Mid air collisions between "manned aircraft" occur on average once a month. What does that have to do with drones?
Just trying to put your sky is falling paranoia into perspective.
My concern is legitimate. Your dismissal is uninformed.
Google drone vs aircraft collision and see how many PIREPS of near misses there have been.
All I'm saying is it's going to happen. Unfortunately. I'll get back to you when it does and we'll re address this point.
Jim Williams, the FAA executive in charge of integrating unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System (NAS) says that if and when a small UAS (sUAS) and a manned aircraft collide, the manned aircraft isn't likely to suffer serious damage. Jim Williams was speaking to a nervous audience of helicopter operators at HAI (Helicopter Association International) Heli-Expo in Orlando (March 2015) and said that while there's never been a reported contact between an sUAS and a civilian aircraft, the military has some experience in that regard. In all cases the aircraft was virtually unscathed while the UAS was "smashed to pieces." He said aircraft are much more robust than the lightly built UASs, which inevitably come up on the short end of a chance encounter. Nevertheless, he pledged that the FAA has safety at the forefront of its UAS integration plan without displacing existing traffic. "We can't integrate unmanned systems at the expense of manned systems," he told a skeptical crowd of more than 200 at the Orange County Convention Center.
Also, military drones tend to be much larger and much heavier than the Phantom.
Your example is a stretch for an analogy to what a drone can do to an airplane. The Shadow 200 RQ-7 Tactical Unmanned Aircraft is considered small by the military, but it weighs 375 pounds. If that's the extent of the damage to an airplane from a 375 pound military drone, just imagine the horrific paint scrape from a three pound plastic Phantom.
Politicians and fear mongers like to refer to the FAA Drone data spreadsheet that was released last November as substantiation of their fears. They obviously did not read the reports, just the sensational title: “Drone Sightings.” Of the almost 200 reports, most were not within five miles of an airport, many are unverified, and none of them caused a pilot to make any evasive action. Airline pilots are reporting drones just like they were reporting UFOs in the ‘60s. Just change the word “UFO” to “drone,” and it’s the same script.
Most amazing is that some of the pilots can even see a drone as claimed. Standing on the ground, looking up at the DJI Phantom, it becomes a barely perceptible speck at 200 feet, yet quite a few of the reports say the sighted drone was 500 feet or more away from them. One even reported “a few hundred yards” - good eagle eyes on that reporter. Another “3,000 feet below ...” - that’s a threat, how? The FAA database of drone sightings even includes complaints from private citizens saying, for example “that a neighbor was flying a UAS over his home and neighboring homes at 100 feet the previous evening.” And another where the drone operator “was stuck in a tree to retrieve his UAV that had crashed into the same tree.” In one, a pilot said that “a drone was following him” - pretty good when most drone’s top speed is well below the stall speed of most aircraft.
Are you in fact a licensed FAA pilot by chance?
Commercial, CFI, Instrument. Some tail time, some helicopter time, and .5 hours in an air Force C5 simulator. (I had to log that one). Over 1200 hours in all. Most in my own Cessna.
How many videos are out there of drones being flown above the clouds, or at much higher altitude than allowed? Just one or two? Can you do a quick count since they are so rare?
Higher than
allowed? Allowed by whom? You? Certainly not the FAA. 400 ft is a
GUIDELINE, not a rule. Yes there is a rule prohibiting VFR flight between 18,000 and 60,000 ft, and if your drone can fly that high, I want to see it.
All I said was we should not do, nor encourage our fellow pilots to do, things that put other people at risk. You disagree?
No. On that we are completely in agreement.
Where we digress is that we have enough nay-sayers and fear mongering from the Muggles and grandstanding politicians. There is no need to create nonexistent "rules" to support them. Fear mongering like yours just adds to the chorus of "the sky is falling" that we get from people who likely have never even seen a drone, let alone fly one. All your criticism does is to encourage the clueless lawmakers and the cops.
As I said - keep it in perspective.
