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.
I would liken it to the Wild West, where anybody with money can buy a fairly large quadcopter and go fly it without many consequences. I'm glad there is a push to get these registered.
I think one of the reasons there isn't a greater push for safety (licensing and insurance) is you're not seeing the stories that would compel the general public to react and have a large outcry over drones yet. Yes, you've seen some privacy issues surrounding them, but stuff like kids getting severely injured or this causing a ten car pile up on the highway hasn't happened yet - or at least not that I'm aware of.
Thus, with no major public outcry, the politicians have no desire to push for laws that regulate the industry and the people using them. I'm sure in time, we'll start see more stringent regulation of drones, but for now, there is little if any.
full disclosure: I own several drones and do aerial videography as part of my job.
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.
The info was on rec.models.rc.air and rec.models.rc.heli and flyinggiants.com for scale enthusiasts, and runryder for heli enthusiasts, and .... etc. They are fantastic resources,but they aren't in-person help.
Local clubs were a much better experience, because they could tell you about the local stores, or lend you the tools and supplies that you only need once (I'm looking at you, green loctite), or help you assemble that tricky part that has terrible instructions.
Also, in a time before ready to fly models, everything came as a broken down, or partially assembled kit. Having someone who knew what they were doing check that you had assembled your very expensive model correctly was an enormous benefit. For a new pilot, having an experienced pilot fly your airplane for the first time, and sort out the trim, etc saved a lot of people a lot of time, money and heartache.
You don't really need any of that with a multicopter - they're so much simpler mechanically. I can see how they've gotten away without that kind of community, but i still think it's a major loss.
Exactly this. The quality of advice is also much better. The first thing they'll tell you is "you need to get insurance, these things are not toys".
Now you can walk into Maplin (UK electronics store) and buy a £200 drone as a Christmas gift for your 12 year old. The rep who sells you the drone won't tell you about insurance, or how dangerous they can be, or anything...
It might be worse in some ways, but I'm really referring to the fact that I had to go to a specific group of people (a club) and request information. They gave me the best quality information. The same probably would've happened if I went to a aeromodelling shop (back then the nearest one was an hour drive away).
I went Christmas shopping today and saw various £200+ drones for sale in high street shops. You can walk in, buy one, and walk out no questions asked.
Great in many ways, terrible in others. It gives no opportunity to raises issues about liability and the fact that these things are not really toys.
One of the first things I learnt at my club was just how easily a prop will take off your finger (by way of a carrot). They are not toys.
Why would you assume a major TV broadcaster wouldn't use sufficiently capable pilots and not have insurance? I would be shocked if they were not very well insured.
Sorry, I wasn't really commenting on this exact situation in particular - more the general problem of enthusiast drones which is becoming quite a hot topic in my country (UK).
I'm sure they had insurance and I'm sure the pilot was competent!
People pretty much fly toy quadcopters the same way people open their car door into your car door, bang it up and don't give a damn.
It's somewhere between apathy and "try to catch/stop me".
The required registration now is almost hilarious, it's just going to be a way to give a huge fine after an incident for unregistered drones, no-one is going to register unless all the stores get together and do it for you when you buy it automatically (and then people will just buy direct from China).
Well drones are ideally suited to eventually being equipped with light weight sensors to prevent collisions. If the tech could be on cameras, I think it was ultrasonic, surely it has improved enough that even simply avoidance systems are possible.
It's not that easy.
Ultrasonics don't work well in fast moving air. High resolution time-of-flight cameras as extremely expensive. Parallax camera systems have prohibitive processing requirements (that may change). Structured light sensors are prone to being blinded by the sun.
AMA for one. It's more like a membership than anything, and they provide guidance and some basic insurance coverage for when things happen, which they hardly ever do. Most fields require you are an AMA member and that you have insurance. Most home owners insurance covers this as well, or at least it did a few years back.
