A U.S. airliner almost collided with a drone while flying over Florida in March, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Jim Williams, head of the unmanned-aircraft office at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), mentioned the incident publicly during a drone conference in San Francisco on Thursday, according to the Journal. Williams said the pilot of the plane told officials that on March 22 he came very close to a “small remotely piloted aircraft” around 2,300 feet above the ground near Tallahassee Regional Airport in Florida.
“The airline pilot said that he thought the [drone] was so close to his jet that he was sure he had collided with it,” Williams said, according to the Journal.
Williams said an inspection of the plane found no damage, but that the “the risk for a small [drone] to be ingested into a passenger airline engine is very real.”
The Journal reported that the flight in question was US Airways Flight 4650, out of Charlotte, N.C., and was operated by a US Airways subsidiary. US Airways, in turn, is part of American Airlines. The pilot of the 50-seat jet described the drone to officials “as a camouflaged F-4 fixed-wing aircraft that was quite small.”
Gretchen West, executive vice president for the drone trade group Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, told the Journal that the incident showed the need for the FAA to “come up with the rules to create a safe environment.”
my prediction, the idiots in Washington are not going to bar drones until one falls out the sky and kills a child or a major catastrophe
“come up with the rules to create a safe environment.”
First rule of Drone Club*: Do not fly near real airports.
*actually a rule-of-thumb, basic common sense. The fact that it is in the handbook is solely so idiots and morons don’t bring down a commercial airliner.
Or, as suggested in the article, is ingested by a jetliners engine, possibly resulting in a major catastrophe. The WSJ also says the drone operator is unknown at this time. Fly the friendly skies, indeed!
A drone crashed into a skyscraper this week here. Could most certainly have been at the same height as a plane. How many millions of these does Amazon want to put in the sky to delivery packages?
It sounds terrible and shocking until you realize that millions of birds that don’t know any better are also in the sky. They hit planes only very rarely and even then do not usually do any serious damage.
They can certainly ban “drones”, but since they are nothing more than some motors, battery, and simple radio electronics it won’t stop anyone nefarious.
The FAA is mentioning this because they want to expand their authority.