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Plane damaged after being hit by York police drone at Buttonville Airport
- umvi 5y agoHopefully the police get a fine and licence temporarily revoked just like a civilian would have.
- java-man 5y agoThe fine will be paid by the taxpayers and nothing will change.
- anonymousiam 5y agoI'm pretty sure that if a civilian was operating a drone in restricted airspace and a collision almost took out an aircraft, it would incur more than a fine and temporary license suspension. Just look at all of the folks being prosecuted for pointing a laser the wrong way in the sky. http://jdasolutions.aero/blog/aiming-lasers-at-aircraft/ http://jdasolutions.aero/blog/aiming-lasers-at-aircraft/
- ansible 5y ago> ... pointing a laser the wrong way ... I don't see how the two situations compare. If you are shining a laser light towards an aircraft, you are deliberately trying to inflict harm upon the pilot, and could easily cause an accident. The police drone pilot screwed up, badly, and was possibly criminally negligent, but wasn't intending to down a plane, though that could easily have been the result.
- Teever 5y agoA lot of people who point lasers at planes don't understand how dangerous their actions are. I expect the people that we give guns/drones to for the purpose of enforcing laws to understand the laws they're enforcing and the consequences of their actions.
- brokenmachine 5y agoPersonally I'm unconvinced by the danger posed by handheld lasers to an aircraft. A group of people all pointing high-powered ones into the eyes of a pilot as it's landing, yes that's dangerous. But a single person, it'd be pretty difficult to keep it on target long enough to have real effect. Most of the time I'd say it's just kids pointing up into the sky and maybe hitting the underside of a plane for a split-second, it's not the end of the world. Lets not act like they're shooting heat-seeking missiles. Yes, it's not the right thing to do and shouldn't be happening, but let's not blow the risk out of all proportion. Of course I do understand why such behavior needs to be illegal, because otherwise whole neighborhoods could band together to distract pilots and bring down aircraft. But by the same token we don't need to send in the SWAT team for a teenager with a laser pointer. Cue all the keyboard warrior pilots telling me how a 747 will instantly fall out of the sky if touched for a millisecond by a handheld AA-powered laser. edit: actually just the downvotes, whatever.
- NickNameNick 5y agoIt's worth looking at some video of what a laser strike looks like from the cockpit. eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoj3H7LMy2k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoj3H7LMy2k And because this happens at night, the pilot looses their dark adaptation - they will have difficulty seeing for a minute or longer after each flash. So, no, the airplane won't instantly roll over dive into the nearest building. But it is still quite dangerous.
- brokenmachine 5y agoI note that in that video, the first footage there is a plane on the runway with someone shining the laser from maybe 30m away. Not a moving plane in flight. And it doesn't speak to the quality of the reporting when it shows the alarmist message "THIS FOOTAGE SHOWS A LASER ATTACK ON A PASSENGER PLANE", combined with footage that is clearly not from a plane but a helicopter. In my younger, stupider days I've played with laser pointers with my young, stupid friends, trying to shine them into each others eyes from across a park. It's really not that bad because you can't hold it steady enough and in a moving aircraft from a large distance would be a non-event. A helicopter would be more vulnerable however, and as I said a group of people all ARMED with laser WEAPONS to ATTACK. Yes, people who shine at planes are doing the wrong thing, but it's not bad enough to warrant alarmist all-caps warning messages and pretending it's anywhere near as much threat as physical impacts with drones, drunk/sleepy pilots, crappy maintenance or plane UI (lol, I watch Air Crash Investigations TV show), or anything else.
- sokoloff 5y ago> you are deliberately trying to inflict harm upon the pilot I suspect most people who shine lasers at aircraft are just being stupid and don’t intend to inflict harm on the pilot. I’ve been hit by a green laser in a high-wing. At 3000’, the beam is wide enough that it lights up a substantial fraction of a wing, (quite brightly at night). I suspect that looks pretty entertaining to the laser wielder on the ground. I turned off my position lights, reported their location to ATC, and hope they’re caught, but I think it’s way more likely that they were being a bored butthead (probably a group thereof) than them actually trying to hurt me.
- spywaregorilla 5y agoThese people tend to be intentionally aiming their lasers at planes, which is quite different from "point a laser the wrong way in the sky" which implies accidental. The headline example on your page also got a year of probation from a fairly understanding judge it seems.
