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I’m not sure how we could ever gather statistics but I’m really curious if reported drone sightings could just be other objects mistaken for drones. To really s

I’m not sure how we could ever gather statistics but I’m really curious if reported drone sightings could just be other objects mistaken for drones. To really see an object clearly such as a consumer drone like a DJI Phantom you’ll have to be very close and at that range it’s going to zip by extremely fast.

bb88 8y ago
The sun sets in NJ at 5:03 pm tonight, and backtracking through the article, the disruption started around 5:30, probably reported just a few minutes before ATC redirected traffic. Likely they saw the lights of the drone flying around. It's a clear sky tonight, so they would have been able to see the drone for several miles.
- bronco21016 8y ago
  It’s hard enough to pick out the lights of an aircraft 5 nm away in the sea of lights surrounding the NYC metro area. I highly doubt they were able to identify a drone by its lights from up to ‘several miles’ away. Let’s assume they did though. All of the drones I’ve owned have red and green lights. Aircraft typically have red and green lights in addition to white lights facing aft and typically a red beacon and strobes. What’s so different about these lights that they’re able to distinguish them as those of a drone? Isn’t it possible it was a helicopter? A GA aircraft flying VFR? What about the red, green, white lights from a boat? In my experience there have been many times I’ve seen something strange in the sky where my mind wants me to think it was something but in the end I really cannot be sure what it was. There’s been multiple times something has gone whizzing by at cruise or in the terminal area and for all I know it could have been a bird, a drone, a balloon, a kite, etc. Given the report was at night and it’s at an altitude that a drone shouldn’t normally be operating it seems questionable to me whether what they saw was actually a drone. With the recent media attention drones have had around airports I suspect there will be an uptick in reported sightings that likely are not drones at all.
beezischillin 8y ago
DJI drones have software features to prevent abuse: https://www.dji.com/flysafe https://www.dji.com/flysafe If these are indeed drones causing disruption then they might not be off-the shelf video drones.
- _Wintermute 8y ago
  I remember seeing a talk in which the DJI (or maybe a different manufacturer) geofencing was just a plain text file of coordinates that anyone could alter.
  - beezischillin 8y ago
    I can't comment on that, but from the outside, they look to have a pretty complex implementation according to their website. But then again I never would've assumed that Sony would store passwords in plaintext until they got hacked...
twblalock 8y ago
The problem is that one guy genuinely sees a drone and after that everybody else thinks they see a drone that isn't there. That's the genius of this form of disruption: fly a drone past an airport just once, and people in the airport will report spurious drone sightings for hours afterwards. Flights will be delayed and much money will be spent tracking down things that don't exist.

bb88 8y ago

The sun sets in NJ at 5:03 pm tonight, and backtracking through the article, the disruption started around 5:30, probably reported just a few minutes before ATC redirected traffic. Likely they saw the lights of the drone flying around. It's a clear sky tonight, so they would have been able to see the drone for several miles.

bronco21016 8y ago
It’s hard enough to pick out the lights of an aircraft 5 nm away in the sea of lights surrounding the NYC metro area. I highly doubt they were able to identify a drone by its lights from up to ‘several miles’ away. Let’s assume they did though. All of the drones I’ve owned have red and green lights. Aircraft typically have red and green lights in addition to white lights facing aft and typically a red beacon and strobes. What’s so different about these lights that they’re able to distinguish them as those of a drone? Isn’t it possible it was a helicopter? A GA aircraft flying VFR? What about the red, green, white lights from a boat? In my experience there have been many times I’ve seen something strange in the sky where my mind wants me to think it was something but in the end I really cannot be sure what it was. There’s been multiple times something has gone whizzing by at cruise or in the terminal area and for all I know it could have been a bird, a drone, a balloon, a kite, etc. Given the report was at night and it’s at an altitude that a drone shouldn’t normally be operating it seems questionable to me whether what they saw was actually a drone. With the recent media attention drones have had around airports I suspect there will be an uptick in reported sightings that likely are not drones at all.

beezischillin 8y ago

DJI drones have software features to prevent abuse: https://www.dji.com/flysafe https://www.dji.com/flysafe If these are indeed drones causing disruption then they might not be off-the shelf video drones.

_Wintermute 8y ago
I remember seeing a talk in which the DJI (or maybe a different manufacturer) geofencing was just a plain text file of coordinates that anyone could alter.
- beezischillin 8y ago
  I can't comment on that, but from the outside, they look to have a pretty complex implementation according to their website. But then again I never would've assumed that Sony would store passwords in plaintext until they got hacked...

twblalock 8y ago

The problem is that one guy genuinely sees a drone and after that everybody else thinks they see a drone that isn't there. That's the genius of this form of disruption: fly a drone past an airport just once, and people in the airport will report spurious drone sightings for hours afterwards. Flights will be delayed and much money will be spent tracking down things that don't exist.