How would traffic controllers handle them over US or busy cities? Just see them on radar, would they know that this object is not someone drone? Or would they rely on matching with a flight plan and expect it.
Depends on the type of drones you want to use and their range. Helicopter-like drones have very poor range and flight time, so this would limit your range considerably. And if you go to a plane-like drone, or even some kind of hybrid mode (eg. VTOL), suddenly you can't really do an emergency hover when cruising to destination.
But even if they find a way to handle the traffic, I was just saying that there will be traffic and that this poses serious problems.
I'm a pilot and can't make sense of 'the plane had to take evasive action to avoid the drone' - I'm skeptical I'd see a drone, unless it were huge, I'm even more skeptical I'd be able to evaluate and take action in time once I did see it. A drone is almost certainly below me in altitude which means it's against the ground as the background. I don't think I have much of a chance of seeing it at all unless it's painted in DayGlo and has strobes. Any else got an idea if you'd see anything in time? I'm flown near geese, they were definitely trying to avoid me, otherwise it wouldn't have ended well. So I've got a sneaky suspicion if I'm on a collision course with a drone, it's going to get hit unless the drone pilot prevents it.
I've never piloted a drone or a jet in my life, so I'm genuinely asking: is it likely that an inbound jet would be able to spot a drone and take evasive action?
I wonder how easy it would be to make drones have a stronger radar signal? It's probably not nice to clutter up the displays of ATC, but it would be I think a more direct solution for controlled airspace
Mandatory transponders on drones might not be the worst idea. I'm sure soon enough police will learn to look for the signals.
Many drones are 2.4ghz something something. What if airport police monitored the frequency around the airport? Then use signal finding to capture controllers?
Unless there are literally 50+ of these, they'll most likely be completely invisible. If there are 50+ there's also a good chance of a couple collisions. Given how expensive the drone + camera + transmitter must be, I doubt this is a serious concern anytime soon though.
I wonder if/when they'll require drones to have a transponder that will allow identification via radar similar to what airplanes are required to have and operate.
What if, just hypothetical, it was a swarm. (I don't think it was in this case).
I mean private persons can use drone swarms to put pictures on the night sky.
And while they are rout pre-programmed, it's not hard to use a template to very fast pre-program a drone swarm to fly some pseudo randomized pattern around a ship of which the position is known.
Surely there’s going to eventually be drones that don’t go boom? Those would be nice to retrieve
A wall of floating drones that go boom if you come too close sounds like a terrifying likely future. Especially if they’re too small to properly show up on radar
The airport has fire trucks, same thing really. Not sure you'd accurately reach a drone from the ground though, since it could be > 1000ft AGL and they'd still have to close the airport.
It would actually be very interesting to see what would get dispatched - at what point do they give up trying to contact the operator? Do they go for electronic warfare to wrest control of it, or do they capture the physical drone? What kind of response time would they have?
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