So how long before quads are illegal?

I love your optimism :slight_smile: If you’re flying a duck with an ADS-B anywhere within the US or Europe, not only will the government know every movement you make, so will an army of enthusiasts (flightaware, flightradar etc), and published live on public websites. Yes, it’s a privacy issue (the clue’s in the name - Automatic Dependant Surveillance Broadcast).

No quads are going to get banned. The ADS-B requirement for 2020 currently DOES NOT apply to UAV’s. It’s in the NPR. The problem is that ADS-B out requires a TSO’d GPS, which is currently quite expensive. And with ADS-B ATC and manned aircraft do not need their screens cluttered up with a bunch of drones flying around in the city park.

So I don’t think it will actually ever go thru, except for commercial UAV operators that want to operate UAV’s at high altitudes with the manned aircraft and integrate them into controlled airspace. And this is eventually coming.

Municipalities can, and already have, enacted laws that restrict you from flying your drones in certain areas. But that is not a ban. It is currently not even illegal in the US to fly your UAV over somebody else’s land, as they don’t control the airspace over their land. That doesn’t mean a land owner can’t bring a civil suit for invasion of privacy if you do, but it likely won’t hold up in court any more than it would trying to bring a suit against somebody for flying a Cessna 152 over their land.

The main issue that exists is interfering with operation of manned aircraft. And when the things are being spotted regularly at high altitudes and around airports, it’s a real issue. I don’t know how it’s going to be dealt with but an outright ban on “drones” is not in any NPR I’ve ever seen.

Exactly what right to privacy do you have operating an aircraft in the National Airspace System? None. If you want privacy you can fly it in your living room all you want, knock holes in the walls with it, terrorize the cat, buzz the dinner table, and nobody can do anything about it… But out in public where your aircraft can cause personal property damage, injury, or interfere with other aircraft, all your privacy is voluntarily given up just like driving your car on public roads. You have to obey laws or your privilege of driving your car in public will be taken away.

Edit:
I should not say nobody can do anything about it in your living room. I got banned from flying my little MCPx helicopter in the house. Wife.

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Despite Transport Canada’s new equipment requirement for geese, they do have a more sensible NPR for commercial UAV’s operated in rural vs urban areas than the FAA does in the US. Part 107 in the US is a bad joke.

DOH! I guess it’s back to my original question:

Sorry, I’m still trying to figure out forums reply’s on this forum …

This doesn’t show any collisions that brought down an airplane with a drone.

Me too. I had to go outside to play.

No. The FAA reports show how many drones are being flown illegally. And is the primary reason for the NPR on ADS-B transponders. The FAA’s thinking is that if all aircraft are required to have them, when one is spotted flying illegally we can track down who’s doing it. Slap them with a $25,000 fine and make an example out of them to get the message out that you don’t do that.

The problem with their thinking is that if somebody wants to fly a drone illegally they’ll just build one without a transponder and do it anyway. That’s why I don’t think it will actually be signed into law, because surely somebody who writes the laws in Congress is smart enough to figure that out. Right?

My little humorous comment on ‘‘Goose on Screen’’ was an illustration of the magnitude of the problem. Mid-air strike is a risk that will always be present, and any pilot will have to cope with it.

IMHO a drone strike is imminent, its just a matter of when, but on the other hand the same risk exist, if not higher, of having a drone crashing in a truck windshield and causing a major accident on a highway. In this case, no transponder will prevent this to happen.

Using technology to optimize and accelerate air traffic is a good idea, using technology for substitute for lack of knowledge and stupidity is an endless story.

This will happen with a quad falling from the sky.

There is one documented case of a drone flying on a highway and crashing and getting ran over, but these would be extremely rare (I hope). Maybe this was the only occurrence.

ADS-B is a huge plus for commercial operators. Just not practical for private/recreational use. I already have it on one of my helicopters and I love it because it allows me to fly fields around three airports I fly all time with no hassles. But you can’t put it on a 250 race quad and really get anything useful out of having on there.

