11 ms·

Skier almost hit by camera drone in World Cup slalom

159 points by vermontdevil 11y ago

janaagaard 11y ago
He's wearing a helmet. What could wrong? Sorry--too much Reddit.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  He could start tumbling down the slope with all the momentum he had at the moment, break various bones and die. The guy was not standing still at the moment of the incident!
melling 11y ago
This was the breakout year for dangerous drones. Wait until there are 10x more drones in the skies. I was tracking drone incidents for a few months. It's too hard to keep up: https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/dangerous-drones-daily/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/dangerous-drones-dai...
deleted 11y ago
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yummybear 11y ago
It must be technically possible to prevent a drone from flying below a certain altitude. Probably one of the many features that will be added to drones in the coming years.
- markild 11y ago
  How would that help? The obvious solution would be to have strict corridors (which it sounds like they had in theory) for drones.
  - maaaats 11y ago
    Could deploy a parachute, maybe?
- Dwolb 11y ago
  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 against drone regulation)
  - Piskvorrr 11y ago
    Good point - the weakest point of current drones is that the same power source is used for engines and control, without any redundancy.
    - TheCondor 11y ago
      Is there enough data to determine the weakest weakness? Energy makes logical sense, it is also fairly easy to fix with an auxiliary energy supply that could kick in in an emergency situation. That's fairly easy logic to build as well, it seems like something a pro video drone might already have. They don't have a lot in the way of instruments typically, do they have wind gauges and such on the bigger more professional drones? We only see the bottom of the crash, could it have rolled from a gust of wind and become unstable and just not recovered in time? How do you monitor ice build up? How stable are they when a single motor fails? What about the base station? My cheap qav250 drops like a stone when I flip the radio power off, that opens the door to a lot of other potentials for failure, including interference, I know many have gps and return home functions when they lose signal but those are options that are added on. what about a vps signal failure which isn't that unusual in the mountains... I guess the issue at hand becomes cost, between licensing, insurance and then building devices that are higher quality as if they could endanger life, I suspect they'll be cheaper than planes and helicopters but quite a bit more costly.
  - asynchronous13 11y ago
    > 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 for commercial) 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. There's even more who didn't attend the show! For comparison, Delta Airlines operates about 800 aircraft.
- donatj 11y ago
  Unless it's a helium balloon I think you are not considering gravity + batteries.
- detaro 11y ago
  During regular flight, sure. But if it's unstable and crashing?
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  If the power cuts out and the drone is falling out of the sky, how useful is a software rule which is dependent on a computer that is now offline, a non-functioning altimeter and a set of dead engines? (Spoiler: not very much) But of course, such thing would never happen. (Except it just did.)
  - yummybear 11y ago
    A small secondary powersource that deploys a parachute?
- Igglyboo 11y ago
  When the drone runs out of power, then what?
frik 11y ago
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=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsport.orf.at%2Fstories%2F2243235%2F2243236%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u... Just last week a new unproofen airbag system seriously injured an athlete [edit: still under investigation]. The new airbag system was from the Italian company Dainese. The athlete suffered a 3 times vertebral fracture which maybe ends his young career. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsport.orf.at%2Fstories%2F2243222%2F2243146%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=h... http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/newsdetail/D-air-Ski-official http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/newsdetail/D-air-Ski-official http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/athletes/ http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/athletes/ (the athlete in question isn't featured on the website anymore)
- kbart 11y ago
  Wow, it was news for me that athletes wear airbags.
  - Piskvorrr 11y ago
    It's a new thing, they started coming out of the labs a season or two ago: http://news.pocsports.com/2015/10/13/poc-and-inmotion-introduce-airbag-safety-for-skiers/ http://news.pocsports.com/2015/10/13/poc-and-inmotion-introd...
  - frik 11y ago
    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 two Canadians." (from the source above)
nns 11y ago
Am sure when the first cars hit the road, similar news made it to the newspaper front pages then.
- donatj 11y ago
  It did, and the auto industry invented the term jay walking and ran a newspaper campaign against them.
  - emehrkay 11y ago
