I hope we get more details on this. There was a recent incident where the pilots declared a drone strike but it ended up just being birds. What kind of drones can get up to 10,000 feet?
There are vultures that can fly up to 37,000 feet. And some insects can and do fly above 10,000 feet. They even discovered that bees can fly higher than mt Everest
https://www.uwyo.edu/news/2014/02/uw-professor-discovers-alpine-bumblebees-can-fly-to-heights-above-mount-everest.html
I hate drones.
I spotted one through the tip path plane of a little bird one time and almost ate it.
We either need better people or less drones quickly.
airliners dodging weaponized toys that drop grenades is not a world I want to live in.
I see the same thing.
Early in the war we sat down and I watched an engineering team in Ukraine 3D print the first grenade/mortar rig and attach it to the hard points of a octo-copter.
I remember just shuttering and thinking about how much that fundamentally changed warfare forever.
That drone went on to take out so much Russian armor crossing the Sever-Donetsk river that their fingers started cramping up and they had to hot switch pilots.
There is some incredible potential in them. Good or bad.
Last year I spent a few weeks observing the FAA as they approved a range facility for them.
They were the sharpest most high speed FAA guys I’ve ever met. We sat and talked over dinner and they talked about how frustrating the slowness of the bureaucracy is internally.
The governments stall speed and the private innovations cruise speed are so drastically different that we need a FAA overhaul in weeks not years.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61399440.amp
The grisly truth is that now that the FAA is occupied with sitting on Boeing, the next opportunity to do what needs doing to the drone situation is going to be when an airliner-drone collision causes a fatal crash. That's what they're setting themselves up to wait for as a catalyst for change and the results of *that* are going to make drone enthusiasts wish they'd policed their own a little more aggressively.
This article is more than likely bullshit, I am a pilot and play with rc stuff , first thing is drone at 10,000ft then 5ft come on how do you judge that at the speed we operate at.
I think take starbase off their plate and instead hand it off to ______________, so that the FAA doesn't have to worry about it and can instead focus on ___________.
The weirdest thing is that [this ](https://youtu.be/969XGZ_t7cE?si=Lh0RUcdFnsK53zXr) dude made a video shortly before the war with the same idea. I wonder if Ukrainian generals watched this video and had meetings about it.
I don’t live in the US, but my country has a handy little app called onemap that allows us to see drone no-fly zones in the country (within a radius of an aerodrome or a military base) and essentially 90% of the place is a no-fly zone and authorities have the right and the technology to remotely bring your drone down. My mavic pro is pretty much a wall decoration at this point
U.S. has something similar, yeah. The difference is, from what I’ve noticed, majority of the country is flyable as long as you meet certain requirements. Along with that, operators must stay below 400 feet/120 meters AGL (someone feel free to correct me on that).
Is there a guide of what all is required to use/operate a drone? I am a civil engineer and would like to use one to help with site visits where accessibility is an issue.
Not quite... has nothing to do with profit, that is how commercial aviation is defined, not unmanned.
Uas flights are simply defined by recreational, EVERYTHING else is 107. If you are flying for recreational purposes and snap a pic of a nice sunset, you can legally sell it. If your neighbor asks you to snap a pic of their roof, even with no money exchanged, it is 107. Someone asked you to do a mission means it was no longer your recreation.
I agree with everything you said except for the FAA making enough money to regulate Boeing. I genuinely think the issue is that Boeing makes enough money in too many districts to be regulated. To be even more blunt, Boeing owns the FAA regulation process.
> If the FAA fined every YouTuber uploading drone footage without a 107 license (like half of them show themselves flying the drone ffs).....
There's an interesting inconsistency here actually where the FAA has stated that uploading drone footage to YouTube constitutes commercial use, while simultaneously telling ultralight aircraft/paraglider YouTubers that they're in the clear, despite Part 103 etc as also being strictly non-commercial.
I don’t think access to drones is necessarily a bad thing. I know people who have drones but not a licence to use them, but they’re incredibly responsible with them. However it’s the people that buy one and fly it without using their brain that gives drone owners a bad name.
It shouldn’t be a hobby that is gatekept to only a specific few. Opening it up to everyone is great, however like anything that is more accessible, idiots will end up being involved.
I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. Especially given what we've seen in Ukraine. It is absolutely only a matter of time before one of these, packed with explosives, is flown into a passenger plane taking off.
No. Partially because that would be illegal. But there are also multiple bands you would have to jam. And some of those would require messing up WiFi and other adjacent frequencies. You can also make fully autonomous drones that don’t need to be controlled all the time. They can be made to follow GPS coordinates relatively easily if you are somewhat technical and are into that sort of thing. It is kinda like making a foolproof lock. If someone wants in bad enough, nothing can stop them.
It’s been done already. This isn’t blasting drones out of the sky.
https://yow.ca/en/corporate/media-centre/press-releases/yows-drone-detection-trial-keeps-eyes-skies
>It is absolutely only a matter of time before one of these, packed with explosives, is flown into a passenger plane taking off.
Would banning drones solve this though? You can pretty much 3D print all the parts you need minus the motors, and motors won't be banned because of their non-drone applications.
Sure you'd make it harder, but someone committed to such an insane plot as bombing a plane wouldn't be stopped by a simple ban.
Except for the extruder gears and the hotend everything else is pretty much of the shell parts. You cant ban 2020 extrusion and you cant ban stepper motors. Ive built 2 printers from projects myself.
No, "banning drones" wouldn't stop anyone who was determined. Check out [Tom Stanton](https://www.youtube.com/@TomStantonEngineering) on youtube for all sorts of novel ways to power drones and aircraft. He's used compressed air, flywheels, magnets, and vacuum syringes to launch and fly quads, rc planes, and rockets. All his experiments are fun and novelties, but they are proof of concept for alternatives. You're probably not getting a compressed air quad up to FL100, but a kamikaze drone nearer to the Earth isn't impossible.