The FAA’s current plan to require it on all “drones”, I don’t think, will work. But that’s what they got in the pipeline.

Wow, there’s so much misinformation in this thread that I have to break my vow of silence.

No one is planning to “ban” recreational model aircraft of any type.
The FAA does NOT have plans to require ADS-B on sUAS.

While local municipalities have tried to pass laws restricting sUAS flight in their jurisdiction, a Federal court in Massachusetts recently ruled against such restrictions. The court verified that federal law preempts them from enacting any laws regarding flight. The ruling only applies to Massachusetts, but it can be referenced in other Federal courts.

49 USC § 40103 - Sovereignty and use of airspace
(a) Sovereignty and Public Right of Transit.—
(1) The United States Government has exclusive sovereignty of airspace of the United States.

Only the FAA may regulate flight.
Only the FAA may create a no-fly-zone

Any contact or near contact with a manned aircraft would be a bad thing, but it is the overwhelming exception that the news media wants you to perceive that personal drones are an out of control threat to life. Personal drones are just not the menace that the news and general public want them to be. Most of the reported drone sightings near airports are unverified, and some of them are physically impossible to have been a personal drone due to reported altitude and speed. And a lot are questionable when the reporting pilot can see and identify a dinner-plate sized object hundreds or thousands of feet away while flying well in excess of 150 MPH. And all of “drone sighting” reports in the FAA database are uncorroborated by another crew member.

Many of the sighting reports put the drone in Class G airspace and more than 500 ft from the reporting aircraft. In other words, operating a legal flight.

This is what we in the rational world call “Fear Mongering”. Keep the risk of personal drones in perspective.
The panic, here, is completely out of any sort of proportion to reality.

Today (if this is an average day in the U.S.):
1560 people will die from Cancer
268 people in US hospitals will die because of medical mistakes.
162 people will be wounded by firearms in the US.
117 Americans will die in an automobile accident.
98 people in the US will die from the flu.
53 people will kill themselves with a firearm.
46 children will suffer eye injuries.
37 will die from AIDS.
30 people will die in gun-related murders.
3 General Aviation airplanes will crash in the US.
0 people will be seriously injured or killed by a small drone accident.

Zero. Why are so many otherwise rational people so terrified of zero?

There is absolutely no factual evidence to support the fear and ignorance around small personal drones. There have been more than a million hours of flight of small drones, yet there is not one verifiable report of a collision between a small drone and a manned civilian aircraft. Not one. While there’s never been a verified contact between an sUAS and a civilian aircraft, the military has some experience in that regard. In all cases the aircraft was virtually unscathed while the UAS was “smashed to pieces.”

How is one small personal drone going to take out all the engines on a multi-engine airliner? This is the kind of baseless comparisons that the press uses to drive ‘drone paranoia’. It took a flock of Canadian geese to take Sullenberg’s multi-engine airliner. If a drone strike happens, yes there will be damage to the aircraft costing maybe millions to repair, but the aircraft pilot will keep flying on the remaining engine to return to the airport and land safely.

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The FAA has a NPR on it. Based on FAA Advisory Circular 90-48D (pilot reaction times) and industry pressure from manufacturers of low power ADS-B out systems for UAV aircraft. The proposal is that the FAA will open more airspace to UAV’s that can be integrated into the NAS with ADS-B out technology.

DJI already has ADS-B on their Matrice 200, receiver only. And DJI is the major driving force in FAA advisory on what to do in making rules for UAV’s.

Not necessarily. Some airplanes cannot continue flight with one engine out. Others can handle an in-flight engine loss and continue to a safe landing but cannot handle ground to air transition. So take, for instance, the B737 which I am type-rated in - loss of one engine means the airplane is only going to be able to make a turn in one direction, can only make one approach as it does not have enough thrust for adequate climb performance to execute a missed approach, and upon landing the thrust reversers can’t be used and the possibility of overrun is very real depending on the airfield.