    Reminds me an NPR story I listened to a few years ago about how the cigarette industry is responsible for furniture needing to be fire retardant (people falling asleep while smoking). The story was about the unknown effects from the chemicals found in the furniture. edit -- found the story: http://www.npr.org/2012/05/23/153308887/fight-over-flame-retardants-in-furniture-heats-up http://www.npr.org/2012/05/23/153308887/fight-over-flame-ret...
- pierotofy 11y ago
  This. Perfectly agree.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  And we got driving licenses, mandatory insurances, traffic rules etc. A lot of this already happened to drones and more will.
- pron 11y ago
  Sure, and as a result cars' mechanical safety and operation became regulated.
- mkagenius 11y ago
  Funny story, heard Marc Andreessen once saying: During the early days, whenever a horse cart came in opposite direction to a car, the car owner was supposed to disassemble the car and hide behind a bush before the horse came near. We have come a long way :)
centizen 11y ago
I imagine this is going to have implications reaching beyond just professional skiing. I won't be surprised if other governing bodies follow suit and ban "drones" as well. I'm also really interested to know more about how this could happen. High end, professionally operated drones don't generally just fall out of the sky.
dspillett 11y ago
I think the title should be updated a bit here. When I read "drone nearly hits" I imagined it flying by and getting to close on the way passed. The video shows it crashing to the ground with some force. It isn't clear whether this is under its own power (so an issue in directional control by either a pilot error or equipment fault) or due to loss of power (so it hit the ground due to gravity). Either way it could have done the skier quite some damage if it had been just that little bit closer.
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  The drone in the video seems to be flying like a brick; complete engine shutdown, IMNSHO. If any of the four rotors were operating, the vector would be significantly different. As to why "it's raining drones, hallelujah" - too early for that; I very much doubt there's enough of a data recorder to reconstruct the event, even with a commercial-grade drone.
  - asynchronous13 11y ago
    > 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.
    - michaelt 11y ago
      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.
      - matheweis 11y ago
        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.
donatj 11y ago
Has anyone actually been killed by a non military drone yet?
- danso 11y ago
  I haven't read the FAA regulations in extreme detail, but from what I've surmised, RC copters would count as needing to be registered. So if that makes it a drone -- and I don't see why not, as it is an unmanned aircraft and whether it had a camera or not doesn't seem to matter to the FAA -- then yes, people have been killed by them. I remember in Brooklyn a couple years back a teenager was killed quite gruesomely in a public park by his own RC copter: http://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-controlled-toy-helicopter/ http://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-contr...
  - asynchronous13 11y ago
    Yep, the FAA does not distinguish between an RC aircraft and a drone. There's also been accidents with larger UAVs: http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/schiebel-s-100-crash-kills-engineer-in-south-korea/ http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/schiebel-s-100-crash-k...
    - NickNameNick 11y ago
      >the FAA does not distinguish between an RC aircraft and a drone. Which is kinda funny, because congress have expressly forbidden the FAA from rulemaking about rc aircraft. the FAA have gone and tried anyway.
- dham 11y ago
  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.
- jjwiseman 11y ago
  A few people have been killed by RC helicopters (see e.g. http://abcnews.go.com/US/minute-mechanical-error-led-teens-remote-control-helicopter/story?id=20182547 http://abcnews.go.com/US/minute-mechanical-error-led-teens-r...). A man was killed by a larger drone when, it's suspected, the GPS was jammed: http://lemondronor.com/blog/index.php/2013/3/gps-loss-kicked-off-fatal-drone-crash http://lemondronor.com/blog/index.php/2013/3/gps-loss-kicked...
UK-AL 11y ago
Bad risk taking drone pilots are incredibly irritating, because they will ruin it for the decent pilots.
- vdaniuk 11y ago
  This is very relevant to your comment. "In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error, also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation's external factors." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    It's not just that. It happens always when a particular thing becomes of interest to the general population. Suddenly, domain-geeks are being swamped by normals who have little interest or experience in the domain itself, and they make stupid mistakes that sometimes end up being corrected with law. Happened to programming too.
    - LesZedCB 11y ago
      I've only been a professional programmer for 2 years now. For my own edification, what events or laws or shifts are you referring to?
  - UK-AL 11y ago
    The fact that he deviated out of his defined zone then back again, several times probably means this wasn't some malfunction of the device. He was risking it for better shots. If he was in his zone, then malfunctioned then it would not have crashed there.
- amelius 11y ago
  It is only a matter of time before decent pilots make mistakes. So what you are saying is that the risk-taking pilots are closing the "window of unregulated flying" a little bit faster than you'd like to see. Eventually, that window will be closed nonetheless.
