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Title makes it sound like a US military drone shot down a passenger plane.
by adam12 11y ago
Title makes it sound like a US military drone shot down a passenger plane.
- jrockway 11y ago"Toy airplane seen near passenger plane" doesn't bring in the ad views.
- timthorn 11y agoNeither does anything else on BBC websites (acknowledged that outside the UK, ads are present, but BBC Worldwide is so divorced from the BBC News website journos that it is irrelevant)
- FireBeyond 11y ago"$1500 'toy' hits passenger plane". Yours is a little dismissive. I love drones, though I don't own one, though I do have two RC helicopters (the 'proper' ones, like an Align Trex, not a $20 mall toy) but your interpretation isn't the greatest.
- jrockway 11y agoMy complaint is the word "drone". It's designed to sound scarier than it is. The previous generation called them "model airplanes". Language evolves and all that, but also introduces bias. The "done scare" would never be a popular thing if someone hadn't come up with a scary word for model airplanes. (But I agree that "model airplane" isn't that great of a term for some of the higher-end photography drones. It's more than just a toy, it's an interesting tool for filmmaking. I'm still not all that afraid of them, however.)
- chrismcb 11y agoThat's because model airplanes tend to model an airplane. Quad copiers don't model anything. Drone is a fine word.
- Piskvorrr 11y agoIn most cases, there's a legal distiction between "looks like an airplane but smaller" (model airplane) and "looks like a bunch of sticks and propellers" (drone). The rules for both tend to be similar, but not quite the same.