it was because he likely started by looking up the crash report (and based on his claimed date, it's probably s/n, 44-2031)
This is exactly what a typical armored windscreen looked like in this era (e.g. https://ww2aircraft.net/forum/threads/armored-windscreen-for...)