shocks 11y ago
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", touting that they have home insurance and it doesn't matter.
- itgoon 11y ago
  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".
  - shocks 11y ago
    Ha, that is true. I had to join a club before I even knew what to buy...
    - IshKebab 11y ago
      That sounds rubbish to be honest.
      - NoNotTheDuo 11y ago
        I think the intent was that he joined an RC club so he knew what planes/parts/tools/etc were quality and which were junk. Not that he had to actually join a club in order to purchase anything.
        lmm 11y ago
        Sure. That still sounds much worse in many ways than all the info being up on Tom's Drones or wherever.
elmar 11y ago
A mandatory security parachute could avoid this scenario. To ban drones is the simple way out.
- avar 11y ago
  The skier could have easily hit a parachuting drone head-on in this video if the timing had been different. You're not exactly paying a lot of attention to parachuting objects from above when downhill skiing.
- asynchronous13 11y ago
  Parachutes create additional failure modes. What if the parachute caught the athlete's arm or leg or ski? There's lots of ways it wouldn't work perfectly (sadly, I know from experience).
- lucb1e 11y ago
  Of all the things that can go wrong, falling out of the sky is one of the least of the problems. A bulky parachute is extra weight so people are going to avoid building it in, and besides that, I doubt it's going to help in most situations. E.g.: Who decides to deploy it? The pilot? In that case, signal loss or interference might get in the way. Or does the multirotor decide for itself when to deploy? In that case it could decide to do so at the wrong moment, which can be just as dangerous. You'd need safeguards against this safeguard. The main danger of these machines are the blades, not it falling out of the sky without inertia in the props.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Depends on the mass, the momentum a drone carries, and how high it flies. Replace "drone" with "stone" and think again about the damage potential.
pj_mukh 11y ago
Seems like a malfunction on a homemade rig. Possibly throttle cutout when descending? Why the pilot would insist on using this on what seems like a professional job is beyond me. The industry is coalescing around a couple of field tested professional rigs (DJI products for instance). I hate all these FAA regulations around stuff people do in their backyards but at a professional event like this (with this many people around), it seems like a no-brainer that air worthiness should be tightly regulated. Source: been building drones for 5 years. EDIT: This is Europe. So EASA not FAA
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  No idea about italy but austria has strict regulations for drones. So this is already happening anyways.
Piskvorrr 11y ago
...and won that one, big time: nowadays, just suggest that the road is not exclusively owned by cars, and watch the foaming-at-the-mouth flamewar.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  Eh. Times have changed. In many cities you are the idiot if you are in a car.
  - Piskvorrr 11y ago
    Times are changing, thankfully; but it's not possible to just revert a century of car-centered city planning. This will still take decades :(
    - sundaeofshock 11y ago
      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.
      - meddlepal 11y ago
        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.
        11y ago
barrystaes 11y ago
In other news: Moon nearly hits earth.
tcfunk 11y ago
Maybe it's a translation thing, but I love how calmly the skier talks about the incident afterward. It would have been very easy to take the "F that drone pilot!" road, but instead he just says "Please be more careful next time."
- rurban 11y ago
  He is the best austrian skier, and a professional. He behaves professional.
e40 11y ago
I've seen drones used in US sporting events, where they fly directly over the crowd. It is only a matter of time before one of them crashes into a bunch of people.
drelihan 11y ago
Car nearly hits cyclist .... Wait no, the car actually hits cyclist dozens of times per day...
- prodmerc 11y ago
  Heh, just today I suggested replacing motorcycles with drones on cycling tracks.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  The rule of thumb on newspaper statistics: common risks are boring, therefore not news. (Note that "car hits car" is too boring even for you to mention ;))
- r0m4n0 11y ago
  haha I was thinking the same thing when I saw the ticker headline on the treadmill at the gym. On the other hand, how exciting would this be: "Falling branch nearly misses skier!!!" As someone else pointed out, daily occurrences are not worth talking about...
maaaats 11y ago
It's not just any skiier it's the guy winning the world cup total the last years! Wish my favorite sport was featured on HN in some better light, heh. From my experience in flying drones in wintery mountains, it could be a battery failure. Cold batteries suddenly drops in voltage, too fast for the failsafe mechanisms to trigger. Can explain why it drops like a brick and not slowly descends.
- pfortuny 11y ago
  That is why true "failsafe" mechanisms tend to be mechanical more than electrical: less prone to failure.
  - xgbi 11y ago
    How do you provide this in a quadcopter? The rotors are too small to allow autogiration...
