As a pilot, this has always been weird to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that people just don’t like drones. I think selling them to the masses is part of the answer.
I can build a tower (with exemptions for protected airspace) that’s 199ft in the US without any problem. To me, that basically says to any pilot “expect the unexpected if you fly lower than that,” which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.
> 199ft in the US .. which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.
Not to geophysical exploration pilots running gravity, radiometrics, magnetics, etc in modified crop dusters at 80m ground clearance and 70m/s.
199 ft ~= 60m which a survey line might bottom out at when draping over ridges, etc.
Literally millions and millions of line kilometres are flown at those specifications, entire countries (like Mali, Fiji, Australia, etc) have been covered at 200m line separation.
Insanely low for yourself is pretty much just another day in the cockpit in just another month long survey job for survey pilots.
Not to mention actual crop dusting and other STOL grunt work.
Those pilots are in the minority, and already accept a much higher level of risk. Also, drone flights that have been problematic are typically in congested areas (much like laser problems).
What might have been better is if the FAA had created a way for those pilots to create mini low-level TFRs or protected airspace to warn drone pilots not to fly their during inspections. It’s also worth mentioning that many survey jobs are being replaced by more advanced drones due to cost.
I do respect what you are saying, but having a foot on both sides of the fence can’t help but feel like the FAA had a knee-jerk reaction to drones.
If I fly a 600g drone below treetop level in a heavily forested, rural area, it will have 0 impact to aviation. This is currently illegal without licensing, additional hardware, or a flight notification. I find this silly.
In the light aircraft domain working survey and dusting aircraft ideally work all the daylight hours with pilots on shift to take over as daily flight hours pass personal limits.
The economics are such that the planes are always aloft, parked at night, or being maintained.
Air Transport companies price light passenger and mail runs on the basis of daily, perhaps twice daily A->B runs, Air Tractor companies price on the basis of 100,000 line kilometres jobs completed as rapidly as possible in order to move onto the next, there's a backlog of mineral exploration and agriculture work demanding more craft and pilots.
> and already accept a much higher level of risk.
I'm sorry, are you saying that makes it OK to add more risk to low level drafting by just allowing any old drone up in the air anywhere at all?
Until some form of comprehensive regulation is resolved and upheld with drone operators required to get clearance for airspaces it's still better to err on the side of human safety now.
Depends on the operator, K.Geophysics operated for 25+ years with 15+ airframes (mostly fixed wing, some heli's) with zero deaths or crashes.
Another company bought them out and had three major crashes and five deaths with the next two years.
You can put that down to quality of maintainance and route planning.
One crash due to engine failure on takeoff and climbing, a second due to tangling with power lines that were not on the flight plan, the third I'm unsure but IIRC it was maintainance again.
By cause these were crashes caused by poor support surrounding the work rather than intrinsic risk of low flying .. of which only the power line tangle had an element of, which wouldn't have happened had the support team down their homework.
In a fixed wing, altitude is absolutely your friend and gives you more options to land, which equates to a higher probability of finding a nicer emergency landing spot.
And to your point, power lines that are shorter than 199ft don’t have to be on the charts. I could erect a tower off major airways or near an airport to that height without prior warning.
I bet agriculture drones rarely need to fly more than 50 feet up. They probably spend the majority of their time around 5m. I doubt air traffic would be a big concern outside legal restrictions that might not be fine grained enough to know the difference
Maybe it’s confirmation bias, but I have heard of very few over-hydration cases whereas medical dehydration seems pretty common.
Granted the pressures for dehydration are a lot more common (hiking with too little water, running competitions, maybe little access to water in a hot climate, etc). Once one has ample access to water, I doubt there is much pressure to keep drinking to over-hydration.
My experience is the opposite. I've never witnessed serious dehydration, i.e. with symptoms beyond cramps, but I've encountered various cases of serious spontaneous over-hydration, including a heli evac. It's worth pointing out that my background is infantry, so we're generally mindful of drinking enough during marches, in arctic conditions and so on, which are some of the exceptions I'm talking about. On the less serious side, two friends have had "urinary tract abnormalities" due to generally drinking too much water daily because they bought into the "stay hydrated" hype.
With all that said: Yes, dehydration is probably more common. My point is simply that the goal is a good balance, not to drink excessively to "stay hydrated".
Indeed it was! Three day day-and-night march/exercise with hot temperatures even during the night due to midnight sun. We ended up getting resupplied with salt that we added to our canteens to avoid any more incidents. We were more used to arctic conditions and not fully prepared for something like that.
Interesting. Many years ago when I was doing initial motorbike racing training, the instructors gave us salt tablets due to the amount of sweat each of us lost each day wearing leather race gear + drinking water all day to make up for it.
I like Cloudflare, but this is also what makes me skeptical. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and I've had the rug pulled out from underneath me many times before. I wish they at least charged a sustainable amount for egress, because I feel like it's coming eventually.
