Live data from Hacker News

Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

bbc.com

101–110 of 167 posts

Re: Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I very much doubt there's enough of a data recorder to reconstruct the event, even with a commercial-grade drone. Why do you think that? It's very easy to record telemetry data on even hobby level devices. In fact, it's pretty standard if someone uses a ground station. I'd be surprised if a commercial grade drone didn't have that capability.

In an airliner's black box, there's enough redundancy to keep logging (and tell what happened) even if the main power fails, or the radio link fails, or the main processors' software crashes. I've never seen a drone with data recording that sophisticated.

It gets pretty close; 3DRs SOLO streams "black box data" to the transmitter in addition to logging it onboard the drone, so you get data up to the moment of incident even if the transmitter link fails. It also has a fail safe processor in the hardware that the community is adding I/O functionality to for just this purpose.

Re: Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

#102
post #19

Has anyone actually been killed by a non military drone yet?

Yes people have been killed by RC helicopters. A buddy of mine who flew at a club almost died when a Trex 500 hit him in the head. You won't hear about that stuff on the news though because it's not a "drone". Drones are the media fad right now.

Re: Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

#103
post #39
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, it was news for me that athletes wear airbags.

It's very new. "The airbag is in this debut season by no means standard. Because many drivers believe he would impede on the track. Others fear aerodynamic deficiencies and malfunctions. In addition, the Italian manufacturer Dainese many teams not supplied as outfitters. And so had the sixth race this winter in addition to Mayer only five further downhill in Val Gardena over the air bag striped, four Austrians and tw…

This sounds very much like the slow adoption of the HANS Device in NASCAR. The guy who developed said he sold maybe 200 in the first ten years.

That all changed when Dale Earnhardt died of a basilar skull fracture, and then the drivers lined up to get them. It's now standard equipment on all NASCAR vehicles.

http://www.nascar.com/en_us/news-media/articles/2012/09/11/u...

Re: Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Times are changing, thankfully; but it's not possible to just revert a century of car-centered city planning. This will still take decades :(

Of course it's possible. We reverted millennia of pedestrian centered city planning in a century; I'm sure we can figure out how to reverse the damage done to cities over a single century.

Tearing down is a lot easier than building up. We leveled massive neighborhoods and rewrote how transportation infrastructure works in the US due to the car. Not to mention everything is much much more expensive now than it used to be and the political will to fix things isn't their. You've also got decades of voters who think in terms of the automobile. People in their 60's, 70's and 80's remember denser more urban cities where cars didn't dominate, but those people moved to the suburbs in their adult-hood and raised kids in the burbs who then raised their kids in the burbs and so on. Car culture is going to be here for a long time and the damage it has done will be slow healing because the people who could speed up the change the most have had an auto-centric world view from childhood.

Re: Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

#106
post #40
post #24

I used to fly remote control aeroplanes as a hobby. There's a really strong culture of having a licence and insurance before you're allowed to fly solo. You have to pass a test before you can get insurance, and there are more tests if you want to fly around spectators (stunt shows, etc). This seems to be completely missing in the drone community. I quizzed some drone enthusiasts about it and they responded with "meh"…

There isn't really a drone community. With RC, almost everybody involved was an enthusiast who would meet with other enthusiasts. Anybody interested, even for a few minutes, can get a drone. This is the RC world's "Eternal September".

>> This is the RC world's "Eternal September"

I would liken it to the Wild West, where anybody with money can buy a fairly large quadcopter and go fly it without many consequences. I'm glad there is a push to get these registered.

I think one of the reasons there isn't a greater push for safety (licensing and insurance) is you're not seeing the stories that would compel the general public to react and have a large outcry over drones yet. Yes, you've seen some privacy issues surrounding them, but stuff like kids getting severely injured or this causing a ten car pile up on the highway hasn't happened yet - or at least not that I'm aware of.

Thus, with no major public outcry, the politicians have no desire to push for laws that regulate the industry and the people using them. I'm sure in time, we'll start see more stringent regulation of drones, but for now, there is little if any.

full disclosure: I own several drones and do aerial videography as part of my job.

Re: Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

#108
post #7

It was an official TV-video-quadcopter from an Italian local TV company. The FIS was initially okay with it. The quadcopter operater has a pilot license and was suposed to fly only in a specific corridor with no visitors nor athletes underneath. Though, the quadcopter (intentionally?) left the corridore several times in the minutes before the crash (for better videos?). https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl…

I'm having trouble understanding why the last part of this comment is relevant...?

Re: Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

#109
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this is possible with a software update, but it doesn't fix the standards to which the drone was mechanically constructed. Other commercial flying objects are rigorously safety tested for their ability to remain in the air despite different mechanical failures. Without the same standards applied to drones, we are likely to continue to see near-misses or full accidents happen. (Note: I'm not weighing in for or…

> Other commercial flying objects are rigorously safety tested for their ability to remain in the air despite different mechanical failures. The key phrase here is commercial . There are strict regulations on commercial aircraft, but there are no such requirements for home-built or kit built aircraft. (quick edit, there are regulations/requirements for all aircraft, but it's a much lower standard for home-builts than…

> Many people think that there aren't many kit aircraft out there, but there's actually a huge number. Oshkosh is the largest airshow in the U.S. for experimental aircraft and there were over 10,000 experimental aircraft at the show last year.

Most RC'ers I know are very intentional about when and where they fly; they aren't strapping a GoPro to them and flying them all around the city randomly and presuming they have the right to do so.

Re: Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

#110
post #108
post #7

It was an official TV-video-quadcopter from an Italian local TV company. The FIS was initially okay with it. The quadcopter operater has a pilot license and was suposed to fly only in a specific corridor with no visitors nor athletes underneath. Though, the quadcopter (intentionally?) left the corridore several times in the minutes before the crash (for better videos?). https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl…

I'm having trouble understanding why the last part of this comment is relevant...?

[deleted]
Post reply on HN