
Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom - vermontdevil
http://www.bbc.com/sport/winter-sports/35164700
======
shocks
I used to fly remote control aeroplanes as a hobby. There's a really strong
culture of having a licence and insurance before you're allowed to fly solo.
You have to pass a test before you can get insurance, and there are more tests
if you want to fly around spectators (stunt shows, etc).

This seems to be completely missing in the drone community. I quizzed some
drone enthusiasts about it and they responded with "meh", touting that they
have home insurance and it doesn't matter.

~~~
itgoon
There isn't really a drone community. With RC, almost everybody involved was
an enthusiast who would meet with other enthusiasts.

Anybody interested, even for a few minutes, can get a drone. This is the RC
world's "Eternal September".

~~~
at-fates-hands
>> This is the RC world's "Eternal September"

I would liken it to the Wild West, where anybody with money can buy a fairly
large quadcopter and go fly it without many consequences. I'm glad there is a
push to get these registered.

I think one of the reasons there isn't a greater push for safety (licensing
and insurance) is you're not seeing the stories that would compel the general
public to react and have a large outcry over drones yet. Yes, you've seen some
privacy issues surrounding them, but stuff like kids getting severely injured
or this causing a ten car pile up on the highway hasn't happened yet - or at
least not that I'm aware of.

Thus, with no major public outcry, the politicians have no desire to push for
laws that regulate the industry and the people using them. I'm sure in time,
we'll start see more stringent regulation of drones, but for now, there is
little if any.

full disclosure: I own several drones and do aerial videography as part of my
job.

~~~
yohui
> _stuff like kids getting severely injured_

A baby lost an eye: [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-
worcester-349367...](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hereford-
worcester-34936739)

------
maaaats
It's not just any skiier it's the guy winning the world cup total the last
years! Wish my favorite sport was featured on HN in some better light, heh.

From my experience in flying drones in wintery mountains, it could be a
battery failure. Cold batteries suddenly drops in voltage, too fast for the
failsafe mechanisms to trigger. Can explain why it drops like a brick and not
slowly descends.

~~~
pfortuny
That is why true "failsafe" mechanisms tend to be mechanical more than
electrical: less prone to failure.

~~~
xgbi
How do you provide this in a quadcopter? The rotors are too small to allow
autogiration...

~~~
pfortuny
you might use something different, like a parachute.

~~~
Ao7bei3s
No, that's been tried and it doesn't work well for multicopters.

* They're only effective from quite some altitude, much higher than you typically fly multicopters

* They'll still just soften the landing somewhat anyway

* Multicopters are much more fragile than, say, EPP planes,

* You have to make sure they don't get caught up in the props

* Also you need to find a reliable way to trigger them -- for model aircraft in general and multicopters in particular, humans are way too slow and sudden high accelerations in arbitrary directions are common for multicopters.

------
nns
Am sure when the first cars hit the road, similar news made it to the
newspaper front pages then.

~~~
mkagenius
Funny story, heard Marc Andreessen once saying:

During the early days, whenever a horse cart came in opposite direction to a
car, the car owner was supposed to disassemble the car and hide behind a bush
before the horse came near.

We have come a long way :)

~~~
kylegordon
In some ways, be grateful that it never became law. Just some wishful
legislative thinking.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws)

------
pj_mukh
Seems like a malfunction on a homemade rig. Possibly throttle cutout when
descending?

Why the pilot would insist on using this on what seems like a professional job
is beyond me. The industry is coalescing around a couple of field tested
professional rigs (DJI products for instance). I hate all these FAA
regulations around stuff people do in their backyards but at a professional
event like this (with this many people around), it seems like a no-brainer
that air worthiness should be tightly regulated.

Source: been building drones for 5 years.

EDIT: This is Europe. So EASA not FAA

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
No idea about italy but austria has strict regulations for drones. So this is
already happening anyways.

------
melling
This was the breakout year for dangerous drones. Wait until there are 10x more
drones in the skies. I was tracking drone incidents for a few months. It's too
hard to keep up:

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/dangerous-drones-
dai...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/dangerous-drones-daily/)

------
dspillett
I think the title should be updated a bit here. When I read "drone nearly
hits" I imagined it flying by and getting to close on the way passed. The
video shows it crashing to the ground with some force. It isn't clear whether
this is under its own power (so an issue in directional control by either a
pilot error or equipment fault) or due to loss of power (so it hit the ground
due to gravity). Either way it could have done the skier quite some damage if
it had been just that little bit closer.