    - pfortuny 11y ago
      you might use something different, like a parachute.
      - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
        No, that's been tried and it doesn't work well for multicopters. * They're only effective from quite some altitude, much higher than you typically fly multicopters * They'll still just soften the landing somewhat anyway * Multicopters are much more fragile than, say, EPP planes, * You have to make sure they don't get caught up in the props * Also you need to find a reliable way to trigger them -- for model aircraft in general and multicopters in particular, humans are way too slow and sudden high accelerations in arbitrary directions are common for multicopters.
aaron695 11y ago
More bullshit almost hits. Exactly the same as 'scary thing' could..... But never happened. Why does HN become crap whenever tech is the boogieman. It's good to know dangers, but this bs upvoting nothing is pointless.
- asynchronous13 11y ago
  Check out the video, this was actually a close call.
protomyth 11y ago
Wired cameras have also had problems such as http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2013/05/26/coca-cola-600-cable-cord-caution-nascar-sprint-cup/2362613/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2013/05/26/coca-... It would be interesting to start comparing accidents per hour for wired and drones.
- ChuckMcM 11y ago
  ... and in football games : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ji-S2Kj8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ji-S2Kj8k or one of my favorites when a camera fell off a skydiver http://wgntv.com/2015/04/08/watch-what-happens-when-gopro-falls-10000-feet-from-the-sky/ http://wgntv.com/2015/04/08/watch-what-happens-when-gopro-fa... but it's more trendy if its a drone.
squidbidness 11y ago
This is why we can't have nice things.
joekrill 11y ago
Didn't this also happen at an NFL game with those camera's that zip around on cords above the players? I don't recall everyone yelling to ban those when that happened.
GizaDog 11y ago
Really sad to see media trying to make UAV's look bad. Instead of investigating why it happened they just want to ban them. Governments can use real drones to kill people and still allowed to continue the death and destruction. People need to get some perceptive here. I've been flying over 11 years and not one issue ever!
- dbrannan 11y ago
  It was most likely a licenced and insured pilot - looked like battery failure to me, but usually large unit (this was an X8) would have had dual batteries for redundancy. Being an X8 it would have dual motors and props, so if one failed it could still fly. The media shouldn't blow this out of proportion - if quads are banned they will regret loosing such awesome aerial footage.
  - ArcticCelt 11y ago
    The main problem, as stated in the article, is that he was flying right above the head of the competitors instead of from a distance as he was suppose to do. But that cameraman/marketing company decided instead to go for the better angle, ignoring the risk for the competitors.
kordless 11y ago
I'm a little outraged that the skier was outraged while being interviewed. He's in a sport that is very risky, and part of that risk is performing for an audience which wants to see things better and in more detail. Those drones are part of the camera network of an event he's performing at, so it's unlikely anyone did anything wrong, other than maybe they put in the wrong battery packs. You can't have it both ways. Note that I'm not saying he can't have some emotional response, but public outrage is basically saying "this shouldn't ever happen and people should be afraid of this" which is stupid given shit happens when you are doing highly competitive and dangerous things as a performer - which includes the venue and staff filming it in new and interesting ways. The audience demands it, and you as an athlete and performer are part of it. The older I get, the more the unnecessary spread of cognitive dissonance irritates me.
- an_account 11y ago
  He should be outraged! The drone operator was told that he "had to fly outside of the race track and follow the racer from a 15-metre distance." This clearly didn't happen. If the cameraman on the side of the track suddenly took his camera into the middle of the track, it would obviously be outrageous.
- hristov 11y ago
  Skiing is already risky enough he shouldn't have TV stations adding to the risk. It is wrong to say "well it is risky anyways, so who cares about one more source of risk." This is like saying that someone is already rich anyways, so it is ok steal from them. I can guarantee you that professional skiers are very careful about all the risks they undertake, and work hard to minimize those risks. It is very understandable this skier is angry to learn that a TV station just added a new way for him to die.
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jetskindo 11y ago
Note to self: add a small mechanical trigger for a parachute for cases of emergency. This will trigger if the drone falls at a certain speed.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  You could add an electromechanical failsafe that would trigger in the event of loss of power - i.e. the safety device wants to deploy itself, but is actively prevented from doing so by the electronics.
  - Piskvorrr 11y ago
    Won't help. An unsteered parachute slows down the fall so that it's sort-of survivable instead of terminal-velocity; there wouldn't have been any significant effect in this specific case.