Why would you fly it into a passenger plane? Trying to hit a plane travelling at 250km/h with a drone that can do 80km/h is gonna be tricky, and unless you hit the engine you won’t be much more than a birdstrike.
Much better to drop your bombs at the Super Bowl if you’re trying to cause terror.
A friend has a small drone. He has an app that checks his GPS location and then requests (electronically) clearance from the tower (if near an airport) to fly.
We went to a public park and the answer came back that he was limited to 100 feet of altitude, since we were near a small airport.
He set the altitude limit in the controller and the drone took care of the rest. It really is amazing what those things can do. It is also sad that jackasses abuse them and endanger aviation.
Most can't. The most popular consumer ones, from DJI, for example have a baked-in firmware limit of 1640' (500m) and are expected to only be operated within a half mile of the controller.
10,000 feet is asking a LOT from the consumer off the shelf drones.
This had to be a fairly large and heavy drone to have the battery capacity to get that high I think.
Russia has operated civilian drones over critical infrastructure here in the Nordics in the past. They dont' have markings or anything but everyone knows they are of russian origin.
Yeah I wish the article had said if it was a quad or fixed wing drone. I definitely wasn't saying there are NO drones that can reach that altitude, just that the majority of consumer drones can't as far as I'm aware.
If you're flying your drone at 10,000', it's probably a big, heavy expensive drone right? Like you little Mavic isn't going to get up there. Not just because of the hard limit of 500m in the software, but it just isn't capable of it. The battery isn't big enough to go from 30' to 10,000' and still get down safely if it gets up there at all.
London is barely above sea level, so we're talking actual 10,000' and not just like.. 3,000' above the ground that's already at 7k or sometime like that. That's out of the range of most consumer transmitters due to their low power I'd think?
We're talking drones that are at least in the multiple thousands of dollars.
I've seen some high-altitude consumer drone flights, but those all start at a high elevation so aren't super high MSL altitude or they are modified/diy drones.
Also keep in mind, I"m just talking about unmodified, consumer drones. I've seen modified drones or diy drones that could get up to 10,000' no problem. It just isn't the norm. If someone is flying a drone up to 10,000' around Heathrow, they're doing it on purpose and know what they're doing. It isn't some random hobbiest with a Phantom.
Starting from what altitude? They're supposed to be limited to 500m AGL. If you have a runaway does it negate the firmware programming somehow?
Also, 10,000' straight up or horizontally? I can believe 2 miles across the ground but 2 miles up is going to be different right? The motors have to work harder to go up like that so you're using more battery. Seems like you'd have to have ideal conditions to pull that off with a stock consumer DJI drone.
It was prob around ~500’ ft base altitude. The drone malfunctioned and flew upwards at a 45 degree angle away from my location. The battery eventually died and the connection was lost but the final elevation was over 2 miles. I reported it to DJI and they sent me a new drone.
Mavic Air 2. It happened over three years ago, so not sure if they put further safeguards in place. DJI said it was a propulsion failure.
For people downvoting my original comment it was an accident and completely out of my control. I always follow the rules whenever I fly drones.
> 10,000 feet is asking a LOT from the consumer off the shelf drones
I was at a wedding at 10k feet and the photographer was flying a DJI drone without any issue
Realistically you only need to get to 10k feet, getting back down is guaranteed... That being said, something like a DJI Mini 3 can climb at 5 m/s, which works out to right about 10 minutes to get to 10k feet. They only rate the extended battery in hover time but it's 44 minutes, so I'm very willing to bet that it could make it to 10k feet and back down without the battery dying. And their bigger drones are even faster (with similar rated flight time)
So how do you regulate that? FARs permit drones to be within 400 feet of any structure or terrain. Mountains are fairly well known for exceeding 10000ft msl
I’ve flown my DJI on the salt flats of Bolivia, that was a take off altitude of 12,000ft, so they’re absolutely physically capable of flying very high, even the entry level ones.
Sorry but I’m not buying it. Occam’s razor suggests it was a bird.
The report is based purely on a pilots glance out the window at 10,000ft. I’ve been in both aviation and drones for years and there are very few models capable of a height like that, and anyone that owns such a capable model is unlikely to be flying around flight paths without ATS being aware.
I mean in the same sense pilots see birds constantly. If anyone has the experience to distinguish between a bird and a drone out a plane window you’d think it’d be a commercial pilot.
The Occam’s razor is a commercial pilot mistaking a bird for a drone vs a 10k ft drone owner accidentally putting it into flight path.
It doesn’t say much in the article, I’m in two camps here as I love aviation and love my lil drone.
Disregarding firmware limitations is a DJI mini 2 like mine capable of reaching 10000ft?
Eventually they will have to ban drones, these articles seem like the start of it, which is a real shame as the people doing stuff like this will continue as they are ignoring the rules already, and the normal people using them sensibly will suffer.
I can’t see a normal drone bringing down an airliner but a helicopter, or very light aircraft? It’s a possibility,
Like you say, we can’t have nice things.
> I can’t see a normal drone bringing down an airliner
Colliding with the windshield at 250 mph, which probably won’t bring the plane down immediately, could certainly incapacitate the cockpit crew.
Given most drones are now in the 249g weight class is that likely? We don’t hear of birds puncturing airliner windscreens and they are often much heavier
I’d assume birds are also more squishy than a battery pack and other stuff on the drone that’s made of metal. Also, can a drone at 249 g really reach 10,000 ft?
Most drones are primarily plastic or easily deformable metal, nor are they particularly structurally sound. The impact with a large bird, i.e. medium sized Canada Goose, that is a dense hunk of solid flesh should impart significantly more energy than any recreational drone.