~~~
lucb1e
> Either way it could have done the skier quite some damage

Not either way.

If it was the pilot's mistake then yes, but if power was lost then the blades
would not have had much force anymore. They can cause very serious cuts when
propelled, but half a second after losing power they hardly have any momentum
left. Tripping the skier over would likely have been the worst of it, if a
loss of power was the case.

Either way, safeguards may be necessary when flying so close to fragile
objects...

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
He was taking part in a slalom race. These guys hit ridiculous speeds.
"Tripping the skier over" could have had absolutely disastrous consequences.

~~~
alkonaut
Slalom is fast-ish but not ridiculous like downhill. Falling in slalom is
common and even for crazy falls it rarely leads to major injuries. Compare
that to downhill where falling often causes serious injuries. If this had been
a downhill race it would have been a near-letal accident.

Still, hitting the "solid" bit of the drone (camera, battery), which is
probably over 1kg for this type of pro footage, the skier would definitely
have been injured.

------
centizen
I imagine this is going to have implications reaching beyond just professional
skiing. I won't be surprised if other governing bodies follow suit and ban
"drones" as well.

I'm also really interested to know more about how this could happen. High end,
professionally operated drones don't generally just fall out of the sky.

------
e40
I've seen drones used in US sporting events, where they fly directly over the
crowd. It is only a matter of time before one of them crashes into a bunch of
people.

------
UK-AL
Bad risk taking drone pilots are incredibly irritating, because they will ruin
it for the decent pilots.

~~~
vdaniuk
This is very relevant to your comment. "In social psychology, the fundamental
attribution error, also known as the correspondence bias or attribution
effect, is the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal
characteristics (personality) to explain someone else's behavior in a given
situation rather than considering the situation's external factors."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error)

~~~
TeMPOraL
It's not just that. It happens always when a particular thing becomes of
interest to the general population. Suddenly, domain-geeks are being swamped
by normals who have little interest or experience in the domain itself, and
they make stupid mistakes that sometimes end up being corrected with law.

Happened to programming too.

~~~
LesZedCB
I've only been a professional programmer for 2 years now. For my own
edification, what events or laws or shifts are you referring to?

------
tcfunk
Maybe it's a translation thing, but I love how calmly the skier talks about
the incident afterward. It would have been very easy to take the "F __that
drone pilot! " road, but instead he just says "Please be more careful next
time."

~~~
rurban
He is the best austrian skier, and a professional. He behaves professional.

------
donatj
Has anyone actually been killed by a non military drone yet?

~~~
danso
I haven't read the FAA regulations in extreme detail, but from what I've
surmised, RC copters would count as needing to be registered. So if that makes
it a drone -- and I don't see why not, as it is an unmanned aircraft and
whether it had a camera or not doesn't seem to matter to the FAA -- then yes,
people have been killed by them. I remember in Brooklyn a couple years back a
teenager was killed quite gruesomely in a public park by his own RC copter:
[http://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-
contr...](http://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-controlled-
toy-helicopter/)

~~~
asynchronous13
Yep, the FAA does not distinguish between an RC aircraft and a drone.

There's also been accidents with larger UAVs:
[http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/schiebel-s-100-crash-k...](http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/schiebel-s-100-crash-
kills-engineer-in-south-korea/)

~~~
NickNameNick
>the FAA does not distinguish between an RC aircraft and a drone.

Which is kinda funny, because congress have expressly forbidden the FAA from
rulemaking about rc aircraft. the FAA have gone and tried anyway.

------
protomyth
Wired cameras have also had problems such as
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2013/05/26/coca-...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2013/05/26/coca-
cola-600-cable-cord-caution-nascar-sprint-cup/2362613/)

It would be interesting to start comparing accidents per hour for wired and
drones.

~~~
ChuckMcM
... and in football games :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ji-S2Kj8k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ji-S2Kj8k)
or one of my favorites when a camera fell off a skydiver
[http://wgntv.com/2015/04/08/watch-what-happens-when-gopro-
fa...](http://wgntv.com/2015/04/08/watch-what-happens-when-gopro-
falls-10000-feet-from-the-sky/)

but it's more trendy if its a drone.

------
drelihan
Car nearly hits cyclist .... Wait no, the car actually hits cyclist dozens of
times per day...