There are three tiers that I remember. A, B, and C. You get insurance through the BMFA, and an A licence allows you to fly solo. B is required for performing at shows. C is for bigger models and teaching/exams etc (iirc).
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.
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.
Yup. And the carnage created brought operator licensing, mandatory registration, mandatory & regulated insurance for personal liability in most states and a substantial traffic code + police to enforce said code.
But people have been flying RC forever. It's not like it's a new hobby. AMA has been around for 80 years. It's just a fad right now. Everyone couldn't fly 4 channel airplanes or 6 channel helicopters, but a monkey could fly a quadcopter.
The same guy who gets into RC airplanes and helis is not the same person who gets into quadcopters. From what I've seen the quadcopter community does not feel like the regular RC community. Very reckless bunch of folks from what I've seen, and they're ruining it for all the other RC folks like me who have flown for 20+ years with no problems.
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.
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.
I also read, maybe when a kid, that in the early days of cars, a hired person had to walk on the road ahead of the car to notify horses and humans that a car was coming, with a flag or something ...
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.
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:
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm pretty sure it was capable of this; I just don't think many units have this enabled and running, as opposed to the always-on recorders mandated for commercial aviation.
The Pixhawk controller (that many of us from the RC / tech community use) can record so much data that it can be overwhelming.
The commercial 3D Robotics SOLO uses an updated version of the same controller, and has such data logging enabled continuously. In fact, it -also- streams it continuously to its controller unit; even if you lose the drone there will be enough data in the controller to figure out what happened. 3DR uses that to back their flyaway warranty (if a SOLO flys away or crashes due to a software/hardware fault vs user error, 3DR will replace the entire thing free)
(I'm not affiliated with 3DR other than owning a Pixhawk.)
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.
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.
> Either way it could have done the skier quite some damage
Not either way.
If it was the pilot's mistake then yes, but if power was lost then the blades would not have had much force anymore. They can cause very serious cuts when propelled, but half a second after losing power they hardly have any momentum left. Tripping the skier over would likely have been the worst of it, if a loss of power was the case.
Either way, safeguards may be necessary when flying so close to fragile objects...
A drone like this that has lost power is essentially a flying brick. If you get hit by a brick, you generally suffer damage. Add to that the fact that the guy had accumulated some serious momentum, and getting hit by this drone could easily turn into career-ending, or even life-ending injury.
Slalom is fast-ish but not ridiculous like downhill. Falling in slalom is common and even for crazy falls it rarely leads to major injuries. Compare that to downhill where falling often causes serious injuries. If this had been a downhill race it would have been a near-letal accident.
Still, hitting the "solid" bit of the drone (camera, battery), which is probably over 1kg for this type of pro footage, the skier would definitely have been injured.
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.
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.
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.
There is no way to avoid all and any risks - you just can't have 100% safety and reliability. What you could do is push for increasing the safety (at the cost of something else, obviously). What you're looking for is preventing avoidable mistakes, and minimizing damage if Something Really Bad happens.
If a decent pilot is following the existing rules/recommendations, then they won't be flying over people, or at least anyone other than themselves, so when something goes wrong, they are extremely unlikely to hurt anyone.
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."
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.
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."
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-contr...
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.
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 ;))
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?).
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.
There is no proof that the airbag was responsible for his injuries and at least the German version of the news article isn't making any accusations like this.
Same FIS skiing TV event/discipline, both incidents involve mechanical engineering, computer hardware and software.
Both are currently featured in the news and are controversial. The second one happened just a few days earlier.
Same skiing nation (in 5 races, 4 of their favorities were knocked out for (broken bones, etc)). The involved companies came in both incidents from the same country (coincidence, doesn't mean anything).
But instead of downvoting, maybe just ignore it? Several downvoted/flagged it, but a lot more upvoted it. It seems other use a throw away user account to post controversial comments...
Anecdotally, all the news in the U.S. I've heard around the athlete wearing the airbag was quite contradictory to the assertion that the airbag exacerbated the problem; the story was that it actually may have saved him from much greater injuries.
