Are drones really dangerous for airplanes?

Imagine that you get on a plane, in an economy class. And from behind, and the child kicks feet sitting. You put on headphones and try to abstract from this world. Immediately after take-off, you hear a dull sound and an explosion. The plane begins to heel. You look out the window at the engine, but you see only fire and black smoke. Awful, is not it?

This is exactly what the US Federal Aviation Administration fears about regulation of drones. Therefore, the agency is trying to introduce requirements, according to which all people must register non-commercial aircraft models, primarily drones. But unmanned aircraft in fact do not pose a great danger to civil aviation. Although there is always a risk that you will be on board an aircraft with a drone in its engine, studies show that there is more chance of encountering a bird than with a drone.

Bird collision with aircraft

In airspace, there are billions of birds. Although every effort is made to keep them away from airports where they represent the greatest threat, in 2014, only 13414 cases of collision with them occurred in America. However, all these cases are divided equally between passenger and other aircraft, as well as by helicopters and small private vessels. Very rarely, these collisions are serious enough to damage the jet engine. In the same year 2014, 417 cases of birds getting into the engine were recorded, and only 112 times were damaged at any time by the aircraft.

How dangerous are the drones?

At the same time, to date, there has not been a single case where a quadrocopter (commercial or otherwise) would have collided with a manned aircraft in the airspace of America. The Federal Aviation Administration raised the alarm over unmanned aerial vehicles in airspace and now it receives more than 100 messages per month about drones flying next to another manned aircraft. However, many of these cases pose no danger to passengers. The researchers analyzed 921 such cases, and concluded that only 158 of them drone flew at a distance of 60 meters from the manned vessel. And only in 28 cases the pilots decided to undertake distracting maneuvers.

Potential damage to airliners

So what is the danger of unmanned aerial vehicles for passenger ships and people on board? It is necessary to consider how often drones encounter manned aircraft, and also that their size is about the same as that of birds. But, unlike them, the operators of drones are able to avoid collision with aircraft.

There are many more birds in the world than drones, and they lose much more time for food than drones for charging from solar panels. Nevertheless, scientists can calculate the frequency of collision of aviation with birds in one hour. Assuming that the speed of birds and drones is the same, it can be concluded that drones will face manned aircraft every 374 thousand years of their use.

Threat to passengers

Not all collisions can damage the aircraft, and even less - people who are inside. Scientists focused on 2-kilogram birds, since this weight was discussed as a possible threshold for an easier class of drones. One of the five aircraft that collide with 2-kilogram birds has minor damage. At the same time, for every 500 aircraft at least one person is injured.

In other words, if one million two-kilogram drones worked in the air 24 hours a day, seven days a week, then one person would be injured every 187 years.

Responsibility of operators of unmanned aircraft

We conclude: unmanned aerial vehicles are safe if their operators have at least the same cognitive abilities as birds. Naturally, some operators can purposely send drones on the way of airliners. But compliance with prohibitions is not such a big deal. To keep airspace safe, it is necessary to introduce a two-pronged strategy for the formation of operators to manage drones in crowded airspace. For example, in the United States, a special website was developed that contains accessible and easily understandable recommendations that allow safe and legal work with unmanned aerial vehicles.

Also, a special application for smartphones was launched, which uses the geolocation function to inform the user about the limitations and requirements for flying drones in the selected area.

The Importance of Additional Work

Unfortunately, this app works ridiculously bad. Users complain about the erroneous limitation of many runways that have been in operation for many years. Other operators complain that they can not contact the control tower, because the application does not provide a phone number.

The Federal Office should correctly prioritize and give operators precise information about where they can fly and where it is prohibited. And for this, users need to provide a quality application. Now the private sector has joined the game. For example, another website was developed, optimized for mobile devices, through which users can determine where they should not fly.

In addition to education, it is necessary to focus on the short-term and long-term period of technological solutions to the problems of increasingly crowded airspace. In the short term, the technology called Geofencing is very promising. It has already been adopted by manufacturers of many unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones equipped with GPS, which allows you to keep them away from illegal places for them, for example airports, crowded stadiums or national parks.

Long-term perspective

In the future, it is necessary to focus on airspace modernization. After all, there is a possibility that even manned aircraft will benefit from the technologies that are currently developing in the unmanned sector. While most drones are now working on remote control, eventually they will be able to autonomously fly and communicate among themselves to avoid a collision.

The same type of "machine-machine" connection and the on-board computer have a decisive potential for improving the safety of the manned aircraft, because the pilot's mistakes will be eliminated.

Improving security

To improve the safety of unmanned and manned aircraft, it is necessary to accelerate plans to incorporate this new management model in the system. Field tests conducted at NASA are an excellent first step, but airspace modernization should be an integral topic in the approach of the Federal Aviation Administration to the integration of UAV.

As we can see, studies conducted by specialists show that drones themselves do not represent any real threat. If the Federal Office wants to make airspace safer and more supportive of innovation, it must use education and technology instead of explicit prohibitions and unenforceable registration requirements.