~~~
Piskvorrr
The rule of thumb on newspaper statistics: common risks are boring, therefore
not news. (Note that "car hits car" is too boring even for you to mention ;))

------
joekrill
Didn't this also happen at an NFL game with those camera's that zip around on
cords above the players? I don't recall everyone yelling to ban those when
that happened.

------
jetskindo
Note to self: add a small mechanical trigger for a parachute for cases of
emergency. This will trigger if the drone falls at a certain speed.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You could add an electromechanical failsafe that would trigger in the event of
loss of power - i.e. the safety device wants to deploy itself, but is actively
prevented from doing so by the electronics.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Won't help. An unsteered parachute _slows down_ the fall so that it's sort-of
survivable instead of terminal-velocity; there wouldn't have been any
significant effect in this specific case.

------
GizaDog
Really sad to see media trying to make UAV's look bad. Instead of
investigating why it happened they just want to ban them.

Governments can use real drones to kill people and still allowed to continue
the death and destruction.

People need to get some perceptive here. I've been flying over 11 years and
not one issue ever!

~~~
dbrannan
It was most likely a licenced and insured pilot - looked like battery failure
to me, but usually large unit (this was an X8) would have had dual batteries
for redundancy. Being an X8 it would have dual motors and props, so if one
failed it could still fly.

The media shouldn't blow this out of proportion - if quads are banned they
will regret loosing such awesome aerial footage.

~~~
ArcticCelt
The main problem, as stated in the article, is that he was flying right above
the head of the competitors instead of from a distance as he was suppose to
do. But that cameraman/marketing company decided instead to go for the better
angle, ignoring the risk for the competitors.

------
elmar
A mandatory security parachute could avoid this scenario.

To ban drones is the simple way out.

~~~
lucb1e
Of all the things that can go wrong, falling out of the sky is one of the
least of the problems. A bulky parachute is extra weight so people are going
to avoid building it in, and besides that, I doubt it's going to help in most
situations.

E.g.: Who decides to deploy it? The pilot? In that case, signal loss or
interference might get in the way. Or does the multirotor decide for itself
when to deploy? In that case it could decide to do so at the wrong moment,
which can be just as dangerous. You'd need safeguards against this safeguard.

The main danger of these machines are the blades, not it falling out of the
sky without inertia in the props.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Depends on the mass, the momentum a drone carries, and how high it flies.
Replace "drone" with "stone" and think again about the damage potential.

------
frik
It was an official TV-video-quadcopter from an Italian local TV company. The
FIS was initially okay with it. The quadcopter operater has a pilot license
and was suposed to fly only in a specific corridor with no visitors nor
athletes underneath. Though, the quadcopter (intentionally?) left the
corridore several times in the minutes before the crash (for better videos?).

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsport.orf.at%2Fstories%2F2243235%2F2243236%2F)

Just last week a new unproofen airbag system seriously injured an athlete
[edit: still under investigation]. The new airbag system was from the Italian
company Dainese. The athlete suffered a 3 times vertebral fracture which maybe
ends his young career.

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsport.orf.at%2Fstories%2F2243222%2F2243146%2F)

[http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/newsdetail/D-air-Ski-
official](http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/newsdetail/D-air-Ski-official)

[http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/athletes/](http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/athletes/)
(the athlete in question isn't featured on the website anymore)

~~~
kbart
Wow, it was news for me that athletes _wear_ airbags.

~~~
frik
It's very new.

"The airbag is in this debut season by no means standard. Because many drivers
believe he would impede on the track. Others fear aerodynamic deficiencies and
malfunctions. In addition, the Italian manufacturer Dainese many teams not
supplied as outfitters. And so had the sixth race this winter in addition to
Mayer only five further downhill in Val Gardena over the air bag striped, four
Austrians and two Canadians." (from the source above)

~~~
comrh
To clarify these are airbags designed to protect you in a downhill crash
(which are usually very violent for big alpine riders) but avalanche airbags
that help you rise to the top of the stream of snow have been pretty standard
equipment for the past ~5 years.

