Drone crashes into house

[sar104]

Small UAVs do not pose any significant risk to people or the National Airspace System. "Dangerous" and "invasion of privacy" concerns are ridiculous, driven by paranoia borne of ignorance. We don't need fact-challenged posts like this to add to the public hysteria. There is absolutely no factual evidence to support the fear of personal drones. There have been more than a million of hours of flight time using these small aircraft worldwide, yet there is not one verifiable report of a drone crash in the US that resulted in a serious injury as defined by the FAA in CFR 49-830.2 to someone not connected to the flight. **Not one**. (A Band-Aid is not a serious injury). It is a safety record that all other segments of aviation would be jealous to have. (In the General Aviation fleet 100,000 hours would include at least one fatality.) Where's the blood and mayhem to justify the perception that small personal drones are a threat to public safety?

Bald, stupid assertions, such as yours, that are easily disproven by documented events, do not help the cause of responsible UAV pilots. Quite aside from the issue of whether UAVs can cause peronsal injury (they have), the argument that they are not a significant risk to the NAS, based on the lack of collisions with manned aircraft to date, is untenable. Consumer UAVs are still relatively new, and the adoption rate is increasing non-linearly. If you seriously believe that extrapolating from the first few years of limited data is reasonable then you are completely clueless. All it will take is one collision with a manned aircraft, possibly independent of outcome, and the FAA (and other equivalent agencies elsewhere) will have all it needs to get authorization to regulate hobby flights so tightly that you can probably write off an entire industry. I suggest you stop blathering and start paying attention.

 

[sar104]

Good to see you're still alive and kicking Steve. Seems there are a few in the UK who believe in FAKE NEWS.

Simply applying the label "fake news" does not make an argument, however trendy it has become. "Alive and kicking" may be true. "Making sense" is clearly beyond him.

 

[andy_k]

Statistics mean very little and when they are warped or taken out of context to prove a dubious point they mean even less to anyone with half a brain. Use of bold and upper case text doesn't make garbage any more believable either.

If nobody has died as a result of jumping from a certain building simply because nobody has actually jumped from that building do the facts say it's safe to jump from there?

 

[jason]

What you forgot to add is that every one of those stores and ATM's are operated by companies with strict data collection and control policies - they aren't the ones posting their videos on YouTube

How many drone operators (hobby or commercial) can say the same thing?

People like to think they have some privacy, it reassures them

Seems you're new into the RC hobby while some of us have been it for many years whether in fixed wing or multirotor and have seen what the News Media to demonize UAVs (drones) in the press and evening news reports. Most of which is FAKE NEWS.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with posting aerial footage on YouTube or Vimeo. Sure there are some who feed their egos by doing things they shouldn't whether it be in this hobby or others and eventually they will pay for their indiscretions.

 

[andy_k]

Seems you're new into the RC hobby while some of us have been it for many years whether in fixed wing or multirotor and have seen what the News Media to demonize UAVs (drones) in the press and evening news reports. Most of which is FAKE NEWS.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with posting aerial footage on YouTube or Vimeo. Sure there are some who feed their egos by doing things they shouldn't whether it be in this hobby or others and eventually they will pay for their indiscretions.

Yeah, I'm disagreeing with you so I must be new. I started flying R/C in the late eighties/early nineties, before that I flew control line planes with my father from about 1965. I've flown fixed wing and helis since then for a hobby, at competition level and for commercial operations. I'm a qualified BMFA instructor for fixed wing and helis and have a current PFCO for camera equipped helis, multi rotors and (a now expired one) for fixed wing SUAV's - so, yeah, I'm clearly 'new into the RC hobby' or maybe (just maybe) you have got your 'facts' completely wrong and you have made a ridiculous assumption which you then chose to base the rest of your argument on

Dismissing every report as 'Fake news' makes you look stupid because you can't disagree with every Airprox report (UK), you can't try and debunk every sighting because many of them are clearly genuine.

Just in this last week there was a story bouncing around the drone forums of a drone flying over the Goodwin fire in the USA - the video posted was sketchy and the 'fake news' brigade went into overdrive, all trying to rubbish the story - guess what?