This is a misconception by the general public that multi-engine aircraft are safe if one engine is lost. The facts are, flight with multi-engine aircraft with engine out carry a much higher risk of fatality compared with single engine aircraft and constitute 9% of all fatal crashes in GA and commercial combined. Although statistically, the fatal crash rate in single engine GA aircraft has been 1.41/100,000 hours of flight time for years, the numbers are somewhat skewed because multi-engine aircraft are typically flown in more adverse conditions.

But still, there is no such thing in multi-engine aircraft as simply “keep flying on the remaining engine to return to the airport and land safely”. It just doesn’t work that way. Flame out one engine in a 737-300 and it takes full rudder with the other engine at 100% thrust just to make it fly. At it’s full gross weight of 139,500 lbs if a drone is ingested by one engine on climbout after rotation, not only is flight performance severely compromised, we can’t land it without dumping fuel. The max landing weight is 115,800 lbs. The 56-3B2 turbofans in the 737-300 can usually handle a bird with damage to a few compressor and fan blades and still keep running and producing thrust. Ingesting hard parts of a drone would flame the engine out , cause catastrophic damage to the fan and compressor, and the resultant vibration would likely tear it loose from the mount.

We do not want to be ingesting drones into turbofan engines. The plastic parts wouldn’t be much of an issue. But the hard mass of the battery would wreak havoc. You might as well throw a rock into it.

It’s not “fear mongering”. It must be prevented.

This I have to agree on. There has never been any bans of any sort ever even put on the radar of law makers. Regulations, limitations and restrictions, pilot requirements, aircraft requirements - all a possibility. And I must say I like Transport Canada’s NPR on regulating use of “drones”. The FAA many times fails to impress me with their ideas. Like their across-the-board registration requirement for all UAV’s (even their terminology of sUAS really sucks) that was eventually thrown out.

I do not think the current NPR on requiring all UAV’s to have ADS-B will work. It would be a plus for commercial aircraft. I do not think the current Part 107 rules are workable in the long term. Part 107 was a knee-jerk reaction to industry pressure to “do something”. In reality it does nothing except burden hobbiests that might want to run a part-time aerial photography business with excessive regulation that achieves nothing in the form of enhanced safety. Regulating the snot out of somebody who wants to run a part-time aerial photography business is not going to stop the people who want to fly drones around airports, ground firefighting aircraft by flying where they’re not supposed to be, and doing whatever other stupid things people come up with to do with drones.

What’s the NPRM number? If there is one, I am sure I would have seen it
by now.

What possible good does an ADS-B receiver do for a Drone Pilot?

ADS-B is not certified to operate below 500 ft except near airports, and
the drone pilot is supposed to be watching the drone, not a screen that
tells him that there’s an ADS-B equipped aircraft five miles
that-a-way. Finally, not all aircraft will have ADS-B Out by 2020 and
some even in Class B airspace will be exempt. ADS-B Out is not required
for aircraft in the rural countryside that won’t be flying in airspace
requiring Mode-C transponders.

As your own response said. If a small drone manages to take out a
single engine of a multi-engine aircraft - it is not going to crash!
Yes, managing the flight will be a lot of work- probably more than
either pilot on board has ever faced before. But, please do not join
the crowd that screams “IT’S A DRONE, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE”!

Your statement that " Ingesting hard parts of a drone would flame the
engine out , cause catastrophic damage to the fan and compressor, and
the resultant vibration would likely tear it loose from the mount." is
pure speculation because it’s never happened.

Yes, I have seen the computer modeling of an 8-pound drone ingested into
a 9-ft turbofan. While it’s not pretty, and definitely expensive, the
aircraft is unlikely to crash. From the study:
“So there is little doubt that a drone of this large size would cause
catastrophic engine failure. This sort of damage would be consistent
with the type of damage that occurs regularly with a ingestion of a
large bird. However thanks to FAA standards for aircraft engine design
https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/advisory_circulars/index.cfm/go/document.information/documentID/99690,
the failure and detachment of a rotor blade is anticipated, and must be
contained within the engine
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2002-title14-vol1/xml/CFR-2002-title14-vol1-sec33-19.xml.”