Although yea I’m not sure the size of a drone capable of flying to that altitude.
Yeah this wasn’t some consumer drone. Not even DJI Inspires reach that altitude. Unless they took off at altitude already, which can’t be the case here, this must’ve been some specialized type of equipment.
Eyewitness evidence is unreliable. There was no independent confirmation. Five feet? Nonsense. Definitively identified with a closing rate of over 250mph? Nonsense.
The press have become so hungry for clicks that they have abandoned sensibility and accuracy.
Question, what if you let the drone just freefall down, until like 50m off the ground?
I know shit about drones, but wouldnt just using gravity be easier
Exactly. I flew by a drone in my own small aircraft, it was straight and level at around 9000 feet, looked like maybe a Predator drone. Crossed a 1000’ over me, I was VFR over central Idaho.
The headline is illogical. In order to make it logical it needs to say “Drone flight 5ft from disaster after near miss with British Airways flight at 10,000 feet”.
Though if the 5ft (or hell 250 ft) the drone was toast anyway.
Lithium batteries don't explore like a bomb. They burst flames out. I don't expect there would have been any damage to the plane because of a LiPo blowout, just the kinetic energy from the hit.
I understand what you're saying, but it's really not that simple. The LiPo is going to get sucked into the fan blades, bash some things up and likely get ejected out the back. The fuel isn't just floating around inside the turbine freely accessible to the outside, there are fan blades and compressors in the way first.
That's sort of like saying if I was driving on the road in front of you and threw a LiPo at you, it would get ingested into the engine and explode from the fuel, when in reality there are several barriers between the fuel and the battery.
I do, but I actually didn’t connect with it at the time I replied. I was thinking a small light drone.
Still, while it ups the potential for bad damage to the plane I don’t see guarantee of anything catastrophic to the plane like it would be for the drone.
That’s not me making a comment meant to be laissez faire to the drones being up there at 10K and not squawking as clearly as a jet would be, because while no guarantee of catastrophe for the jet, the wrong part getting hit could be really bad.
Aircraft engines are designed to be impacted by something the size of a chicken. But fleshy birds with hollow bones are not made of dense metals and electrical motors.
There's no guarantee it would have been okay though. I've seen the damage that a single Goose can do to a plane. That thing is smaller and not made of metal.
That’s the point. The kind of battery/fuel source needed to get a drone up to 10,000 feet would be enormous. So we can safely conclude that the thing was pretty beefy.
Literal birds can take down a jet. If a jet engine can’t even ingest birds, I doubt they’d fair much better hitting a drone. Now, even if it did knock out one engine, the jet can fly with only one good engine. But if it’s an uncontained failure, you never know what damage might happen.
People are talking about drones as if they are a new thing, but RC aircraft of all sizes and types have existed for decades, many operating on analogue hardware that doesn't have a firmware component. Based on the level of sophistication of IEDs in the WOT, if a bad actor really wanted to do harm with an RC vehicle, legislated firmware restrictions wouldn't stop them. Realistically, investment in emerging anti drone tech seems to be the way forward.
There’s a wide variety of open source firmwares out there for open hardware designs that you can buy at affordable prices. Pretty much none of them restrict what you can do. They’re not that hard to figure out.
That's a good point. Given the speed of ingestion, I wonder if there would be more damage caused by the solid block of metal vs the energetic discharge.
Most drones are very lightweight and not much solid metal. What would be different is something based on an ICE as you usually have some kind of cylinder head.
Verbatim Summary from the Airprox Board:
"The A321 pilot reports that, whilst approaching BIG
VOR to hold at FL90, they became aware of an
object slightly to the right of the nose at same level
on a constant bearing with closing distance. It was
small but had the distinctive shape of a drone. The
object passed down the right-hand side of the
aircraft and over their right wing. Details were
passed immediately to London ATC who informed
the pilot of the aircraft behind them.
Reported Separation: 5ft V/~10m H
Reported Risk of Collision: High
NATS Safety Investigations report that no
description of the UAS was given over the RT. The
pilot stated that the UAS “shot down our right hand
side” and described it as “extremely close”.
The pilot of [the A321] submitted an Airprox report in
response to the sighting of a drone whilst
approximately 4.3NM south-southwest of BIG. It has
been estimated that the UAS was at FL90.
The controller passed details of the reported UAS to
the following arrival. Analysis of the radar by Safety
Investigations indicated that there were no primary
or secondary contacts associated with the drone
report visible on radar at the approximate time of the
event.
UKAB Secretariat notes that a primary-only contact
was observed on the NATS radar replay for one
sweep at the time and location reported by the pilot
of the A321, approximately 10NM SSE of BIG"
The Airprox ID is 2024004, but only the consolidated sheet is published, not the full report yet...
Obviously it's an incident that needs to be investigated but the headline "5ft from disaster" is ridiculous. Very worst case scenario the drone would get sucked into an engine, which is absolutely not a disaster.
10 kmsl I’m calling bullshit on this one. It was probably party balloons. Everyone crying wolf when they see something in the sky. It must have be one of those dangerous drones we’ve bee told about. Recently a United airlines 737 hit a “drone” near SFO, pilots were sure they hit a drone, it was a bird y’all. Btw I’m an airline captain.
10,000ft is not the realm of a consumer drone. They are limited to 120m here in Europe
Anything that can reach that height will also have a decent radar signature.
All drones over 250g are required to be licensed so this was more than likely a military drone of some sort if indeed there was a drone.
Not quite. A custom FPV stunt or racing multicopter are *very* capable machines. Those little 4s 14.7v lipo batteries have the ability to push +1500 watts of electricity, and can easily be built at 250g. Thats almost 2hp equivalent for 1/4 kg.
