Pollution fears after 350 drones fall into river in Melbourne lightshow fail | Hacker News Reader

Pollution fears after 350 drones fall into river in Melbourne lightshow fail

theage.com.au

34 pointsgsatic14 comments

lol. strip mining coal and running your entire country off coal is okay, but a few hundred drones crosses the line. australia hasn’t changed one bit

I know, right?

“Sterrett said it was vital that all drones were recovered and that similar shows did not take place over water until there was an assurance the same thing would not happen again.”

So the alternative is that all future drone displays must take place over… land? That seems… suboptimal… in the event of similar mass failure.

And while I am truly sorry for the aquatic wildlife adversely affected by a few hundred pounds of lithium falling on their habitats, is this even in a part of the river that provides drinking water? That seems like that would be the primary risk, but I can’t imagine that’s the case in any area densely populated enough for a drone display.

No, I think the alternative is that drone shows don't take place until they can be done safely. This doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

You don't need to worry too much about the aquatic life in the Yarra. It's a disgusting shithole of a river at the best of times.

You sound far better acquainted with the facts on the ground, so I defer to your assessment. But “river activist indifferent to land” being a position held by someone out there is not something I find terribly difficult to imagine.

I would say the important factor mentioned in the article is that heavy metals from the batteries will end up in the waterways if they're not recovered. A bunch of drones crashing on land an be a) (presumably) recovered much easier and b) even if you don't find one of the drones, it's probably going to take a lot longer to find its way into the water and it should be in lower concentrations etc.

mvdtnz' assessment of the Yarra being full of garbage already is correct, though. It wasn't too long ago that Melbourne locals were intentionally throwing hire bikes into the river because they were sick of them taking up the side walk. I think it was numbers well into the hundreds of bikes that were being dredged up.

Also the drones didn't so much "crash" as they entered auto-land, and landed... on water, where they sunk. If it was over land they would have just landed on the ground with no harm.

I assume gluing a self-inflating balloon to the drones to prevent sinking would be sufficient.

Australia's governance of energy and mining policies includes many different organisations.

It's overly simplistic to claim that because Australia relies on fossil fuels and has a powerful mining lobby that The Age's thirty-something year advocacy for cleaning up the Yarra is somehow insincere. Over the duration of this campaign we have seen the health of the Yarra slowly improve.

I’m guessing the people writing about this are against the other things too, though?

I wonder if the new light-based communication networks recently proposed could make applications like these more reliable - there were suspicions that radio frequency interference was a factor in this failure.

Light, while having directional and occlusion risks, would appear to be more readily directed and filtered. Stray sources of light modulated at the frequency selected for communication would also likely be less of an issue.

However, some method would have to be devised to allow hundreds of nodes to share the network - though with the bandwidth of light based communication, simple TDMA or even broadcast could work.

It can have major problems in various conditions including fog, smoke, dust, rain, etc. You need radio backups or some fail safe auto-land system.

Actually, it was the fail safe auto-land system that functioned perfectly and put these things in the Yarra in the first place.

Something went wrong (presumeably with their radio link) and they executed their fail-safe procedure, which was to cancel horizontal velocity and perform a gentle powered landing - In the river below them...

How does the pollution compare to fireworks? What exactly is toxic in a drone? Fireworks are full of metal that presumably goes in the water eventually, right?

The lithium batteries are the most dangerous part.

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