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Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#61

Post by tremon »

untog wrote: post #47
cm3 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News should not report stuff they don't know is true. Otherwise it's just reddit on TV and we wouldn't need the profession called journalism.

That's a nice idea, but would never work in reality. People want to know things. When an explosion happens people are going to watch the TV network with sources that can confirm off the record what happened, even though they don't "know it is true". Unless you're going to pass a law requiring all news organizations to behave this way (and when did government control of news ever go bad?) it's never going to happen.

Let's use another example then: would you be comfortable with a headline like "Dead body found at Apple HQ, no politician directly implicated"?

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#62

Post by phicoh »

tremon wrote: post #60
phicoh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you call hobby drones. My guess is that with the more expensive hobby quadcopters it should be easy to get way to close to landing planes at 2000 feet. Basically at a busy airport you will have one plane every few minutes taking roughly the same path. So flying close to that path, for example to make video recordings of the landing planes will eventually result in a near miss.

Yeah, maybe my interpretation of what still classifies as "hobby" needs brushing up. I was only thinking of cases where flying the drone is the objective, not of cases where the drone is a tool to further another hobby. So I was automatically discarding altitudes where you'd no longer be able to see the drone.

Two things really changed because of the kind of electronics now available and because of the different community that developed quadcopters.

Electronics make it possible to equip models with cameras and real-time video links, making first person view flying possible and also making it possible to review the video footage you are getting. Electronics also provides those models with various automatic flying modes.

That results in a different community. The goal is no longer being able to pilot a remote controlled model.

The goal is now, using FPV to fly very complex patterns. Fly in woods, fly very far.

Or, use the quadcopter as a tool for filming. Because of the stability of a quadcopter, relative lack of vibrations (compared to a helicopter) and ability to stay at a fix point in the sky (which planes cannot do) they are ideally suited for filming from a position up in the air.

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#63

Post by paavokoya »

wastedhours wrote: post #59
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Quads with cameras make people nervous. And yet people are fine with the government using the same if not worse. Based on those I speak with who hold such a double standard, there is a deeply held belief that it will never be used against them, largely because of their SES, race, and religion.

But there is a public perception difference (especially in the UK with our pervasive CCTV culture) between government surveillance and the somewhat inevitable tabloid "voyeur with a drone" thought process. Constant state monitoring and Dirty Derek with a DJI are separate concerns.

How is everyone so sure that "Dirty Derek" doesn't work for the government and do this exact thing with no oversight?

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#64

Post by jessriedel »

dingaling wrote: post #42
jessriedel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the damage from birds is large: "Experts say bird strikes...cause an estimated $600 million a year in damage to planes." http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/birds-plane-crashes-arti... The cost of a single downed passenger plane is ~$1B, while the entire yearly value of the drone market is $50M. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11425782 Even their usage/value of drones were kept fixed, then it could make…

> while the entire yearly value of the drone market is $50M. That's purely a total-airframe valuation estimate, excluding revenue being generated by commercial use of drones. If you want to use that type of valuation then the loss of an A320 ( as reported in the original story ) would be around $98 million. http://www.airbus.com/presscentre/pressreleases/press-releas...

It's the value of everything in the aircraft. For a drone, that's basically the cost of the drone. For the airliner, it's the $10M per human life.

Apotential ban on drones would allow licenses and exceptions (thereby not destroying much commercial value), so the primary impact of the ban would be the amateur market. And for them, the cost of the device gives a good estimate of the value.

Yes, we could expand our calculation outward and try to capture all the externalities created by those dead people, or the drone, or the irrational fear of drones. But this would have quickly diminishing returns.

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#65

Post by Lawtonfogle »

wastedhours wrote: post #59
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Quads with cameras make people nervous. And yet people are fine with the government using the same if not worse. Based on those I speak with who hold such a double standard, there is a deeply held belief that it will never be used against them, largely because of their SES, race, and religion.