159 points by vermontdevil 11y ago

janaagaard 11y ago

He's wearing a helmet. What could wrong? Sorry--too much Reddit.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
TeMPOraL 11y ago
He could start tumbling down the slope with all the momentum he had at the moment, break various bones and die. The guy was not standing still at the moment of the incident!

melling 11y ago

This was the breakout year for dangerous drones. Wait until there are 10x more drones in the skies. I was tracking drone incidents for a few months. It's too hard to keep up: https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/dangerous-drones-daily/ https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/dangerous-drones-dai...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

yummybear 11y ago

It must be technically possible to prevent a drone from flying below a certain altitude. Probably one of the many features that will be added to drones in the coming years.

markild 11y ago
How would that help? The obvious solution would be to have strict corridors (which it sounds like they had in theory) for drones.
- maaaats 11y ago
  Could deploy a parachute, maybe?
Dwolb 11y ago
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 against drone regulation)
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  Good point - the weakest point of current drones is that the same power source is used for engines and control, without any redundancy.
  - TheCondor 11y ago
    Is there enough data to determine the weakest weakness? Energy makes logical sense, it is also fairly easy to fix with an auxiliary energy supply that could kick in in an emergency situation. That's fairly easy logic to build as well, it seems like something a pro video drone might already have. They don't have a lot in the way of instruments typically, do they have wind gauges and such on the bigger more professional drones? We only see the bottom of the crash, could it have rolled from a gust of wind and become unstable and just not recovered in time? How do you monitor ice build up? How stable are they when a single motor fails? What about the base station? My cheap qav250 drops like a stone when I flip the radio power off, that opens the door to a lot of other potentials for failure, including interference, I know many have gps and return home functions when they lose signal but those are options that are added on. what about a vps signal failure which isn't that unusual in the mountains... I guess the issue at hand becomes cost, between licensing, insurance and then building devices that are higher quality as if they could endanger life, I suspect they'll be cheaper than planes and helicopters but quite a bit more costly.
- asynchronous13 11y ago
  > 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 for commercial) 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. There's even more who didn't attend the show! For comparison, Delta Airlines operates about 800 aircraft.
donatj 11y ago
Unless it's a helium balloon I think you are not considering gravity + batteries.
detaro 11y ago
During regular flight, sure. But if it's unstable and crashing?
Piskvorrr 11y ago
If the power cuts out and the drone is falling out of the sky, how useful is a software rule which is dependent on a computer that is now offline, a non-functioning altimeter and a set of dead engines? (Spoiler: not very much) But of course, such thing would never happen. (Except it just did.)
- yummybear 11y ago
  A small secondary powersource that deploys a parachute?
Igglyboo 11y ago
When the drone runs out of power, then what?

frik 11y ago

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=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsport.orf.at%2Fstories%2F2243235%2F2243236%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&u... Just last week a new unproofen airbag system seriously injured an athlete [edit: still under investigation]. The new airbag system was from the Italian company Dainese. The athlete suffered a 3 times vertebral fracture which maybe ends his young career. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsport.orf.at%2Fstories%2F2243222%2F2243146%2F https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=h... http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/newsdetail/D-air-Ski-official http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/newsdetail/D-air-Ski-official http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/athletes/ http://www.dainese.com/eu_en/athletes/ (the athlete in question isn't featured on the website anymore)

kbart 11y ago
Wow, it was news for me that athletes wear airbags.
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  It's a new thing, they started coming out of the labs a season or two ago: http://news.pocsports.com/2015/10/13/poc-and-inmotion-introduce-airbag-safety-for-skiers/ http://news.pocsports.com/2015/10/13/poc-and-inmotion-introd...
- frik 11y ago
  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 two Canadians." (from the source above)

nns 11y ago

Am sure when the first cars hit the road, similar news made it to the newspaper front pages then.