------
Piskvorrr
...and won that one, big time: nowadays, just _suggest_ that the road is not
exclusively owned by cars, and watch the foaming-at-the-mouth flamewar.

~~~
_yy
In the US, maybe, but for sure not in Europe. We don't even have a word for
"jaywalking" in Germany.

~~~
Piskvorrr
And there's no single word for _Schadenfreude_ in English, but it exists there
as well ;)

IIRC, it's a traffic offense in Germany, too (as well as here in Prague ;)).
While city centers may be pedestrianized again, it's bound to be an uphill
battle for some time.

~~~
ph0rque
I'm more partial to _Fremdenschämen_ myself. Also fits in this situation :)

~~~
Tomte
Great word, but lose the "en": fremdschämen

------
squidbidness
This is why we can't have nice things.

------
yummybear
It must be technically possible to prevent a drone from flying below a certain
altitude. Probably one of the many features that will be added to drones in
the coming years.

~~~
Dwolb
Perhaps this is possible with a software update, but it doesn't fix the
standards to which the drone was mechanically constructed.

Other commercial flying objects are rigorously safety tested for their ability
to remain in the air despite different mechanical failures. Without the same
standards applied to drones, we are likely to continue to see near-misses or
full accidents happen. (Note: I'm not weighing in for or against drone
regulation)

~~~
asynchronous13
> Other commercial flying objects are rigorously safety tested for their
> ability to remain in the air despite different mechanical failures.

The key phrase here is _commercial_. There are strict regulations on
commercial aircraft, but there are no such requirements for home-built or kit
built aircraft. (quick edit, there are regulations/requirements for all
aircraft, but it's a much lower standard for home-builts than for commercial)

Many people think that there aren't many kit aircraft out there, but there's
actually a huge number. Oshkosh is the largest airshow in the U.S. for
experimental aircraft and there were over 10,000 experimental aircraft at the
show last year. There's even more who didn't attend the show! For comparison,
Delta Airlines operates about 800 aircraft.

~~~
bdcravens
> Many people think that there aren't many kit aircraft out there, but there's
> actually a huge number. Oshkosh is the largest airshow in the U.S. for
> experimental aircraft and there were over 10,000 experimental aircraft at
> the show last year.

Most RC'ers I know are very intentional about when and where they fly; they
aren't strapping a GoPro to them and flying them all around the city randomly
and presuming they have the right to do so.

------
barrystaes
In other news: __Moon nearly hits earth. __

------
aaron695
More bullshit almost hits.

Exactly the same as 'scary thing' could..... But never happened.

Why does HN become crap whenever tech is the boogieman.

It's good to know dangers, but this bs upvoting nothing is pointless.

~~~
asynchronous13
Check out the video, this was actually a close call.

------
janaagaard
He's wearing a helmet. What could wrong?

Sorry--too much Reddit.

~~~
TeMPOraL
He could start tumbling down the slope with all the momentum he had at the
moment, break various bones and die. _The guy was not standing still at the
moment of the incident!_

------
kordless
I'm a little outraged that the skier was outraged while being interviewed.
He's in a sport that is very risky, and part of that risk is performing for an
audience which wants to see things better and in more detail. Those drones are
part of the camera network of an event he's performing at, so it's unlikely
anyone did anything wrong, other than maybe they put in the wrong battery
packs. You can't have it both ways.

Note that I'm not saying he can't have some emotional response, but public
outrage is basically saying "this shouldn't ever happen and people should be
afraid of this" which is stupid given shit happens when you are doing highly
competitive and dangerous things as a performer - which includes the venue and
staff filming it in new and interesting ways. The audience demands it, and you
as an athlete and performer are part of it.

The older I get, the more the unnecessary spread of cognitive dissonance
irritates me.

~~~
an_account
He should be outraged! The drone operator was told that he "had to fly outside
of the race track and follow the racer from a 15-metre distance." This clearly
didn't happen.

If the cameraman on the side of the track suddenly took his camera into the
middle of the track, it would obviously be outrageous.