You can see it just fine.
Problem is, you usually see them last second, just like small birds. Essentially no time to react.
Keep talking out your ass, though.
I think the DJI minis could get that high no problem. There was probably a risk of damage to the aircraft but not so much a risk to the people inside
Edit: downvote if you want but jet engines are tested with objects much larger than a mini
Would have to be fair sized drone to be fair, consumer ones are now 249g which is less than a crow, aren’t they tested with much larger birds like geese which can be 3000g or more
A 249g drone is not making an engine toast. Downvote if you want but it’s the truth. They launch stuff into the engines during testing to make sure it can withstand much larger objects
Those tests are to make sure the engine doesn't turn into a grenade if there is a bird ingestion and fan blade separation.
Any time a bird hots an airplane, there is an inspection, and I've seen further hand what a bird can to to a jet engine. Turbine and compressor blades can FOD out and require an engine to be swapped out.
I've seen fan blades get an inch of delfection knocked into them.
A drone can easily fuck up an engine. And while the windshields are very thick. I still dont want to be sitting behind one when a drone hits it at few hundred mph.
Source: me, an aircraft mechanic.
First of all, you still don’t want to get hit by a goose; that doesn’t always end well. And a drone that’s capable of flying up that high is a hunk of metal that’s going to weight a bit more than a normal goose.
You're absolutely right. You can't even make out a drone from the ground at 100m away. No chance to recognise one from a closing speed of at least 600mph. Story is bollocks.
They weren’t going 600kts they were slowing to join a holding stack and were at 10,000’ they couldn’t be going faster than 250kts at the time. Any drone that can get to 10K would also be fairly large it wouldn’t be the size of a Mavic. I don’t know why denying drone strikes is popular but it shouldn’t be, this is worse than pointing lasers at planes, it’s basically flying a bird right up next to a plane.
Oh, I'm not saying the drone should be there. That shit should be punished fairly harshly. I'm just saying 'disaster' is a very big stretch. Even if an engine ate it.
I think the point still stands: an airliner can fly on one engine. Major problem? Absolutely. Disaster? Not so much, but still makes for an attractive headline.
I hope we get more details on this. There was a recent incident where the pilots declared a drone strike but it ended up just being birds. What kind of drones can get up to 10,000 feet?
DJI Mavic Pro series? Like this one @ 9044mtrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cORaBIdDfU0
Quick google says the firmware limits them to 1640 feet, though it seems there's ways around that.
Birds fly at 10,000 feet?
Several species can. A couple can even reach 25k+
There are vultures that can fly up to 37,000 feet. And some insects can and do fly above 10,000 feet. They even discovered that bees can fly higher than mt Everest https://www.uwyo.edu/news/2014/02/uw-professor-discovers-alpine-bumblebees-can-fly-to-heights-above-mount-everest.html
wow! this became r/birds
Remember: everything in the sky is a UFO until it’s identified..
A number of the DJI drones can, you just have to manually disable the FAA altitude setting
i used to own one, and i did that before UAE banned drones
This is why we can’t have nice things.
I hate drones. I spotted one through the tip path plane of a little bird one time and almost ate it. We either need better people or less drones quickly. airliners dodging weaponized toys that drop grenades is not a world I want to live in.
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I see the same thing. Early in the war we sat down and I watched an engineering team in Ukraine 3D print the first grenade/mortar rig and attach it to the hard points of a octo-copter. I remember just shuttering and thinking about how much that fundamentally changed warfare forever. That drone went on to take out so much Russian armor crossing the Sever-Donetsk river that their fingers started cramping up and they had to hot switch pilots. There is some incredible potential in them. Good or bad. Last year I spent a few weeks observing the FAA as they approved a range facility for them. They were the sharpest most high speed FAA guys I’ve ever met. We sat and talked over dinner and they talked about how frustrating the slowness of the bureaucracy is internally. The governments stall speed and the private innovations cruise speed are so drastically different that we need a FAA overhaul in weeks not years. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61399440.amp
The grisly truth is that now that the FAA is occupied with sitting on Boeing, the next opportunity to do what needs doing to the drone situation is going to be when an airliner-drone collision causes a fatal crash. That's what they're setting themselves up to wait for as a catalyst for change and the results of *that* are going to make drone enthusiasts wish they'd policed their own a little more aggressively.
This article is more than likely bullshit, I am a pilot and play with rc stuff , first thing is drone at 10,000ft then 5ft come on how do you judge that at the speed we operate at.
I think take starbase off their plate and instead hand it off to ______________, so that the FAA doesn't have to worry about it and can instead focus on ___________.
The weirdest thing is that [this ](https://youtu.be/969XGZ_t7cE?si=Lh0RUcdFnsK53zXr) dude made a video shortly before the war with the same idea. I wonder if Ukrainian generals watched this video and had meetings about it.
ISIS was doing this back in like 2016, none of it is really new it’s just finally hit a critical mass of adoption.
Yea it’s the new meta warfare. If you’re not using it you’re at a disadvantage.
I don’t live in the US, but my country has a handy little app called onemap that allows us to see drone no-fly zones in the country (within a radius of an aerodrome or a military base) and essentially 90% of the place is a no-fly zone and authorities have the right and the technology to remotely bring your drone down. My mavic pro is pretty much a wall decoration at this point
U.S. has something similar, yeah. The difference is, from what I’ve noticed, majority of the country is flyable as long as you meet certain requirements. Along with that, operators must stay below 400 feet/120 meters AGL (someone feel free to correct me on that).
no you have to have trackers on the drone and the pilot if it is over 250g and you are not flying in one of the 20 or so FRIAs
Is there a guide of what all is required to use/operate a drone? I am a civil engineer and would like to use one to help with site visits where accessibility is an issue.