- garyfirestorm 5y agolook at the headline 'Plane damaged after being hit by York police drone at Buttonville Airport' if it were a civilian I am sure it would be 'Major disaster - as civilian drone crashes into a plane - potential suspects at large'
- djrogers 5y ago> Just look at all of the folks being prosecuted for pointing a laser the wrong way in the sky. That really smacks of being intentionally obtuse. If I said “look at all the people prosecuted for pointing their guns the wrong way when discharging them” you wouldn’t buy it…
- JTbane 5y agoA civilian would be criminally charged for this. The police will likely get a slap on the wrist, or a token fine.
- hellbannedguy 5y agoIt's weird how my perception of cops have changed. Actually that's a lie. I lost respect for the profession in high school. That said, my immediate thought is they (cops) were fooling around with their new toy. I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection, and solely zoned in on real crime? And what is real crime? I guess murders, white collar crime, organized gangs. It's not drugs.
- alistairSH 5y agoThis wasn't a toy drone like a DJI Mavic or similar. Assuming they haven't changed hardware, it cost ~$125,000, takes a team of two to operate, and weighs 2.4kg (5.2lbs).[1] This is the damage done to the airplane.[2] It will require body work and an engine tear-down (prop struck the drone). If the drone had been a bit higher, it could have done major damage to the prop or worse the windscreen and possibly pilot. 1 - https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5728426-york-regional-police-second-municipal-force-in-ontario-to-operate-aerial-drone/ https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5728426-york-regional-pol... 2 - https://s30121.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/plane-hit-by-drone-aug-20.jpg https://s30121.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/plane-hit-...
- bastawhiz 5y agoThat doesn't mean the officers operating it weren't treating it like a toy. Hopefully the investigation is exhaustive and objective.
- ashtonkem 5y agoIt’s worth pointing out that “real crime” is a social construct. Petty crime is a prosecuted, despite being dwarfed by wage theft. Shooting someone is a crime, obviously, but purposefully starving thousands of infants to boost Nestle stock values is not. What you or I think of being the “real crime” that cops should focus on may or may not be what the laws define as real crime, which itself probably doesn’t map to what cops spend all their time doing
- epicureanideal 5y ago
- chrisseaton 5y ago> Hopefully the police get a fine The police don't get fined - the taxpayer does.
- tailius 5y agoPolice either need public service liability insurance rather than qualified immunity so long as that doesn't affect public safety risk-taking for life saving, or the chain-of-command needs to hold officers to exceptionally high standards of conduct and professionalism.
- vanattab 5y agoI am pretty sure if a plane is actually struck by your drone near an airfield your going to get more then a fine and license revoked your going to jail.
- tailius 5y agoAll animals are equal but...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- justinclift 5y ago... or at least pay for the plane repairs and whatever other expenses arise from it.
- lisper 5y agoThe last sentence made me laugh: > The cause of the collision is not known. I'll give you long odds that the cause was the drone being someplace it was not supposed to be.
- ashtonkem 5y agoThe rule on not using the passive voice in journalism is suspended the moment it’s about cops misbehaving.
- guerrilla 5y agoI hope someone out there is documenting just how consistently, it's astounding. I still wonder how this happens. The only theory I know of is that if they don't give them positive coverage then they'll never get comment form them again, but is that really sufficient for it to be so universal and why have so few papers gone adversarial on this?
- banannaise 5y agoPolice are also known to physically assault and arrest journalists from outfits they don't like.
- djrogers 5y agoPolice in Canada? Do you have anything to back that up?
- amatecha 5y agoHere's one from just this past week (with plenty of prior/ongoing related mistreatment of journalistic activity in the area): https://caj.ca/blog/CAJ_urges_RCMP_to_follow_court_order_to_respect_media_rights_after_journalist_arrested_at_Fairy_Creek https://caj.ca/blog/CAJ_urges_RCMP_to_follow_court_order_to_...
- Hello71 5y ago
- teeray 5y agoUh, why were they allowed to operate a drone within the glide slope of a runway?
- version_five 5y ago> NAV Canada, the country’s air navigation service provider, had not been notified about the YRP drone, Transport Canada said. They didnt ask
- jandrese 5y agoThey were not but they did so anyway.
- marcellus23 5y agoThey're not, but they're cops, so...
