Look at CPT Sully and the Potomac landing...just a few birds right. Brought down a commercial jet.... Don't for one second think our little sUAS can't bring one down.
Whether a bird or a UAS can bring down an airliner is an interesting issue. But is the real issue not what is the actual risk of it occurring and the cost/benefit of various forms of risk mitigation?
- Do Consumer Drones Endanger the National Airspace? Evidence from Wildlife Strike Data (March 2016)
In December 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced a new interim final rule that for the first time imposed regulation on the operation of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) as model aircraft. In the name of a safe national airspace, the new regulations require operators of...
www.mercatus.org
"We estimate that 6.12x10−6 collisions will cause damage to an aircraft for every 100,000 hours of 2kg UAS flight time. Or to put it another way, one damaging incident will occur no more than every 1.87 million years of 2kg UAS flight time. We further estimate that 6.12x10−8 collisions that cause an injury or fatality to passengers on board an aircraft will occur every 100,000 hours of 2kg UAS flight time, or once every 187 million years of operation."
Excerpts:
The risk to the airspace caused by small drones (for example, weighing up to 2kg, or 4.41 pounds) flying in solitary formation is
minimal. Bird strikes provide an excellent parallel phenomenon for estimating the magnitude of damage a small UAS could cause by colliding with a manned aircraft. But as previously mentioned, without an estimate of UAS strike frequency, the magnitude of damage is insufficient to properly gauge risk. The size of the effect has to be multiplied by the chance of it actually occurring. In 2014, there were 13,414 reported collisions with birds and flying mammals, counting incidents in which flocks of birds hit an aircraft as a single collision. As there are on the order of 10 billion birds in US airspace, this means that plausibly 1 bird in 1 million collides with an aircraft every year. Even if we take UAS operators to be about as deliberate and skilled at avoiding aircraft as birds, we cannot similarly estimate that 1 UAS in 1 million will collide with aircraft every year. Not only are UAS operators able to reason about human- piloted aircraft and airfield landing patterns better than birds are, UAS have very short battery lives and may sit idle for months at a time.
In contrast, an observational study of bird behavior near wind turbines found the average bird spends roughly equal amounts of time flying as perching. Flight time is much more variable, however, with some migratory birds potentially flying as long as six months nonstop. FAA commonly refers to “acceptable risk levels” for general aviation in terms of fatalities per 100,000 flight hours. Using the aforementioned finding that birds spend roughly half their lives in flight, the fact that there were 13,414 bird strikes in 2014, and an estimate of 10 billion birds in US airspace, we estimate that there are 3.06x10−5 bird strikes (both damaging and not) per 100,000 bird flight hours.10 This risk level is comparable to the 5x10−5 fatality risk cited by the drone registration task force as acceptable for general aviation, without even adjusting for the probability of injury or fatality Our analysis has been based on actual bird strikes, not near misses or simple sightings. We find in general that small UAS under 2kg pose a negligible risk to the safety of the national airspace.
We estimate that 6.12x10−6 collisions will cause damage to an aircraft for every 100,000 hours of 2kg UAS flight time. Or to put it another way, one damaging incident will occur no more than every 1.87 million years of 2kg UAS flight time.
We further estimate that 6.12x10−8 collisions that cause an injury or fatality to passengers on board an aircraft will occur every 100,000 hours of 2kg UAS flight time, or once every 187 million years of operation. This appears to be an acceptable risk to the airspace. Since the probability of any collision with any UAS is around 3.06x10−5 per 100,000 flight hours.