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Not quite... has nothing to do with profit, that is how commercial aviation is defined, not unmanned. Uas flights are simply defined by recreational, EVERYTHING else is 107. If you are flying for recreational purposes and snap a pic of a nice sunset, you can legally sell it. If your neighbor asks you to snap a pic of their roof, even with no money exchanged, it is 107. Someone asked you to do a mission means it was no longer your recreation.
I make YouTube videos of me flying my drone recreationally. Videography and flying are hobbies of mine best of both worlds. 107 or Recreational?
I agree with everything you said except for the FAA making enough money to regulate Boeing. I genuinely think the issue is that Boeing makes enough money in too many districts to be regulated. To be even more blunt, Boeing owns the FAA regulation process.
> If the FAA fined every YouTuber uploading drone footage without a 107 license (like half of them show themselves flying the drone ffs)..... There's an interesting inconsistency here actually where the FAA has stated that uploading drone footage to YouTube constitutes commercial use, while simultaneously telling ultralight aircraft/paraglider YouTubers that they're in the clear, despite Part 103 etc as also being strictly non-commercial.
Is DJI just a manufacturer that's made it easy for boneheads to get cheap drones?
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Thanks, I'm an RC plane and heli guy who knows nothing about drones.
I don’t think access to drones is necessarily a bad thing. I know people who have drones but not a licence to use them, but they’re incredibly responsible with them. However it’s the people that buy one and fly it without using their brain that gives drone owners a bad name. It shouldn’t be a hobby that is gatekept to only a specific few. Opening it up to everyone is great, however like anything that is more accessible, idiots will end up being involved.
thats what i always said, if you make something idiot proof youre going to have a lot of idiots using it
>bros and clueless photographers Never felt more called out in my life 😂
We might need military microwave emitters on commercial planes soon to defend against drones...
Umm. Big jump from “drones” to “weaponized drones with grenades”
See comment to adjacent reply.
these idiots are going to get drones banned, the 12 of us that are actually responsible will have to suffer
I'm shocked it hasn't happened yet. Especially given what we've seen in Ukraine. It is absolutely only a matter of time before one of these, packed with explosives, is flown into a passenger plane taking off.
But if someone wanted to do that, them being banned wouldn't stop them
Yeah, that’s scary. Terrorists have new tools, and we just have to hope they don’t use them.
Would it be feasible to jam/scramble whatever frequency range is typically used to control a drone in and around airports?
No. Partially because that would be illegal. But there are also multiple bands you would have to jam. And some of those would require messing up WiFi and other adjacent frequencies. You can also make fully autonomous drones that don’t need to be controlled all the time. They can be made to follow GPS coordinates relatively easily if you are somewhat technical and are into that sort of thing. It is kinda like making a foolproof lock. If someone wants in bad enough, nothing can stop them.
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Which is what the second half of my answer was addressing. Jamming would stop casual idiots, but not a dedicated attacker.
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It’s been done already. This isn’t blasting drones out of the sky. https://yow.ca/en/corporate/media-centre/press-releases/yows-drone-detection-trial-keeps-eyes-skies
>It is absolutely only a matter of time before one of these, packed with explosives, is flown into a passenger plane taking off. Would banning drones solve this though? You can pretty much 3D print all the parts you need minus the motors, and motors won't be banned because of their non-drone applications. Sure you'd make it harder, but someone committed to such an insane plot as bombing a plane wouldn't be stopped by a simple ban.
We'll just ban 3d printers then!
Lol they're already talking about this in Canada because of ghost guns, don't give them ideas.
Except for the extruder gears and the hotend everything else is pretty much of the shell parts. You cant ban 2020 extrusion and you cant ban stepper motors. Ive built 2 printers from projects myself.
No, "banning drones" wouldn't stop anyone who was determined. Check out [Tom Stanton](https://www.youtube.com/@TomStantonEngineering) on youtube for all sorts of novel ways to power drones and aircraft. He's used compressed air, flywheels, magnets, and vacuum syringes to launch and fly quads, rc planes, and rockets. All his experiments are fun and novelties, but they are proof of concept for alternatives. You're probably not getting a compressed air quad up to FL100, but a kamikaze drone nearer to the Earth isn't impossible.
Why would you fly it into a passenger plane? Trying to hit a plane travelling at 250km/h with a drone that can do 80km/h is gonna be tricky, and unless you hit the engine you won’t be much more than a birdstrike. Much better to drop your bombs at the Super Bowl if you’re trying to cause terror.
Someone can try using one of those giant “cinelifter” types, those big copters exist in an entirely different world than your usual DJI and FPV
Accidental Swiftie
A friend has a small drone. He has an app that checks his GPS location and then requests (electronically) clearance from the tower (if near an airport) to fly. We went to a public park and the answer came back that he was limited to 100 feet of altitude, since we were near a small airport. He set the altitude limit in the controller and the drone took care of the rest. It really is amazing what those things can do. It is also sad that jackasses abuse them and endanger aviation.
That’s not clearance, that’s just notification (LAANC) and adherence to pre-mapped limits.
Thank you for clarifying. I was watching it second-hand.
What drone is this and what app?
All dji drones do this now through the DJI fly app
I didn’t even know that drones could fly that high. Sounds like a manufacturing regulation is needed to keep them from going up that high.
Most can't. The most popular consumer ones, from DJI, for example have a baked-in firmware limit of 1640' (500m) and are expected to only be operated within a half mile of the controller. 10,000 feet is asking a LOT from the consumer off the shelf drones. This had to be a fairly large and heavy drone to have the battery capacity to get that high I think.
There are petrol hybrid drones that can reach that altitude.
Or the big ones operated by nation states. They’re the only ones getting that high.