- teeray 5y agoAh, yep. The plane should have pulled over when the pilot saw the blue lights.
- marcellus23 5y agoMy point wasn't that cops have authority there, but that cops break the rules when it suits them.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- version_five 5y agoI'd be interested to know about how York police operate their drone "unit": if it's a group of trained people with flight experience, appropriate training, and the right connections with aviation authorities, or if it's just a couple constables "takin' the drone out".
- JamesCoyne 5y agoI found this article from 2018 https://www.toronto.com/news-story/8102547-video-peel-police-will-have-eyes-in-the-sky-with-purchase-of-drones/ https://www.toronto.com/news-story/8102547-video-peel-police... Nearby Peel ON has a drone unit and probably flies similar equipment to York
- stanski 5y agoFlying a drone at or near circuit altitude within the vicinity of an active airport, without prior notification... You can probably guess about the kind of person who was operating the drone.
- coldacid 5y agoYork is where they go when they can't get hired by Toronto or Peel.
- coldacid 5y agoGiven the quality of York cops, it's most likely the latter. (They're still better than the Durham cops, though.)
- hbrav 5y agoIf it was >250g, you need a license: https://tc.canada.ca/en/aviation/drone-safety/learn-rules-you-fly-your-drone/flying-your-drone-safely-legally https://tc.canada.ca/en/aviation/drone-safety/learn-rules-yo...
- joemi 5y agoI know a lot of people are viewing this as the police getting their comeuppance, but there's not really enough info in this article to go on. The last line of the article is pretty explicit about this: "The cause of the collision is not known."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- minitoar 5y agoThe only thing I could imagine that would exonerate the operators of the drone would be if it turned out this was an unforseeable equipment failure (eg an uncommanded climb into controlled airspace), and they weren’t already being excessively risky at the time of failure.
- bigiain 5y agoLess than a mile out and directly in line with the landing approach off an active runway? Having the drone powered up at all was "being excessively risky" in my opinion. I have a DJI drone that will not power up at my house, I'm about 3km out and 7-800m to the side of the runway centreline of my nearby airport. I've been known to test fly and pid tune small (sub 150g) drones in my backyard at lower-than-tree-height or about 3-4 meters up max, but even that "feels wrong" to me if there's a plane I can see on approach or on FlightRadar, so I'll land and wait for a gap.
- caconym_ 5y agoYou don't need to know much more than that the manned aircraft was on final approach within a mile of the airport^[1] and that the police drone got in its way. Short of some one-in-a-million (but probably actually a lot more than a million) malfunction, there is very little wiggle room here for the police operators to have been anything but profoundly and (one would assume, by "civilian" standards at least) criminally negligent. You simply do not fly drones anywhere near an airport without coordinating with the relevant air traffic control authorities, and this is exactly why. The people in the 172 could have been killed. Every person operating a UAS needs to be positive they aren't doing so in restricted or conflicted airspace, even casual hobbyists flying tiny sub-250g drones. Equipment failure is usually not an excuse (for the operator) either, since the limits and failsafes on the drone should always be set to prevent it from ending up somewhere it shouldn't be. Every time I'm going to fly one of my drones, I evaluate these settings and choose new values tailored to the situation and "mission". This includes disabling automatic return-to-home if there is any chance of that function causing it to fly a dangerous route, e.g. one over people. ^[1] https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/172-substantially-damaged-by-police-drone/ https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/172-substantially-damage...
- JamesCoyne 5y agoYou can see a little more detail on the TSB incident page, this is CADORS report 2021O1096: https://wwwapps.tc.gc.ca/Saf-Sec-Sur/2/cadors-screaq/rd.aspx?cno%3d2021O1096%26dtef%3d%26dtet%3d2021-08-23%26otp%3d-1%26ftop%3d%253e%253d%26ftno%3d0%26ijop%3d%253e%253d%26ijno%3d0%26olc%3d%26prv%3d-1%26rgn%3d-1%26tsbno%3d%26tsbi%3d-1%26arno%3d%26ocatno%3d%26ocatop%3d1%26oevtno%3d%26oevtop%3d1%26evtacoc%3d3%26fltno%3d%26fltr%3d-1%26cars%3d-1%26acat%3d-1%26nar%3d%26aiddl%3d-1%26aidxt%3d%26optdl%3d-1%26optcomt%3d%26optseq%3d%26optxt%3d%26opdlxt%3dResults%2bwill%2bappear%2bin%2bthis%2blist%26mkdl%3d-1%26mkxt%3d%26mdldl%3d-1%26mdlxt%3d%26cmkdl%3dC%26cmkxt%3d%26rt%3dQR%26hypl%3dy%26cnum%3d2021O1096 https://wwwapps.tc.gc.ca/Saf-Sec-Sur/2/cadors-screaq/rd.aspx...
