The Drone News and Discussion Thread

The aircraft, carrying 62 people, was travelling at about 900 feet (274 metres) as it prepared to land at Newquay Airport in Cornwall on Wednesday afternoon when it reported a near miss with the drone which was flying alongside.

"This is an incredibly concerning incident; the close proximity of the drone to the passenger aircraft shows a complete disregard by the operator for public safety," said Inspector Dave Meredith from Devon and Cornwall Police.

Officers searched the nearby area but found neither the drone nor its operator.

The incident was the latest in a series involving drones and commercial aircraft.

In April, police said a British Airways passenger jet was hit by what most likely was a drone as it prepared to land at London's Heathrow Airport, Europe's busiest airport.

The plane landed safely but the increasing use of drones for commercial purposes, photography or leisure has led to fears they pose a serious risk to passenger aircraft.

Britain's Civil Aviation Authority last year issued a warning after seven incidents in less than 12 months where drones had flown near planes at different British airports.

Amazon, for one, expects these sorts of pilotless deliveries to be commonplace in the coming years. The company recently won approval to test its Prime Air service, in which drones would carry packages right to customers’ doorsteps.

But some see more sinister possibilities.

With one million drones predicted to be sold [last] Christmas, the FAA is expecting more headaches, and the agency is not necessarily in the business of enforcing regulations against every private citizen.

Those headaches include well-publicized invasions of privacy, such as an incident in Kentucky when a hobbyist drone operator flew the device over the house of a man whose 16-year-old daughter was sunbathing.

(The father promptly shot down the drone, and was arrested on state charges of wanton endangerment and criminal mischief.)

Existing state laws against criminal trespass can be used for violations of privacy committed with hobbyist drones, Morrison said.

And anyone can use noflyzone.org to create their own personal restricted airspace over their property, preventing hobbyist drone operators from flying into that space—theoretically.

But for every hobbyist drone flying astray, there are a multitude of potential business and research opportunities for unmanned aircrafts, from farmers keeping an eye on their crops to scientists tracking sea lions. The commercial market for drones is expected to grow to $4.8 billion in the next five years, according to Winter Green Research.

In real estate, drones could prove useful in making photography of properties for sale much cheaper, said Karen Gibler, associate professor of real estate in the Georgia State Robinson College of Business.

“There’s even the idea of giving someone an aerial view of a property [with a drone] when an agent is marketing it, rather than hiring an aerial photographer with a helicopter,” she said.

Technological advances, such as improvements in software allowing drones to be quasi-autonomous and in hardware to provide large amounts of power to allow a drone to fly for years, could make “all-seeing eyes” hovering over American cities common.

“The Solar Eagle drone can stay aloft for five continuous years,” Morrison said. “It just gives a limitless surveillance capacity to the government.”

And this could all be perfectly legal.

As of now, there are few legal limits on the surveillance law enforcement can conduct in public spaces. The U.S. Supreme Court, under what’s called the “open fields” doctrine, has held that there is no expectation of privacy in outdoor areas not immediately close to a home, even on private property, Morrison said.

“So long as drones are deployed in a way so as not to detect any information happening inside private residences, several strands of the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence would seem to classify such surveillance as ‘not a search,’” she wrote in the Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development.

In the meantime

As drone use evolves, the FAA wants to give ordinary hobbyists a way to have fun and avoid security and privacy headaches.

The agency is working on a new smartphone app, called B 4 UFLY, to help amateurs navigate the air safely. It includes a status indicator telling an operator if it’s OK to fly in their current location and a planning function for hobbyists to map out future flights.

Want to fly your own drone? The FAA offers this advice:

• Take lessons to learn to fly a drone safely.
• Contact the airport or air traffic control tower when flying within five miles of an airport.
• Don’t fly near manned aircraft.
• Don’t fly beyond your line of sight.
• Don’t fly your aircraft for payment or commercial purposes.

What didn’t change, even as hundreds of thousands of drones joined the skies over the United States, is the number of dangerous close encounters with drones. The Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), a hobbyist organization founded in 1936, today published a report examining the reported close calls between drones and crewed aircraft. Looking at data collected and published by the FAA, the AMA report found that, out of a dataset of 1,270 drone sightings released in February 2017, only 44 of those encounters, or 3.4 percent, were near misses or close calls. Further, this is consistent with data provided in 2016 and 2015, where the number of closes calls hovered between 3.3 and 3.5 percent of the total reports.

“Back in the 70s and 80s, everything pilots saw was a UFO. Now everything they see is a drone,” laughed Richard Hanson, President of the Academy of Model Aeronautics. “Drones are the new UF Os.”

These reports come from pilots, and one possibility is that in the 2010s pilots are using “drone” to refer to any airborne thing they couldn’t quite discern, the way pilots in the past referred to such sightings as UF Os. Besides drones, objects pilots reported to the FAA and in the sightings data include balloons, birds, kites, parasails, and even a “blob.”