On day one yes. The serious injuries were found out later in hospital, the picture changed the next day. If you read the article, several persons with different views are quoted including U.S. American Ted Ligety... (The follow up articles are usually not on page one.)
Who else is quoted in the article with an opinion similar to Ted Ligety's? Also, I don't want to insinuate bad motives, but it should be pointed out that he is a co-founder of slytech (http://slytechprotection.com/athlete/ted-ligety/).
This is what angers me when it comes to the whole drone industry. I've been flying model airplanes and heli's for over thirty years. I've owned planes costing in excess of $20K. They are FUCKING TOYS BUILT WITH TOY TECHNOLOGY.
All of these companies, like DJI, and irresponsible operators, are ruining the hobby and placing property and people in danger.
I would never, in a million years, think of flying anything over people, crowds, kids, homes, commercial buildings, etc.
All of these systems are 0 F.T. (zero fault tolerant). Which means your decision making while flying them has to reflect the reality that the thing can fall out of the sky at any instant and there will be little or no control when this happens.
What this means in practical terms is that you fly these things EXACTLY as we've been flying model airplanes for decades: Away from people and property. In general, at approved flying fields (clubs) or in the middle of nowhere.
Bullshit like this is what is causing the FAA to now start down the path of treating model airplanes like guns: They are all bad. Never mind that millions of people have owned them for decades, fly them all the time and never hurt anyone. My fleet of probably thirty or so planes and helicopters has never placed even as much as a cat in danger. But, no, thanks to the stupid fucks who do crap like this now I have to register with the government because my planes and helicopters are going to magically charge their batteries, assemble themselves, open the garage door, fly out and hurt people, all while I am watching TV at home.
The irony isn't lost on me here. This is exactly the gun argument. Drones don't hurt people, stupid people with drones hurt people. Let's go after them, not the drones.
"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)
To clarify these are airbags designed to protect you in a downhill crash (which are usually very violent for big alpine riders) but avalanche airbags that help you rise to the top of the stream of snow have been pretty standard equipment for the past ~5 years.
This sounds very much like the slow adoption of the HANS Device in NASCAR. The guy who developed said he sold maybe 200 in the first ten years.
That all changed when Dale Earnhardt died of a basilar skull fracture, and then the drivers lined up to get them. It's now standard equipment on all NASCAR vehicles.
Not only that, but Alpinestars sells a street jacket with an airbag system - along with their race suit. Hit Air (a system worn over your suit) has been in use by track riders for a couple of years now.
In addition to applying Hanlon's Razor more liberally I'd encourage you to let go of the nationalist worldview if only for the sake of not feeding the trolls.
Thank you,
a fellow European (specifically, from Austria as well)
I was an American expat in England for 2 years and can vouch that culture was much more cycling friendly. However, you still got the occasional "white van man" and this was his favorite argument: http://ipayroadtax.com/
And there's no single word for Schadenfreude in English, but it exists there as well ;)
IIRC, it's a traffic offense in Germany, too (as well as here in Prague ;)). While city centers may be pedestrianized again, it's bound to be an uphill battle for some time.
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.
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.
Some of it's also that the large-scale buildout of automotive infrastructure happened at a time when governments at all levels in the US had pretty wide latitude to "make things so." While there are some pretty bad examples of urban planning from that era, there are other things that are pretty much net positives. This includes much of the interstate highway system but also includes other projects like Lincoln Center in New York. Today, for better or worse, outside of extreme urban blight it would be incredibly difficult for a city government to just bulldoze an entire neighborhood.
The same flamewar that suggests that when someone with a gun shoots people, the fault lies with the victims who were not carrying their own guns for self-defense?
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.
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)
> 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.
> 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.
Most RC'ers I know are very intentional about when and where they fly; they aren't strapping a GoPro to them and flying them all around the city randomly and presuming they have the right to do so.
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.
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.)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.