December 16, 2024
DRONES HAVE BEEN all over the news of late. While I can’t speak to what enemies or other state actors might be behind the ongoing rash of sightings, it gives us a good opportunity to revisit the dangers drones can pose to commercial aircraft.
The issue has moved from an “emerging threat,” as I described it not long ago, to an established one. The number of close encounters between airplanes and drones continues to grow. Here in the United States, the FAA says it receives over a hundred new reports every month — and it’s perhaps just a matter of time before we see a collision. (Just this past weekend, two men were arrested after flying a drone through prohibited airspace near Logan Airport here in Boston.)
The FAA, with its unquenchable enthusiasm for mind-paralyzing acronyms and abbreviations, now refers to all remotely piloted flying machines as UAS or “unmanned aerial systems.” Whatever you call them, they’re potentially lethal.
The amount of damage a collision might cause depends on two things: the speed of the plane and the size — which is to say the weight — of the drone. The heavier the drone, the greater the potential damage. A jetliner traveling at 250 miles per hour (in the U.S., that’s the maximum speed when below 10,000 feet), hitting a 25-pound UAS creates about 40,000 pounds of impact force.
Most hobby drones weigh less than ten pounds and don’t fly very high, but bigger, heavier machines are out there, and we’ll be seeing more of them: paramilitary border patrol drones; police department surveillance drones; Bezos and his fleet dropping iPhones and toasters from the sky.
It’s these larger drones that are of greatest concern. If an operator should lose control of one of these things, or it otherwise wanders into airspace it shouldn’t be in, the results could be catastrophic — particularly if the collision were to damage the plane’s control surfaces or cockpit.
Even a collision with a lightweight drone could result in serious, and expensive, damage. A small drone impacting an engine would be unlikely to cause a crash, but it could easily cause the failure of that engine and millions of dollars of repair bills. Windscreens and other components are vulnerable as well. Small drones are invisible to air traffic control and onboard radar.
Rules have been on the books from the start, though in typical FAA fashion they’re a confusing spaghetti-knot of dos and don’ts. And in 2015, regulators enacted a mandatory registration process for all UASs weighing more than half a pound.
Have all hobbyists been complying with this program? Of course not, but I suppose its purpose is less about tracking users than it is about creating awareness. Ultimately, it’s up to users policing themselves.
The problem all along has been mostly one of ignorance: most drone flyers aren’t trying to be reckless or cause mayhem; they simply don’t realize how hazardous a collision between and plane and a drone could be. This mindset needs changing. More than coming up with technical fixes or enforcing complex airspace rules, we need to encourage awareness and common sense.
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Upper and lower photos courtesy of Unsplash.
Center photo by the author.