donatj 11y ago
It did, and the auto industry invented the term jay walking and ran a newspaper campaign against them.
- emehrkay 11y ago
  Reminds me an NPR story I listened to a few years ago about how the cigarette industry is responsible for furniture needing to be fire retardant (people falling asleep while smoking). The story was about the unknown effects from the chemicals found in the furniture. edit -- found the story: http://www.npr.org/2012/05/23/153308887/fight-over-flame-retardants-in-furniture-heats-up http://www.npr.org/2012/05/23/153308887/fight-over-flame-ret...
pierotofy 11y ago
This. Perfectly agree.
the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
And we got driving licenses, mandatory insurances, traffic rules etc. A lot of this already happened to drones and more will.
pron 11y ago
Sure, and as a result cars' mechanical safety and operation became regulated.
mkagenius 11y ago
Funny story, heard Marc Andreessen once saying: During the early days, whenever a horse cart came in opposite direction to a car, the car owner was supposed to disassemble the car and hide behind a bush before the horse came near. We have come a long way :)

centizen 11y ago

I imagine this is going to have implications reaching beyond just professional skiing. I won't be surprised if other governing bodies follow suit and ban "drones" as well. I'm also really interested to know more about how this could happen. High end, professionally operated drones don't generally just fall out of the sky.

dspillett 11y ago

I think the title should be updated a bit here. When I read "drone nearly hits" I imagined it flying by and getting to close on the way passed. The video shows it crashing to the ground with some force. It isn't clear whether this is under its own power (so an issue in directional control by either a pilot error or equipment fault) or due to loss of power (so it hit the ground due to gravity). Either way it could have done the skier quite some damage if it had been just that little bit closer.

Piskvorrr 11y ago
The drone in the video seems to be flying like a brick; complete engine shutdown, IMNSHO. If any of the four rotors were operating, the vector would be significantly different. As to why "it's raining drones, hallelujah" - too early for that; I very much doubt there's enough of a data recorder to reconstruct the event, even with a commercial-grade drone.
- asynchronous13 11y ago
  > 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.
  - michaelt 11y ago
    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.
    - matheweis 11y ago
      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.

donatj 11y ago

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

danso 11y ago
I haven't read the FAA regulations in extreme detail, but from what I've surmised, RC copters would count as needing to be registered. So if that makes it a drone -- and I don't see why not, as it is an unmanned aircraft and whether it had a camera or not doesn't seem to matter to the FAA -- then yes, people have been killed by them. I remember in Brooklyn a couple years back a teenager was killed quite gruesomely in a public park by his own RC copter: http://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-controlled-toy-helicopter/ http://nypost.com/2013/09/05/man-decapitated-by-remote-contr...
- asynchronous13 11y ago
  Yep, the FAA does not distinguish between an RC aircraft and a drone. There's also been accidents with larger UAVs: http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/schiebel-s-100-crash-kills-engineer-in-south-korea/ http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/schiebel-s-100-crash-k...
  - NickNameNick 11y ago
    >the FAA does not distinguish between an RC aircraft and a drone. Which is kinda funny, because congress have expressly forbidden the FAA from rulemaking about rc aircraft. the FAA have gone and tried anyway.
dham 11y ago
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.
jjwiseman 11y ago
A few people have been killed by RC helicopters (see e.g. http://abcnews.go.com/US/minute-mechanical-error-led-teens-remote-control-helicopter/story?id=20182547 http://abcnews.go.com/US/minute-mechanical-error-led-teens-r...). A man was killed by a larger drone when, it's suspected, the GPS was jammed: http://lemondronor.com/blog/index.php/2013/3/gps-loss-kicked-off-fatal-drone-crash http://lemondronor.com/blog/index.php/2013/3/gps-loss-kicked...

UK-AL 11y ago

Bad risk taking drone pilots are incredibly irritating, because they will ruin it for the decent pilots.

vdaniuk 11y ago
This is very relevant to your comment. "In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error, also known as the correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics (personality) to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation rather than considering the situation's external factors." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  It's not just that. It happens always when a particular thing becomes of interest to the general population. Suddenly, domain-geeks are being swamped by normals who have little interest or experience in the domain itself, and they make stupid mistakes that sometimes end up being corrected with law. Happened to programming too.
  - LesZedCB 11y ago
    I've only been a professional programmer for 2 years now. For my own edification, what events or laws or shifts are you referring to?
- UK-AL 11y ago
  The fact that he deviated out of his defined zone then back again, several times probably means this wasn't some malfunction of the device. He was risking it for better shots. If he was in his zone, then malfunctioned then it would not have crashed there.
amelius 11y ago
It is only a matter of time before decent pilots make mistakes. So what you are saying is that the risk-taking pilots are closing the "window of unregulated flying" a little bit faster than you'd like to see. Eventually, that window will be closed nonetheless.

shocks 11y ago

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", touting that they have home insurance and it doesn't matter.