Supposedly it’s not applicable to R2, but their Enterprise egress pricing is around the $0.05/GB rate. They won’t contact you though until you start to get close to the $5,000/month usage level, which itself can be a problem as your fee goes from $0/month to $5,000/month.
R2 still has per-request fees which, given PUTs are still $4.50/million and GETs $0.36/million (only about 10% off S3’s), they still have significant margin there to cover egress for objects of reasonable size.
One other benefit of paying up front is that I think you are less restricted on S3/Cloudfront in what you can host. I think Cloudflare has some restrictions (video files?) to keep costs more sane. Otherwise, you could spin up a YouTube clone extremely cheap.
Is that 14% different with solar? I’m just bringing this up, because solar is dead simple compared to engineering studies and infrastructure required to build something like a new nuclear plant. I wonder if the simplicity of solar and storage will start to change how power generation is approached.
It has the same cost as a successful response which can quickly add up to a few hundred dollars per month with a couple of DNS enumeration scans.
Google Cloud and Azure also bill DNS like this. Unless you need some of the advanced features you really shouldn't host your DNS in the big cloud providers.
It’s still a huge problem for people that have purchased domains. I bought one that apparently used to be a BT tracker, and gets on the order of several hundred NXDOMAIN requests per second.
I understand it’s still hitting Route53 infrastructure, but I’m not using it, and it’s not commonplace to charge for NXDOMAIN records. Because of this, I’m unable to host at AWS (prohibitively expensive for my use-case).
It’s worth mentioning that DNS infrastructure for things like this are very cheap (I used to self-host the DNS infrastructure for this domain for ~$2.5/mo), so the up charge is even worse that what AWS is charging for bandwidth. If they brought it in line with actual costs, I wouldn’t have as much of a problem.
Totally agree with this. In their defense (not that I like it), obviously the market is willing to pay what they charge. It’s unfortunate that the other big cloud providers haven’t driven prices down that much.
I think there's a bit of misconceptions that it's only long distance transmission lines that are affected. There's a lot of things that are affected. I guess the misunderstanding is understandable due to the famous "long distance lines catching on fire" occurrence during the Carrington event.
It was my understanding that radiation levels at Earths surface are still very low unless you had some kind of amplifying collector (ie - large antenna).
Devices at high altitudes and space are subjected to CME events quite often, and usually don't have many side effects other than degraded RF signal propagation.
What effects might you see at ground level in a normal microprocessor device? More bit flips than normal?
I was also expecting my satellite internet to degrade during the last CME that made the news (apologies - can’t remember the date), but it kept chugging along as if nothing had happened.
You make a great point about the resilience of certain tech during solar events. Most everyday electronics are shielded enough to handle minor solar disturbances, but the intense conditions of multiple X-class flares and a KP-9 geomagnetic storm like we're discussing can push beyond the usual scenarios.
Storms like this one flood the Earth's magnetosphere with energetic particles, increasing geomagnetic currents that can affect both large-scale and local infrastructure. This might lead to unusual behavior in ground-level electronics, such as increased bit flips, clock shifts, or even unexpected resets in sensitive systems.
As for satellites, their advanced shielding often keeps them running smoothly, which likely explains why your internet service didn't get borked. But during extreme events like now, disruptions to satellite functions and GPS signals will occur, as these systems face direct exposure to the storm's impact. Most likely spare capacity rerouted to supply your link during the impact.
I think it's interesting that secondary particles formed when these high-energy solar particles smash into atmospheric molecules also make their way down to us. These include muons and neutrons—particles that, while generally harmless, can penetrate deep into the atmosphere and occasionally impact ground-level electronics, adding another layer of interaction during severe solar events.
There's also the way that alterations to the flux of EM fields induced locally by the larger currents fluxing in the global electric circuit can cause glitches in microelectronics. And how the fluxing of current in the Earth's magnetosphere causes electron and other charged particle release from the ground. All of these things are amped up now and can contribute.
This whole interaction of solar activity / space weather with our technology is a dynamic area of study—there's always more to learn about how these cosmic and solar stuff affect our ground based or Earth based tech. Hahaha! :)
Thanks! :) Haha! I think the ISS hull uses classified shielding to provide some kind of advanced protection. But it's expensive and based on materials science activated with electric fields. I think they also have some detection system to detect and correct single-event effects. Just info tho, I don't have an article source for this haha! :)
Even then astronnauts may be advised to not use some devices during specific solar weather, or to move to safer parts of the craft hahaha! :)
Regarding some more general info you might be interested in:
Same here, it gives me structure if the amount of arrange code is large. It also gives me structure when writing, as it can sometimes be very tempting to mix act and assert statements
I can build a tower (with exemptions for protected airspace) that’s 199ft in the US without any problem. To me, that basically says to any pilot “expect the unexpected if you fly lower than that,” which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.
reply