How many drone related fatalities?

[Felix le Chat]

I have wanted to report literally hundreds over the years ! Their continued habitual abuse of the 500 ft rule in skies near me seems to me to be entirely unsupervised and unchecked - like the FAA and CAA know it's going on but couldn't care less, and are uninterested in the concerns of UAV pilots telling them about this.

Of course the reason these things don't get reported very often is because getting viable evidence from the ground is almost impossible. By the time you have seen and considered that a plane might be lower than its minimums it has nearly always passed by already, and will be all but out of sight of ground-based mobile phones. Especially if we are flying our machines at the time (using an RC2, for example, phone will be off and packed away most of the time), there simply isn't the time to get a device out and record their infractions in a useful way. If we did manage to capture them on film from the drone itself or any ground cams we have set up in advance, they will be <2 px wide in typical resolution photos and no identifying marks (other than the general outline) will be visible, even when maximally zoomed.

When I am at home and happen to see low-flying aircraft I go on Flight-radar 24 and look them up. Half of them aren't even there, being, as they are, army vehicles, police or ambulance helicopters (all of which I realise are not necessarily bound to minimums over residential / recreational areas), and other services not deemed suitable for public scrutiny on the map. Sometimes other data is there but not altitude.

And when I am shown an altitude by that site, it rarely seems more than vaguely correct or accurate. It's like the stats show what they SHOULD be doing, not what they ARE doing ! It would take a serious sustained effort to try and deduce the actual height of aircraft from ground-based photos, and I imagine that is time none of us really have because we are all too busy diligently following our own over-reaching rules and managing our own flights ! It's a proper 'no-win' / 'can't win' situation as far as I can tell...

And yet if an aeroplane pilot says he has seen what he thought might be a drone out of the corner of his eye for a micro-second, that doesn't seem to require ANY actual evidence, and is diligently logged and reported as if it were fact, so that it can feasibly appear in any potential conflict lists they would find it useful to publish later...

Well said.

The Game is definitely rigged in favour of 'proper' aircraft and 'proper' pilots. If there were an even playing field, drones would have an individual ARN (tail number).

Instead: we have to display the OP-alpha string that identifies the owner and not the airframe - which argues the toss that all drone registration is for is to supply a database of who owns drones and where they live.

 

[AnzacJack]

I would think in the US, you have way more staff working in the enforcement area for conventional G.A. Aircraft than you do working on drone enforcement. This is the case in Australia I know.
I think you are suggesting that flight radar and other adsb information apps are deliberately set to hide evidence of low flying aircraft and that you can visually confirm this. I really cant see this happening.
You have wanted to report hundreds but have reported none because you assume the FAA will do nothing.
Maybe try reporting some and see what happens instead of assuming what will happen.
Of course, if your evidence is that adsb info is deliberately misleading and that you can visually tell what height an aircraft is flying at,…….

 

[AeroJ]

I would think in the US, you have way more staff working in the enforcement area for conventional G.A. Aircraft than you do working on drone enforcement. This is the case in Australia I know.

Well I am talking primarily about the UK, so it's the CAA I'm referring to.

Maybe try reporting some and see what happens instead of assuming what will happen.

Oh I would be embarrassed to even try - I don't have any facts to report ! Only (if I am lucky) the flight number, and reported altitude, and the aircraft type. All other data is either not available to me, not visible / recordable from the ground, and I'm as sure as **** they ain't taking my guesses about what actual height might have been !

I think you are suggesting that flight radar and other adsb information apps are deliberately set to hide evidence of low flying aircraft and that you can visually confirm this.

No I am not suggesting anything is being misreported - that is done by machines after all, in this case a barometer on the aircraft. And whist I am expecting that this won't be perfect either I am taking it as being generally correct. I am merely trying to explain the seemingly massive discrepancy between what is reported and what I visually observe.

And of course I am aware of the massive scope for error in my estimation of what height things are at ! And yet rarely, where aircraft are especially low it is possible to be more accurate. Consider the following photo, for example, taken by a fellow Grey Arrows pilot...



So here, I have a very good idea of how high the tower is, and am able to reasonably judge the relative size of the Chinook to the tower to establish how close they are to each other vertically, if that wasn't affected by the relative horizontal positioning, which it is. Horizontally is harder of course - is the chinook behind, over, or in front of the tower ? We are standing about 200 ft from the tower, and even from this close it is hard to tell. The hill itself is 140m above sea level, which is around 500 ft, so that has to be taken off any reported barometric altitude reading before we can get the actual AGL height.

So, if we are lucky enough to have got that photo, and then have time to look up and report the other data then maybe that is enough to flag any discrepancy between what was observed and what was reported, but even in these 'ideal as they reasonably can be' circumstances, it all feels very vague and nebulous, and like they'd be laughing out loud when reading my report ! So that's why I don't report any !