Man arrested for drone intrusion over Goodwin Fire

It turns out that the professional pilots that were forced to land because they saw a drone weren't just making it up to create some anti-drone hysteria they were telling the truth - all those that were shouting 'fake news' were 100% wrong.

Of course, not every report is accurate and every case is different but take a look at YouTube - if you were thinking of enforcing the laws here in the UK just how long would it take you to find 100 illegal flights?

As experienced flyers we need to be educating the current generation of 'these rules don't apply to me' flyers if we care enough about the hobby for it to still exist in a few years time.

 

[JeanMcK]

Just because there is no "blood and mayhem" doesn't not mean that there have not been serious cases of injury and crashes in the USA, as well as privacy invasion and interference with emergencies. The cases I cited about a horse having to be put down and the toddler whose eye was put out are real cases. Some of the other cases reported by the Center for the Study of the Drone in the USA include

• Crashes: A drone owner in Seattle went to jail for 30 days after his aircraft collided with a building, fell and injured two people during the 2015 Pride Parade. A drone crashed into the Empire State Building in 2016, and the operator was charged with disorderly conduct. In January 2017, a man was charged with criminal trespassing after smashing his drone through a window on the 27th floor of an apartment building in Manhattan.
• Airplanes: A man was arrested last year for flying a drone too close to a police helicopter in North Carolina. In January of this year, a drone operator was arrested for obstructing a first-responder helicopter that was in the act of rescuing a person who fell off a cliff in California.

Yes, such things are very rare, but they do happen, so don't claim that there is no significant risk. That is why, as I said before, people should have insurance and should fly within the regulations.

 

[SteveMann]

Just because there is no "blood and mayhem" doesn't not mean that there have not been serious cases of injury and crashes in the USA, as well as privacy invasion and interference with emergencies. The cases I cited about a horse having to be put down and the toddler whose eye was put out are real cases. Some of the other cases reported by the Center for the Study of the Drone in the USA include

• Crashes: A drone owner in Seattle went to jail for 30 days after his aircraft collided with a building, fell and injured two people during the 2015 Pride Parade. A drone crashed into the Empire State Building in 2016, and the operator was charged with disorderly conduct. In January 2017, a man was charged with criminal trespassing after smashing his drone through a window on the 27th floor of an apartment building in Manhattan.
• Airplanes: A man was arrested last year for flying a drone too close to a police helicopter in North Carolina. In January of this year, a drone operator was arrested for obstructing a first-responder helicopter that was in the act of rescuing a person who fell off a cliff in California.

Yes, such things are very rare, but they do happen, so don't claim that there is no significant risk. That is why, as I said before, people should have insurance and should fly within the regulations.

I stand by my statement:
...there is not one verifiable report of a drone crash in the US that resulted in a serious injury as defined by the FAA in CFR 49-830.2 to someone not connected to the flight. **Not one**. (A Band-Aid is not a serious injury).

 

[andy_k]

I stand by my statement:
...there is not one verifiable report of a drone crash in the US that resulted in a serious injury as defined by the FAA in CFR 49-830.2 to someone not connected to the flight. **Not one**. (A Band-Aid is not a serious injury).

and just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean it won't - safety should be about preventing accidents not waiting for them to happen

As an example - Nobody has died or suffered injuries from jumping off the top of the block of flats near where I live. Not one person, not even a scratch, no injuries at all

If we apply your argument to that we could state that the roof of that block of flats has a 100% safety record so it's quite safe to make the jump as statistics can't lie

You can spend as much time as you like standing by your statement - right up until something does happen like it has done in other countries (who you were happy to include in your warped statistics the first time around). Statistics can prove anything you want them to prove if you manipulate them enough.

 

[Peter Hartmann]

Correct me if I am wrong...isn't this "stand by my statement" guy the one who is opposed to requiring prop. guards on drones ?

 

[cd240v]

Our Smart T.V. knows more about us than our mom does, and the manufacturer admits this. They also admit having a camera to watch us for the government. There was an article about it! I haven't read it be fake news yet. In other words if one believes in other news about the drones why in the h$&& you wouldn't believe this and be worried about what happens in ur bedroom or living room. If we only know the truth about what our government is doing with our privacy then it would make drones look like the sheriff of our country. Just saying, do ur own research!!!