But there is a public perception difference (especially in the UK with our pervasive CCTV culture) between government surveillance and the somewhat inevitable tabloid "voyeur with a drone" thought process. Constant state monitoring and Dirty Derek with a DJI are separate concerns.

From what I remember reading about the NSA, there are quite a few Dirty Dereks in the government.

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#66

Post by untog »

tremon wrote: post #61
untog wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice idea, but would never work in reality. People want to know things. When an explosion happens people are going to watch the TV network with sources that can confirm off the record what happened, even though they don't "know it is true". Unless you're going to pass a law requiring all news organizations to behave this way (and when did government control of news ever go bad?) it's never going to happen.

Let's use another example then: would you be comfortable with a headline like "Dead body found at Apple HQ, no politician directly implicated"?

It's not an issue of what I'm comfortable with. What I'm saying is that we can't ever get to a situation we're "comfortable with" without things like press regulation, which is simply not worth the price of admission.

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#67

Post by makomk »

themartorana wrote: post #54
jblok wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The broader population will only remember the drone accusation. A drone maybe hitting a plane is far more interesting and sensationalist than a drone not hitting a plane. There are thousands of instances every day where drones don't hit planes. That's just how the human psyche/news in general works. You can't accuse the BBC of not reporting the updated news. Some shadier outlets might choose not to however.

This is the identical thing that will make adoption of self-driving cars difficult on a broad scale. Thousands of human-caused accidents and deaths, but the first person to die in a self-driving car (even if it's not that car's fault) will be devastating to rollout.

This is probably an understandable assumption, given that the car manufacturer will inevitably try and spin it as the driver's fault no matter what. For example, take the Cruise crash a while ago: car starts swerving in automatic mode, driver takes control but fails to bring it back on course before it crashes into a parked car. Headline in The Verge "Startup’s self-driving test car crashes after driver takes control", uncritically reports Cruise's claim that it was the driver's fault because they 'had "enough time" to correct the path of the vehicle to avoid the accident, but "unfortunately made a mistake."'

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#68

Post by makomk »

dang wrote: post #46
TillE wrote: post #25

You changed the title to something that is simply not true. Please don't do that. "Air accident investigators said they had not ruled out a drone but had no evidence to support the suggestion."

Thanks for pointing this out. The submitted title was "BA plane not actually hit by drone after all". Submitters: please use the original title except when it is misleading or linkbait. This is in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The submitted title seems rather more accurate, given that there's no evidence the drone in question existed and there never was. The BBC's title and reporting suffers from the usual unwillingness to admit they were wrong.

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#69

Post by Zigurd »

spatulan wrote: post #4
cm3 wrote: post #2

So, will the truth be known widely or will the broader population remember only the drone accusation? Cynic in me thinks this was deliberately suggested to make passing some drone laws easier.

That's more conspiracy theorist, than cynic.

It's not a conspiracy theory to think that laws are propagandized by tickling authoritarian tendencies. Planes hit birds because they intersect with flocks of birds, because birds have nearly 100% overlap in altitude with all phases of operation of airliners, over land and over water, and because there are hundreds of billions of birds.

To calculate the odds of hitting a drone, you have to divide the odds of a bird strike by population, altitude overlap and by spatial density when a flock of birds vs a single drone is encountered. This is why betting on a drone strike is, currently, a sucker-bet. Anyone who thinks a report of a drone strike is real is way way too credulous and/or biased.

Re: Drone unlikely to have hit BA plane near Heathrow, government says

#70

Post by Zigurd »

dang wrote: post #46
TillE wrote: post #25

You changed the title to something that is simply not true. Please don't do that. "Air accident investigators said they had not ruled out a drone but had no evidence to support the suggestion."

Thanks for pointing this out. The submitted title was "BA plane not actually hit by drone after all". Submitters: please use the original title except when it is misleading or linkbait. This is in the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Objectively, the probability of it having been an actual drone strike are sub-microscopic. You wouldn't object to a headline like "Man in woods didn't see Yeti after all." The odds are similar.
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