Congress has directed the FAA to design a test to failure of a drone
ingestion. The tests are expected in 2018 as a final test of other
planned engine tests.

Note that nowhere have I ever said that it won’t happen. /I never said
that/. Only that it hasn’t happened after millions of hours of drone
flight. I don’t excuse irresponsible drone pilots, but I will not join
the doom and gloom chorus that sees the end of our industry with every
drone sighting report, even the unverified ones.

Steve Mann

I don’t remember the NPR number without looking it up but it was over a year ago. For the purpose of Part 107 the FAA said they would use regulation to prevent incursion of UAV’s into manned aircraft airspace and consider it in the future when TSO’d UAV ADS-B systems come to market. You should be able to find it on the FAA’s website. There was one entire page in it, with recommendations from numerous commentors on the document to make it mandatory.

Who concluded this? You simply can’t conclude such a thing because not all engines are the same, not all airframes are the same. I could name two dozen turboprop thru turbofan powered aircraft, commonly flown for regional and national air passenger service, where catastrophic failure of an engine after rotation would LIKELY lead to a crash. In cruise flight is a different issue. There’s no sense belaboring the point. You’re not going to convince anybody that ingesting a drone into an aircraft engine is No Big Deal and it just flies happily on to a safe landing. It hasn’t happened. And let’s keep it that way. Because if it does happen it won’t be good for the entire drone industry. And that’s the point of regulation, restrictions, and requirements for drones. To prevent it.

This is completely inaccurate. To be certified twin engined airplanes must be able to take off at planned takeoff weight and meet the climb gradients on the departure. They can turn both ways and must be able to do a single engine go around. While the inoperative engine thrust reverser doesn’t work, the other one does and is used to slow the airplane down upon landing.

I agree with many of your points but felt compelled to separate fact from fiction.

This is why I maintain radio silence- people like you only want to read
what they want to, not what I said.
I NEVER SAID that ingesting a drone into a turbofan was " … No Big Deal ".
I said:

  1. It has never happened.
  2. It will be expensive, messy and the A/C will have to land ASAP.
  3. A crash from a single drone is exceedingly unlikely.

The part 25 certification standard requires that a multi-engine aircraft
can can climb at full gross with the loss of one engine in all flight
configurations
. Once the aircraft reaches V1 it is committed to
flight! The pilot calculated the Critical Engine Failure Speed (CEFS)
prior to push and the calculated takeoff power setting is designed to be
sufficient to allow a single engine takeoff and climb after an engine
failure. Yes, more thrust is available and if you need it, you use it.
But if the aircraft is climbing, why introduce more adverse yaw?

I never said it wouldn’t happen and I never said it was no big deal.

There is no NPRM for ADS-B on sUAS. If there had been, I would have
seen it because I subscribe to the FAA Recently Published Rulemaking
Documents
(https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/rulemaking/recently_published/).

Out!

Gentlemen, FAR Part 25 Type Cert requires a twin be certified at 2.4% gross or 1.6% net gradient, but SID’s are based on 3.3%. And this is ONLY for Part 121. It does not apply to Part 135.

Further, the type cert only requires Vmca to be demonstrated at 5 degrees bank into the live engine(s) at full rudder, maintaining constant heading.

But I digress. I could make a list of multi-engine crashes caused by engine out going clear back to 1950 someone would still insist it “just isn’t so” because there’s a law that says it just can’t happen! Yes, indeeed this discussion is badly gone downhill.

You’re being ridiculous. The causes of crashes with an engine out have been where hydraulics (or something else) was also damaged.

Name a twin-engine airplane that was designed not to fly with an engine out.

I really shouldn’t, but I will get involved in the discussion. The bait is too delicious. :wink:

If anything I pose the more important question of when Governments will no longer be allowed to act illegally.

The airspace needs to regulated to the benefit of it’s citizens, not the corporations or their political derivatives.