itgoon 11y ago
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".
- shocks 11y ago
  Ha, that is true. I had to join a club before I even knew what to buy...
  - IshKebab 11y ago
    That sounds rubbish to be honest.
    - NoNotTheDuo 11y ago
      I think the intent was that he joined an RC club so he knew what planes/parts/tools/etc were quality and which were junk. Not that he had to actually join a club in order to purchase anything.
      - lmm 11y ago
        Sure. That still sounds much worse in many ways than all the info being up on Tom's Drones or wherever.

elmar 11y ago

A mandatory security parachute could avoid this scenario. To ban drones is the simple way out.

avar 11y ago
The skier could have easily hit a parachuting drone head-on in this video if the timing had been different. You're not exactly paying a lot of attention to parachuting objects from above when downhill skiing.
asynchronous13 11y ago
Parachutes create additional failure modes. What if the parachute caught the athlete's arm or leg or ski? There's lots of ways it wouldn't work perfectly (sadly, I know from experience).
lucb1e 11y ago
Of all the things that can go wrong, falling out of the sky is one of the least of the problems. A bulky parachute is extra weight so people are going to avoid building it in, and besides that, I doubt it's going to help in most situations. E.g.: Who decides to deploy it? The pilot? In that case, signal loss or interference might get in the way. Or does the multirotor decide for itself when to deploy? In that case it could decide to do so at the wrong moment, which can be just as dangerous. You'd need safeguards against this safeguard. The main danger of these machines are the blades, not it falling out of the sky without inertia in the props.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Depends on the mass, the momentum a drone carries, and how high it flies. Replace "drone" with "stone" and think again about the damage potential.

pj_mukh 11y ago

Seems like a malfunction on a homemade rig. Possibly throttle cutout when descending? Why the pilot would insist on using this on what seems like a professional job is beyond me. The industry is coalescing around a couple of field tested professional rigs (DJI products for instance). I hate all these FAA regulations around stuff people do in their backyards but at a professional event like this (with this many people around), it seems like a no-brainer that air worthiness should be tightly regulated. Source: been building drones for 5 years. EDIT: This is Europe. So EASA not FAA

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
No idea about italy but austria has strict regulations for drones. So this is already happening anyways.

Piskvorrr 11y ago

...and won that one, big time: nowadays, just suggest that the road is not exclusively owned by cars, and watch the foaming-at-the-mouth flamewar.

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
Eh. Times have changed. In many cities you are the idiot if you are in a car.
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  Times are changing, thankfully; but it's not possible to just revert a century of car-centered city planning. This will still take decades :(
  - sundaeofshock 11y ago
    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.
    - meddlepal 11y ago
      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.
      - 11y ago

barrystaes 11y ago

In other news: Moon nearly hits earth.

tcfunk 11y ago

Maybe it's a translation thing, but I love how calmly the skier talks about the incident afterward. It would have been very easy to take the "F that drone pilot!" road, but instead he just says "Please be more careful next time."

rurban 11y ago
He is the best austrian skier, and a professional. He behaves professional.

e40 11y ago

I've seen drones used in US sporting events, where they fly directly over the crowd. It is only a matter of time before one of them crashes into a bunch of people.

drelihan 11y ago

Car nearly hits cyclist .... Wait no, the car actually hits cyclist dozens of times per day...

prodmerc 11y ago
Heh, just today I suggested replacing motorcycles with drones on cycling tracks.
deleted 11y ago
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Piskvorrr 11y ago
The rule of thumb on newspaper statistics: common risks are boring, therefore not news. (Note that "car hits car" is too boring even for you to mention ;))
r0m4n0 11y ago
haha I was thinking the same thing when I saw the ticker headline on the treadmill at the gym. On the other hand, how exciting would this be: "Falling branch nearly misses skier!!!" As someone else pointed out, daily occurrences are not worth talking about...

maaaats 11y ago

It's not just any skiier it's the guy winning the world cup total the last years! Wish my favorite sport was featured on HN in some better light, heh. From my experience in flying drones in wintery mountains, it could be a battery failure. Cold batteries suddenly drops in voltage, too fast for the failsafe mechanisms to trigger. Can explain why it drops like a brick and not slowly descends.

