Footage Reveals Drone Aircraft Nearly Downed Passenger Plane in 2004 206
Newly released footage, writes reader Wowsers, shows that in 2004 "A German drone aircraft was within meters of bringing down a passenger aircraft with 100 people on board. The link shows stills from onboard the drone. The incident had been hushed up for nine years, and is creating waves in Germany now the footage has been leaked out."
Yes it is real (Score:5, Informative)
No it's not a Photoshop. The drone is not equiped with an automatic preventation system against collisions. The accident nearly happened in Afghanistan. The whole discussion came up by the mistakes which were made and the money which was spend on the Eurohawk project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_RQ-4_Global_Hawk)
Re:Is it Real? (Score:5, Informative)
As best I can tell, the footage is from the forward-facing camera, whose view is slightly obscured by the nose-antenna-harpoon-thing [wikimedia.org](technical term) visible on the front of the drone in this shot.
That would presumably also be present in competent fake footage; but it is consistent with the line of sight that you'd infer from the drone's layout, and from the shots on the manufacturer's puff page [emt-penzberg.de].
Newly released footage? (Score:5, Informative)
The video on YouTube is dated Dec 2006...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NOar22TX2k
How is this newly released footage? (Score:3, Informative)
The video exists on YouTube since December 2006
Re:We need a box which scans for drone video (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Newly released footage? (Score:5, Informative)
99% of the Daily Mail's web content is stuff they found on the internet at lunch time, so I assume "newly released" means "someone just emailed us this with some cat memes".
Re:It is going to be a when, not an if. (Score:5, Informative)
If you're flying ANYTHING in a manner where a millisecond response time matters, you're flying wrong. If you're flying CLOSE ENOUGH to things that a millisecond error in your response is critical, you're flying too close or completely off the flight plan.
This is why we don't take chances with air-traffic-control. It's not unusual for planes to be MILES away from each other and still be called a "near miss". At the sorts of speeds you're talking about, you cover WAY TOO MUCH space too quickly to be able to "get out of the way" - you should just not be within miles of each other.
As such, even UAV's are subject to the same kinds of safety distances. This one obviously a) wasn't on a flightplan, b) was straying off its flightplan or c) was misdirected by (or ignorant of) the local equivalent of air-traffic-control.
One day a drone will hit a passenger-carrying aircraft. One day a passenger jet will take off with both engines hatches undone, causing an engine failure and potential fire in both engines when it snaps off and damages the engine (London Heathrow, last week). One day someone will get on a plane and bomb it (not 9/11 - think Lockerbie back in the 1980's!). These things will all happen. The way we reduce casualties is NOT to ban planes (although, obviously, that works perfectly!!), but to apply controls. In this case, the controls already exist and are in place. If people didn't follow them? Take away their UAV pilot's licence.
A classic Daily Wail srory (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Fixed (Score:5, Informative)
Footage Reveals Drone Aircraft Neatly Avoids Passenger Plane in 2004, Testament To Drone Technology.
Fixed.
From TFA:
The 88lb German 'Luna' drone was caught in air turbulence created by the Ariana passenger plane, before losing control and crash landing near the Afghan capital, Kabul.
Uh, yea, not really "neatly avoid[ing]" when the damn thing crashes as a result.
88lb (Score:5, Informative)