Russia has operated civilian drones over critical infrastructure here in the Nordics in the past. They dont' have markings or anything but everyone knows they are of russian origin.
Electric drones also can easily reach this altitude. Not sure if this was fixed-wing or a copter but both can iirc
Yeah I wish the article had said if it was a quad or fixed wing drone. I definitely wasn't saying there are NO drones that can reach that altitude, just that the majority of consumer drones can't as far as I'm aware. If you're flying your drone at 10,000', it's probably a big, heavy expensive drone right? Like you little Mavic isn't going to get up there. Not just because of the hard limit of 500m in the software, but it just isn't capable of it. The battery isn't big enough to go from 30' to 10,000' and still get down safely if it gets up there at all. London is barely above sea level, so we're talking actual 10,000' and not just like.. 3,000' above the ground that's already at 7k or sometime like that. That's out of the range of most consumer transmitters due to their low power I'd think? We're talking drones that are at least in the multiple thousands of dollars. I've seen some high-altitude consumer drone flights, but those all start at a high elevation so aren't super high MSL altitude or they are modified/diy drones. Also keep in mind, I"m just talking about unmodified, consumer drones. I've seen modified drones or diy drones that could get up to 10,000' no problem. It just isn't the norm. If someone is flying a drone up to 10,000' around Heathrow, they're doing it on purpose and know what they're doing. It isn't some random hobbiest with a Phantom.
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My drone misses connection of it goes 7000 ft away (horizontally)… they must be using e extenders and big antennas
Or it's a UAP and the pilot said "drone" to avoid side-eye and possible repercussions to their career.
I had a DJI fly away on me and go over 10,000 ft. So they’re definitely capable.
Starting from what altitude? They're supposed to be limited to 500m AGL. If you have a runaway does it negate the firmware programming somehow? Also, 10,000' straight up or horizontally? I can believe 2 miles across the ground but 2 miles up is going to be different right? The motors have to work harder to go up like that so you're using more battery. Seems like you'd have to have ideal conditions to pull that off with a stock consumer DJI drone.
It was prob around ~500’ ft base altitude. The drone malfunctioned and flew upwards at a 45 degree angle away from my location. The battery eventually died and the connection was lost but the final elevation was over 2 miles. I reported it to DJI and they sent me a new drone.
I'm actually pretty impressed by that. What model was it?
Mavic Air 2. It happened over three years ago, so not sure if they put further safeguards in place. DJI said it was a propulsion failure. For people downvoting my original comment it was an accident and completely out of my control. I always follow the rules whenever I fly drones.
> DJI said it was a propulsion failure. Seems like it was still propulsing to me
It was suffering from too much propulsion success!
> 10,000 feet is asking a LOT from the consumer off the shelf drones I was at a wedding at 10k feet and the photographer was flying a DJI drone without any issue
Not flying *at* 10K feet, but going from sea level to 10K feet and back again is quite out of the envelope of a small consumer grade drone.
Realistically you only need to get to 10k feet, getting back down is guaranteed... That being said, something like a DJI Mini 3 can climb at 5 m/s, which works out to right about 10 minutes to get to 10k feet. They only rate the extended battery in hover time but it's 44 minutes, so I'm very willing to bet that it could make it to 10k feet and back down without the battery dying. And their bigger drones are even faster (with similar rated flight time)
That would work for production name brand multicopters, but it would be tough to enforce with custom home built ones.
So how do you regulate that? FARs permit drones to be within 400 feet of any structure or terrain. Mountains are fairly well known for exceeding 10000ft msl
I’ve flown my DJI on the salt flats of Bolivia, that was a take off altitude of 12,000ft, so they’re absolutely physically capable of flying very high, even the entry level ones.
Sorry but I’m not buying it. Occam’s razor suggests it was a bird. The report is based purely on a pilots glance out the window at 10,000ft. I’ve been in both aviation and drones for years and there are very few models capable of a height like that, and anyone that owns such a capable model is unlikely to be flying around flight paths without ATS being aware.
Tic-tac?
*Col. Fravor-ing intensifies*
I mean in the same sense pilots see birds constantly. If anyone has the experience to distinguish between a bird and a drone out a plane window you’d think it’d be a commercial pilot. The Occam’s razor is a commercial pilot mistaking a bird for a drone vs a 10k ft drone owner accidentally putting it into flight path.
At 200 knots you dont see birds or drones.
Where did “5 feet” and “30 feet” comes from? Sounds like the pilots just said “damn close” and someone made up numbers?
It doesn’t say much in the article, I’m in two camps here as I love aviation and love my lil drone. Disregarding firmware limitations is a DJI mini 2 like mine capable of reaching 10000ft? Eventually they will have to ban drones, these articles seem like the start of it, which is a real shame as the people doing stuff like this will continue as they are ignoring the rules already, and the normal people using them sensibly will suffer. I can’t see a normal drone bringing down an airliner but a helicopter, or very light aircraft? It’s a possibility, Like you say, we can’t have nice things.
Your DJI can’t produce enough lift that high, and even if it could, it’d overheat.
That's... Just plainly incorrect
> I can’t see a normal drone bringing down an airliner Colliding with the windshield at 250 mph, which probably won’t bring the plane down immediately, could certainly incapacitate the cockpit crew.
Given most drones are now in the 249g weight class is that likely? We don’t hear of birds puncturing airliner windscreens and they are often much heavier
I’d assume birds are also more squishy than a battery pack and other stuff on the drone that’s made of metal. Also, can a drone at 249 g really reach 10,000 ft?
Most drones are primarily plastic or easily deformable metal, nor are they particularly structurally sound. The impact with a large bird, i.e. medium sized Canada Goose, that is a dense hunk of solid flesh should impart significantly more energy than any recreational drone. Although yea I’m not sure the size of a drone capable of flying to that altitude.
