
Drones Flying Near Newark Liberty Airport Temporarily Halt Flights - jbegley
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/nyregion/drones-newark-airport-ground-stop.html
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everdev
FYI, here's a video of a drone striking an airplane wing in a test
environment:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=QH0V7kp-xg0](https://youtube.com/watch?v=QH0V7kp-
xg0)

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
Can any air people comment on whether that collision would have been fatal to
the aircraft? I'm sure it possibly could be, but at what likelihood?
Personally I'd be more concerned about a propeller or wind screen strike, but
these guys know more about it than me.

There's just no good reason to be flying near an airport. On the other hand,
if you're five miles away from the nearest airport, the odds of a collision
(even if you break the rules r.e. flying in LOS or under a certain ceiling)
are just astronomically low. The sky is an enormous place and the odds of two
things occupying the same space in it without trying to are once in a century
if that. At the current level of density, at any rate.

Another thing that strikes me, and probably won't make me popular with pilots
on this board: dozens or hundreds of GA pilots get themselves killed every
year. Most of the time, this is due to pilot error. Drones represent some
amount of increased risk to GA pilots. But, at the current level of drone
market penetration, it seems empirically tiny compared to the risks GA pilots
already faced voluntarily. I don't know what to do with this observation,
except perhaps downgrade my personal concerns about the risks of drone <->
plane incidents.

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everdev
> The sky is an enormous place and the odds of two things occupying the same
> space in it without trying to are once in a century if that.

Not near an airport. Planes takeoff and land in extremely predictable
patterns. And at about the same height as drones typically operate.

I think you're thinking of a meteorite hitting an airplane, which yes is
probably extremely rare.

~~~
jarfil
I wouldn't call "five miles away from the nearest airport" to be near an
airport.

~~~
JshWright
Five miles off the end of the runway a landing plane is only ~1,500ft above
the ground. That's higher than the legal ceiling for drones, but it's
certainly well within their technical capabilities.

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twblalock
It seems like this is a cheap and easy way to cause a whole lot of disruption.
We're going to see more and more of this.

At some point Congress or some state legislature is going to pass restrictive
legislation regulating drone ownership and use much more strictly than is the
case today. It might require manufacturers to include backdoors to enable law
enforcement to take control of a drone. It will be portrayed as a safety
measure, perhaps even as an antiterrorism measure.

This is why we can't have nice things.

~~~
KingMachiavelli
You could almost replace "drone" with "gun" in your comment and save for the
"take control of a gun" line, it would still make sense. You could get an air
port to shutdown by shooting a gun yet the consequnces of doing so are severe
enough that it is in ineffective means of causing disrucption. The key
difference is that a drone can go places a person with a gun cannot so I
suspect that methods of finding drone operators will improve and become more
widely deployed.

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azinman2
Not to mention that you can reconstruct where a bullet was shot from, but a
drone could be operated from anywhere. Bullets are also loud when they go off,
so localization becomes easier.

~~~
toufiqbarhamov
We’ve been living with guns for centuries, we’ve been living with drones for
decades, and only the last decade saw them in the hands of many people. I
suspect the current “Wild West” of drones is a temporary phenomenon.

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bronco21016
I’m not sure how we could ever gather statistics but I’m really curious if
reported drone sightings could just be other objects mistaken for drones. To
really see an object clearly such as a consumer drone like a DJI Phantom
you’ll have to be very close and at that range it’s going to zip by extremely
fast.

~~~
bb88
The sun sets in NJ at 5:03 pm tonight, and backtracking through the article,
the disruption started around 5:30, probably reported just a few minutes
before ATC redirected traffic.

Likely they saw the lights of the drone flying around. It's a clear sky
tonight, so they would have been able to see the drone for several miles.

~~~
bronco21016
It’s hard enough to pick out the lights of an aircraft 5 nm away in the sea of
lights surrounding the NYC metro area. I highly doubt they were able to
identify a drone by its lights from up to ‘several miles’ away.

Let’s assume they did though. All of the drones I’ve owned have red and green
lights. Aircraft typically have red and green lights in addition to white
lights facing aft and typically a red beacon and strobes. What’s so different
about these lights that they’re able to distinguish them as those of a drone?
Isn’t it possible it was a helicopter? A GA aircraft flying VFR? What about
the red, green, white lights from a boat?

In my experience there have been many times I’ve seen something strange in the
sky where my mind wants me to think it was something but in the end I really
cannot be sure what it was. There’s been multiple times something has gone
whizzing by at cruise or in the terminal area and for all I know it could have
been a bird, a drone, a balloon, a kite, etc. Given the report was at night
and it’s at an altitude that a drone shouldn’t normally be operating it seems
questionable to me whether what they saw was actually a drone. With the recent
media attention drones have had around airports I suspect there will be an
uptick in reported sightings that likely are not drones at all.

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WillPostForFood
I understand approaching this with an abundance of caution, but the drones
were reportedly 17 miles away near a different airport, so this looks like
quite an overreaction.

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badwolf
I think the key phrase from the article was

"The drone was spotted about 3,500 feet over Teterboro Airport"

Drone flying at 3500 feet definitely seems like it could pose a risk to
flights out of Liberty 17 miles away

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FPGAhacker
Instead of trying to take out the drone, someone should take inspiration from
that story [1] about lidar ruining some cameras (but not eyeballs) and start
targeting the drone cameras.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886283](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886283)

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the8472
The drone did not halt the flights. Administrators halted the flight out of
fears over a drone.

What I wonder is whether those fears are proportionate. Are drones any worse
than a flock of birds?

Edit: video from a sibling comment suggests the answer is "yes" for the case
of a collision with a wings's leading edge.

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orev
> Are drones any worse than a flock of birds?

Yes. A flock of birds has incentive and the means to get out of the way.
Drones don't react to their surroundings.

Drones are also hard and do more damage than a bird strike.

~~~
danepowell
I'm skeptical that birds have a means to dodge something moving at hundreds of
miles per hour. If anything, a human controlling a drone from a distance has
more perspective / ability to dodge a plane than a bird does.

Now whether we should actually trust said human to do so... that's a different
question, as is the potential damage vs birdstrike.

~~~
AWildC182
I've nearly hit birds flying (and actually hit one but at night). They're
actually not bad at avoiding aircraft going 100+ mph. They'll tuck their wings
and dive if they feel they're in danger so typical training is to pull to
avoid a strike (and lower the chance it impacts the windscreen). Obviously not
all birds are great at this, particularly the larger ones but they do seek to
avoid aircraft generally.