- Scoundreller 5y agoBecause it involved non-police, the CADORS got filed swiftly. When an RCMP (Canadian federal police) drone collided with their own helicopter, they took 4 months to report the incident: https://skiesmag.com/news/rcmp-drone-flying-wrong-altitude-collided-helicopter-bc/ https://skiesmag.com/news/rcmp-drone-flying-wrong-altitude-c...
- giantg2 5y agoIf this happened I the US, I highly doubt the police would have admitted to it.
- tjohns 5y agoAssuming they're flying under Part 107 or as a public aircraft, the police drone operators would have the same obligation to report accidents to the NTSB as would a regular aircraft pilot.
- giantg2 5y agoAnd they're also required to report misconduct of other officers, but how often is that ignored...
- tjohns 5y agoThere's a photo of the damage here: https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/172-substantially-damaged-by-police-drone/ https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/172-substantially-damage... There's also a copy of the incident report here: https://wwwapps.tc.gc.ca/Saf-Sec-Sur/2/cadors-screaq/rd.aspx?occdtefrom%3d2021-08-10%26occdteto%3d2021-08-19%26srchfldcd%3d6%26txt%3dC-GKWL%26srchtype%3d2%26rt%3dWS%26hypl%3dy%26cnum%3d2021O1096 https://wwwapps.tc.gc.ca/Saf-Sec-Sur/2/cadors-screaq/rd.aspx... More generally, I really hope the drone manufacturers invest in genfencing off controlled airspace and installing ADS-B receivers as part of a sense-and-avoid scheme to avoid potential collisions entirely. As a pilot, I'm impressed by the work DJI has been doing in this space. (Though it's worth noting that sense-and-avoid won't solve the problem entirely, since there's a fair number of aircraft that are not transponder equipped. Canada also doesn't yet mandate ADS-B equipage.)
- jcrawfordor 5y agoThe details in the avweb article are pretty damning... 500 AGL and one mile final is not even "near an airport," it's very obviously right in front of the approach end. Hard to imagine how anyone was operating a drone there without complete reckless disregard for safety.
- walrus01 5y agoAny reasonably professional part 107 operator (or Canuck equivalent thereof) would say hell no to operating in the glideslope of a runway like that.
- tonyarkles 5y agoIn fact, Canada doesn’t distinguish between commercial and hobby RPAS operators. Anything over 250g needs at least a Basic license, and anything operating in controlled airspace needs an Advanced license and a filed SFOC. The basic license clarifies where you’re allowed to fly at all. Soooo these clowns either had no clue at all about the licensing, or just straight up didn’t care. The IR says that Nav Canada (ATC) wasn’t informed of the flight ahead of time, so pretty unlikely that an SFOC was involved.
- tzs 5y agoI had never heard the term "airbox" before. To save people some Googling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbox
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoI used to work in aviation. The police fly like they drive (i.e like the rules don't apply to them, because they don't). This isn't surprising in the least.
- tailius 5y agoUnaccountable mafia behavior. Until that changes, the public won't respect them except the fear of being summarily executed or property destroyed under qualified immunity.
- bernardv 5y agoButtonville airport is a small regional airport with few flights in/out on any given day. Anyone can monitor the tower on VHF and get a clue as to what is coming in, and some smaller planes do have ADS-B transponders and show-up on flightradar, or a basic SDR rig. It is flat terrain and any low-flying aircraft is visible well before it passes overhead. Can’t think of any excuse as to how this might have been allowed to happen.
- Buttons840 5y agoIs this the first known incident where a plane hit a drone operated by another person / organization?
- 8eye 5y agodon’t give them jet packs
- ncmncm 5y agoThat pilot is lucky the police didn't try to arrest him for damaging their drone. US cops would have. But he should sue them personally for reckless endangerment, and for repairs for the damage to his aircraft. Suing their department would do no good, beyond maybe getting his repairs paid for.