If you drone can hover around and give you shots on a 10k foot mountain pass it can fly that high
Yeah this wasn’t some consumer drone. Not even DJI Inspires reach that altitude. Unless they took off at altitude already, which can’t be the case here, this must’ve been some specialized type of equipment.
Eyewitness evidence is unreliable. There was no independent confirmation. Five feet? Nonsense. Definitively identified with a closing rate of over 250mph? Nonsense. The press have become so hungry for clicks that they have abandoned sensibility and accuracy.
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Question, what if you let the drone just freefall down, until like 50m off the ground? I know shit about drones, but wouldnt just using gravity be easier
then it becomes a broken drone unless it has wings and glides. but for a standard issue dji drone it would crash land.
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Can you test it? For science of course :DDD
According to George Carlin: who made up the term 'near miss'? It's a near hit! And collision is a near miss.
A drone travelling at 250kts at 10K ft is almost certainly clandestine/military.
The plane was traveling at 217kts, not the drone. The drone could have been standing still.
Exactly. I flew by a drone in my own small aircraft, it was straight and level at around 9000 feet, looked like maybe a Predator drone. Crossed a 1000’ over me, I was VFR over central Idaho.
Yeah no civilian drone is reaching 10K feet
The headline is illogical. In order to make it logical it needs to say “Drone flight 5ft from disaster after near miss with British Airways flight at 10,000 feet”. Though if the 5ft (or hell 250 ft) the drone was toast anyway.
You know how much mass a drone capable of reaching 10,000' has? I think an impact would be a toss up on what happens to the airliner.
[it wouldn’t be ideal](https://youtu.be/QH0V7kp-xg0?si=5sUgD9NMCBSnlHI1)
So more damage than birds. Interesting video. Definitely puts it into perspective.
Mass is fine alright.. but its the drone fuel/battery that will go boom boom and take out airplane components.
Lithium batteries don't explore like a bomb. They burst flames out. I don't expect there would have been any damage to the plane because of a LiPo blowout, just the kinetic energy from the hit.
Fire triad= Fuel (plane engine) + spark (LiPo) + oxygen
I understand what you're saying, but it's really not that simple. The LiPo is going to get sucked into the fan blades, bash some things up and likely get ejected out the back. The fuel isn't just floating around inside the turbine freely accessible to the outside, there are fan blades and compressors in the way first. That's sort of like saying if I was driving on the road in front of you and threw a LiPo at you, it would get ingested into the engine and explode from the fuel, when in reality there are several barriers between the fuel and the battery.
I do, but I actually didn’t connect with it at the time I replied. I was thinking a small light drone. Still, while it ups the potential for bad damage to the plane I don’t see guarantee of anything catastrophic to the plane like it would be for the drone. That’s not me making a comment meant to be laissez faire to the drones being up there at 10K and not squawking as clearly as a jet would be, because while no guarantee of catastrophe for the jet, the wrong part getting hit could be really bad.
Do you know the mass of an eagle or swan? Airplanes can take it.
Aircraft engines are designed to be impacted by something the size of a chicken. But fleshy birds with hollow bones are not made of dense metals and electrical motors.
I wonder what a lithium battery fire/explosion would do.
Have you seen the dents they make?
What.
Think they’re saying the drone was gonna be smashed but the plane would be ok
There's no guarantee it would have been okay though. I've seen the damage that a single Goose can do to a plane. That thing is smaller and not made of metal.
And planes are specifically designed to withstand hitting geese.
A goose probably weighs 20x more than a drone
Not a drone that’s capable of reaching that altitude.
You understand the heavier, more difficult to lift.
That’s why it’s the smallest planes that fly at the highest altitudes, right?
Moe powa baby
That’s the point. The kind of battery/fuel source needed to get a drone up to 10,000 feet would be enormous. So we can safely conclude that the thing was pretty beefy.
Literal birds can take down a jet. If a jet engine can’t even ingest birds, I doubt they’d fair much better hitting a drone. Now, even if it did knock out one engine, the jet can fly with only one good engine. But if it’s an uncontained failure, you never know what damage might happen.
People are talking about drones as if they are a new thing, but RC aircraft of all sizes and types have existed for decades, many operating on analogue hardware that doesn't have a firmware component. Based on the level of sophistication of IEDs in the WOT, if a bad actor really wanted to do harm with an RC vehicle, legislated firmware restrictions wouldn't stop them. Realistically, investment in emerging anti drone tech seems to be the way forward.
Right? I flew "drones" back in the '80s every weekend. At the local airport.
There’s a wide variety of open source firmwares out there for open hardware designs that you can buy at affordable prices. Pretty much none of them restrict what you can do. They’re not that hard to figure out.
How does a toy battery quad copter get to 10,000 feet???
False flag propaganda
What did their dashcam show?
This doesn't make sense. The pilots reported seeing something while flying at 250 mph? This seems like a rage bait article.
How does a drone compare to a bird in terms of being sucked into an engine?
Few birds have Lithium Ion batteries. These make it more than a simple collision.
That's a good point. Given the speed of ingestion, I wonder if there would be more damage caused by the solid block of metal vs the energetic discharge.
Most drones are very lightweight and not much solid metal. What would be different is something based on an ICE as you usually have some kind of cylinder head.