 

[anotherlab]

I stand by my statement:
...there is not one verifiable report of a drone crash in the US that resulted in a serious injury as defined by the FAA in CFR 49-830.2 to someone not connected to the flight. **Not one**. (A Band-Aid is not a serious injury).

The woman in Seattle was knocked unconscious when she was struck by a drone while attending the Pride Parade back in 2015. The news reports do not indicate whether or how long she was hospitalized (in reference to CFR 49-830.2), but being knocked unconscious is not a trivial injury.

Does it have to occur in the US to count? Last fall, a toddler in the UK lost an eye when he was struck by an out of control drone.

And you have the drone that crashed into a crowd in Virginia. The injuries were minor, but if you were on the people that had to be treated, knowing that the injury didn't meet the CFR 49-830.2 standard probably didn't make them feel any better.

It doesn't matter if the injuries don't qualify as a "serious injury" as defined by CFR 49-830.2. if people continue to get injured because of people losing control of their drones, then we'll see more and more restrictions placed on us.

 

[andy_k]

Am I reading CFR 49-830.2 wrong? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with model aircraft so why use it to bolster an argument?

 

[anotherlab]

Am I reading CFR 49-830.2 wrong? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with model aircraft so why use it to bolster an argument?

It's a straw man argument. If someone gets injured due to a drone striking them, it's bad publicity and more stringent local laws. The person with a lacerated arm will not care a bit about CFR 49-830.2 (and neither will their lawyer).

If people would just use common sense (don't fly over a crowd at a parade, don't fly near people's face, etc) life would be easier all around.

 

[sar104]

Am I reading CFR 49-830.2 wrong? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with model aircraft so why use it to bolster an argument?

It applies under Part 107 simply as the threshold requirement for reporting accidents to the FAA. Other than that it has no relevance to the issue of liability for personal injury or property damage. It was just another weak attempt by that poster at defending his untenable position that UAVs have not, and will not, cause injury or damage.

 

[andy_k]

It's a straw man argument. If someone gets injured due to a drone striking them, it's bad publicity and more stringent local laws. The person with a lacerated arm will not care a bit about CFR 49-830.2 (and neither will their lawyer).

If people would just use common sense (don't fly over a crowd at a parade, don't fly near people's face, etc) life would be easier all around.

you are right, I don't get the fascination a lot of US owners have of flying over their own neighbourhood - they live there, they know what it looks like Here in the UK we have rules that specify a minimum distance of 50m from people and property (30m on take off) and 150m of congested areas or large crowds - we seem to get a lot less confrontation over here as well

 

[SteveMann]

I have never said that a serious injury would not happen, only that, in the U.S., it has not. Yes, I am familiar with the tragic loss of an eye by a toddler in England, which is why my post says "..there is not one verifiable report of a drone crash in the US that resulted in a serious injury as defined by the FAA in CFR 49-830.2 to someone not connected to the flight."

I have never said that property damage doesn't happen, but I haven't found many reports of any small UAS accident that caused damage that meets the Part 107 threshold of $500 excluding the sUAS.

Our drones are aircraft regardless if yours is a hobby flight, Part107 or a certified pilot with a Section 333 exemption. The FAA uses 830.2 to define "serious injury" regardless of the aircraft involved. If you count every band-aid and every cold-compress as a "serious" accident, then you are simply feeding the fear mongers to the detriment of all sUAS pilots. If you ever get the opportunity to talk to the press, it helps to have the correct information.

And, Sar104, Thanks for reminding me why I never post in these forums any more.

 

[sar104]

And, Sar104, Thanks for reminding me why I never post in these forums any more.

That's an excellent plan. Unfortunately, obviously, you still do.

 

[Matts175]

A drone hit a house here too. LOL. It was my house and I was flying the drone.... but still.

 

[Les Davidson]

All these comments make my methods of flying seem more logical than ever. I don't fly in my neighbourhood, I go to beauty spots and fly at dawn or dusk when no one is around. I Particularly like night flights using litchi. People don't like Drones for some reason and I keep away from them when I fly.

 

[Bob62]

People don't like anything that they feel is intruding on their privacy