pfortuny 11y ago
That is why true "failsafe" mechanisms tend to be mechanical more than electrical: less prone to failure.
- xgbi 11y ago
  How do you provide this in a quadcopter? The rotors are too small to allow autogiration...
  - pfortuny 11y ago
    you might use something different, like a parachute.
    - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
      No, that's been tried and it doesn't work well for multicopters. * They're only effective from quite some altitude, much higher than you typically fly multicopters * They'll still just soften the landing somewhat anyway * Multicopters are much more fragile than, say, EPP planes, * You have to make sure they don't get caught up in the props * Also you need to find a reliable way to trigger them -- for model aircraft in general and multicopters in particular, humans are way too slow and sudden high accelerations in arbitrary directions are common for multicopters.

aaron695 11y ago

More bullshit almost hits. Exactly the same as 'scary thing' could..... But never happened. Why does HN become crap whenever tech is the boogieman. It's good to know dangers, but this bs upvoting nothing is pointless.

asynchronous13 11y ago
Check out the video, this was actually a close call.

protomyth 11y ago

Wired cameras have also had problems such as http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2013/05/26/coca-cola-600-cable-cord-caution-nascar-sprint-cup/2362613/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nascar/2013/05/26/coca-... It would be interesting to start comparing accidents per hour for wired and drones.

ChuckMcM 11y ago
... and in football games : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ji-S2Kj8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5ji-S2Kj8k or one of my favorites when a camera fell off a skydiver http://wgntv.com/2015/04/08/watch-what-happens-when-gopro-falls-10000-feet-from-the-sky/ http://wgntv.com/2015/04/08/watch-what-happens-when-gopro-fa... but it's more trendy if its a drone.

squidbidness 11y ago

This is why we can't have nice things.

joekrill 11y ago

Didn't this also happen at an NFL game with those camera's that zip around on cords above the players? I don't recall everyone yelling to ban those when that happened.

GizaDog 11y ago

Really sad to see media trying to make UAV's look bad. Instead of investigating why it happened they just want to ban them. Governments can use real drones to kill people and still allowed to continue the death and destruction. People need to get some perceptive here. I've been flying over 11 years and not one issue ever!

dbrannan 11y ago
It was most likely a licenced and insured pilot - looked like battery failure to me, but usually large unit (this was an X8) would have had dual batteries for redundancy. Being an X8 it would have dual motors and props, so if one failed it could still fly. The media shouldn't blow this out of proportion - if quads are banned they will regret loosing such awesome aerial footage.
- ArcticCelt 11y ago
  The main problem, as stated in the article, is that he was flying right above the head of the competitors instead of from a distance as he was suppose to do. But that cameraman/marketing company decided instead to go for the better angle, ignoring the risk for the competitors.

kordless 11y ago

I'm a little outraged that the skier was outraged while being interviewed. He's in a sport that is very risky, and part of that risk is performing for an audience which wants to see things better and in more detail. Those drones are part of the camera network of an event he's performing at, so it's unlikely anyone did anything wrong, other than maybe they put in the wrong battery packs. You can't have it both ways. Note that I'm not saying he can't have some emotional response, but public outrage is basically saying "this shouldn't ever happen and people should be afraid of this" which is stupid given shit happens when you are doing highly competitive and dangerous things as a performer - which includes the venue and staff filming it in new and interesting ways. The audience demands it, and you as an athlete and performer are part of it. The older I get, the more the unnecessary spread of cognitive dissonance irritates me.

an_account 11y ago
He should be outraged! The drone operator was told that he "had to fly outside of the race track and follow the racer from a 15-metre distance." This clearly didn't happen. If the cameraman on the side of the track suddenly took his camera into the middle of the track, it would obviously be outrageous.
hristov 11y ago
Skiing is already risky enough he shouldn't have TV stations adding to the risk. It is wrong to say "well it is risky anyways, so who cares about one more source of risk." This is like saying that someone is already rich anyways, so it is ok steal from them. I can guarantee you that professional skiers are very careful about all the risks they undertake, and work hard to minimize those risks. It is very understandable this skier is angry to learn that a TV station just added a new way for him to die.

deleted 11y ago

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jetskindo 11y ago

Note to self: add a small mechanical trigger for a parachute for cases of emergency. This will trigger if the drone falls at a certain speed.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
You could add an electromechanical failsafe that would trigger in the event of loss of power - i.e. the safety device wants to deploy itself, but is actively prevented from doing so by the electronics.
- Piskvorrr 11y ago
  Won't help. An unsteered parachute slows down the fall so that it's sort-of survivable instead of terminal-velocity; there wouldn't have been any significant effect in this specific case.