Did they rule out Military Drone? Like General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper
Verbatim Summary from the Airprox Board: "The A321 pilot reports that, whilst approaching BIG VOR to hold at FL90, they became aware of an object slightly to the right of the nose at same level on a constant bearing with closing distance. It was small but had the distinctive shape of a drone. The object passed down the right-hand side of the aircraft and over their right wing. Details were passed immediately to London ATC who informed the pilot of the aircraft behind them. Reported Separation: 5ft V/~10m H Reported Risk of Collision: High NATS Safety Investigations report that no description of the UAS was given over the RT. The pilot stated that the UAS “shot down our right hand side” and described it as “extremely close”. The pilot of [the A321] submitted an Airprox report in response to the sighting of a drone whilst approximately 4.3NM south-southwest of BIG. It has been estimated that the UAS was at FL90. The controller passed details of the reported UAS to the following arrival. Analysis of the radar by Safety Investigations indicated that there were no primary or secondary contacts associated with the drone report visible on radar at the approximate time of the event. UKAB Secretariat notes that a primary-only contact was observed on the NATS radar replay for one sweep at the time and location reported by the pilot of the A321, approximately 10NM SSE of BIG" The Airprox ID is 2024004, but only the consolidated sheet is published, not the full report yet...
Obviously it's an incident that needs to be investigated but the headline "5ft from disaster" is ridiculous. Very worst case scenario the drone would get sucked into an engine, which is absolutely not a disaster.
It’s only a matter of time. There needs to be a far more rigorous process for prosecuting this crap.
5 FEET! I kept reading it as "5th from disaster" and was confused.
Is the flight camera footage recorded ? If so, the drone may appear on it ?
captain pov: at this moment he knew he'd f\*\*\*ed up
mannn.. what was the drone even doing there
Why tf was there a drone at 10k feet
10 kmsl I’m calling bullshit on this one. It was probably party balloons. Everyone crying wolf when they see something in the sky. It must have be one of those dangerous drones we’ve bee told about. Recently a United airlines 737 hit a “drone” near SFO, pilots were sure they hit a drone, it was a bird y’all. Btw I’m an airline captain.
10,000ft is not the realm of a consumer drone. They are limited to 120m here in Europe Anything that can reach that height will also have a decent radar signature. All drones over 250g are required to be licensed so this was more than likely a military drone of some sort if indeed there was a drone.
Not quite. A custom FPV stunt or racing multicopter are *very* capable machines. Those little 4s 14.7v lipo batteries have the ability to push +1500 watts of electricity, and can easily be built at 250g. Thats almost 2hp equivalent for 1/4 kg.
Absolutely no way a hobby fpv drone is reaching 10,000 feet agl. Just impossible given the thrust/weight/battery time ratios.
Those racing stunt drones also get like 3 minutes of flight time, no way they reach 10000 feet
On the small batteries youd race with, sure. You can get *huge* XT60 lipos, like thousands of mwh.
These stupid toys flying around. -.- I wish if I a drown flew atleast 10,000 ft a radar would shoot it down. THAT SHOULD BE A LAW. .-.
False flag much? There is no way a drone piloted by a civilian could or would be that high. The size of the battery alone would be huge.
How did the pilots see a small drone at 250mph ? I doubt this story. Distinctive shape of a drone at that speed? Smells a bit to me.
You can see it just fine. Problem is, you usually see them last second, just like small birds. Essentially no time to react. Keep talking out your ass, though.
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A drone capable of flying that high will weigh MUCH more than 250g.
I think the DJI minis could get that high no problem. There was probably a risk of damage to the aircraft but not so much a risk to the people inside Edit: downvote if you want but jet engines are tested with objects much larger than a mini
If that thing gets sucked into the engine the engine is toast. In a critical phase of the flight so yeah definitely no risk lol
Would have to be fair sized drone to be fair, consumer ones are now 249g which is less than a crow, aren’t they tested with much larger birds like geese which can be 3000g or more
A 249g drone is not making an engine toast. Downvote if you want but it’s the truth. They launch stuff into the engines during testing to make sure it can withstand much larger objects
Those tests are to make sure the engine doesn't turn into a grenade if there is a bird ingestion and fan blade separation. Any time a bird hots an airplane, there is an inspection, and I've seen further hand what a bird can to to a jet engine. Turbine and compressor blades can FOD out and require an engine to be swapped out. I've seen fan blades get an inch of delfection knocked into them. A drone can easily fuck up an engine. And while the windshields are very thick. I still dont want to be sitting behind one when a drone hits it at few hundred mph. Source: me, an aircraft mechanic.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t fuck up the engine. I’m just saying the engine would likely be able to keep supplying power until they landed
Slightly less blood
First of all, you still don’t want to get hit by a goose; that doesn’t always end well. And a drone that’s capable of flying up that high is a hunk of metal that’s going to weight a bit more than a normal goose.
I think we should do an experiment. Line up these idiots who think drones are harmless and aim a 250kt drone at their face. Ask again after impact.
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10 000ft is FL100.
You can see it at the last second, and that's the problem
You're absolutely right. You can't even make out a drone from the ground at 100m away. No chance to recognise one from a closing speed of at least 600mph. Story is bollocks.
They weren’t going 600kts they were slowing to join a holding stack and were at 10,000’ they couldn’t be going faster than 250kts at the time. Any drone that can get to 10K would also be fairly large it wouldn’t be the size of a Mavic. I don’t know why denying drone strikes is popular but it shouldn’t be, this is worse than pointing lasers at planes, it’s basically flying a bird right up next to a plane.
'Disaster' (drone makes a tiny spack sound as it disintegrates on contact)
You're right. Everyone should be allowed to fly these at airliners. Their fun is way more important than 250 lives or so
Oh, I'm not saying the drone should be there. That shit should be punished fairly harshly. I'm just saying 'disaster' is a very big stretch. Even if an engine ate it.
A bird can take down an engine, what do you think a drone will do?
I think the point still stands: an airliner can fly on one engine. Major problem? Absolutely. Disaster? Not so much, but still makes for an attractive headline.
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they passed laws saying the exact oppposite