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The trick is that there has never been any confirmed dangerous collision with a quadcopter, all the tests have shown them less dangerous than geese, and acciden

The trick is that there has never been any confirmed dangerous collision with a quadcopter, all the tests have shown them less dangerous than geese, and accidents in the wild have never impacted the air-worthiness of the aircraft. We will probably end up with the 400 feet AGL banned for aviation, and 300 feet AGL limit for recreational flying, and 100 feet of buffer. General aviation pilots violate regulations all the time without being disciplined, and kill people once in a while, and it's a bit hard to put all the burden on the recreational remote controlled aircraft pilots. here is a guy with a cool head on the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0gOxuyr438 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0gOxuyr438

bri3d 9y ago
That was a great video, thank you for the link! I think that's a pretty sensible set of rules, but it turns gray in situations like this helicopter hover training one where civil aviation pilots have a legitimate need to be under 300ft AGL for a length of time. My intuition (and this is what I was trying to push with my comments around the collisions in the article never affecting an airframe) was that drone pilots need to be better educated around staying the hell away from other flying vehicles (which I treated as a given, probably leading to downvotes) but also that helicopter pilots will need to be trained to treat drones like geese and not to react as strongly as this pilot did, since, to your point, it's going to be hard to put the entire burden on RC pilots. However, based on the other comments in this thread, this seems like a very controversial stance for the HN crowd, and I do sympathize with the argument from the helicopter pilot in this thread that they've already got enough on their plate without needing to handle mental interrupts from other junk flying around. The proliferation of recreational drones with terrible inexperienced pilots is definitely a problem we'll have to handle in the coming years.
- nraynaud 9y ago
  there is a little issue, you don't hover an helicopter next to people and, and you don't land next to untrained people (because they could rush to the tail rotor). And they turn a lot around a site before landing, where was the pilot of the RC quad, and why didn't they see them?
_s 9y ago
Generally GA aircraft have a 500’ AGL limit to adhere to; and it’s higher above built-up / high density areas.

bri3d 9y ago

That was a great video, thank you for the link! I think that's a pretty sensible set of rules, but it turns gray in situations like this helicopter hover training one where civil aviation pilots have a legitimate need to be under 300ft AGL for a length of time. My intuition (and this is what I was trying to push with my comments around the collisions in the article never affecting an airframe) was that drone pilots need to be better educated around staying the hell away from other flying vehicles (which I treated as a given, probably leading to downvotes) but also that helicopter pilots will need to be trained to treat drones like geese and not to react as strongly as this pilot did, since, to your point, it's going to be hard to put the entire burden on RC pilots. However, based on the other comments in this thread, this seems like a very controversial stance for the HN crowd, and I do sympathize with the argument from the helicopter pilot in this thread that they've already got enough on their plate without needing to handle mental interrupts from other junk flying around. The proliferation of recreational drones with terrible inexperienced pilots is definitely a problem we'll have to handle in the coming years.

nraynaud 9y ago
there is a little issue, you don't hover an helicopter next to people and, and you don't land next to untrained people (because they could rush to the tail rotor). And they turn a lot around a site before landing, where was the pilot of the RC quad, and why didn't they see them?

_s 9y ago

Generally GA aircraft have a 500’ AGL limit to adhere to; and it’s higher above built-up / high density areas.