The drone penetrated the wing and broke spars. It is very easy for such an impact to also destroy control surface cabling, wiring, or hydraulics which certainly can cause a plane crash.
What brought down Flight 1549 was damage to the core of both engines. If the birds just damaged the fans, then the aircraft probably would have been able to return and land safely.
I'd be more concerned about a DJI Phantom type drone going through the windscreen of a light aircraft and injuring the pilot.
Engines on planes are made to chuck a flock of birds without exploding, i think the plane would have been "fine" (aka no human casualties) even if it did hit the drone.
Assuming it was a quad-copter not an actual military drone.
I'm not an aviation expert, but it's not implausible to me that the propeller is fragile enough to get bent by a stream of jet fuel traveling at fighter-jet speeds.
On the contrary, a mid-air collision that just bends a couple of propeller blades and not the rest of the drone seems like either incredible flying or incredible luck.
I'm fairly confident it would destroy the jet engine. The shrapnel from the drone is likely to blow the very tight tolerances between the compressor blades and the body of the jet engine, causing jams.
This might be a naive question, but what would happen if a hobby drone collided with a jet? As long as it doesn't hit the engines, wouldn't the damage be negligible?
The one instance that comes to mind of an airliner encountering an entire flock of birds, both engines were destroyed and they made a rather spectacular landing in the Hudson river.
Airliners are made to withstand bird strikes, but that doesn't mean they escape with no damage. I agree that there probably would have been no casualties if the plane had hit this drone, but it's not exactly a guarantee. It could have easily taken out an engine, and then a mistake or further equipment failure while handling the emergency could have caused a crash. The odds are good that everyone would be fine, but we're talking something like a mere 99.9% chance that everything would be fine (minus a couple million dollars to fix the engine), rather than the one-in-a-billion odds we're accustomed to seeing for air travel.
I've only heard of two incidents. One was investigated by the NTSB and (IMO) both the pilots of the manned aircraft and the RC aircraft were partially at fault. NTSB report blamed the RC pilot. No injuries but the manned aircraft was damaged, and the RC aircraft destroyed. This occurred at low-level ( < 50 ft) over the runway.
The second was that the small military UAV was blown off course due to changing winds, while a jet was doing a ground power run. The RC aircraft crashed short, with some debris hitting the aircraft wing. UAV operations were authorized, although the Tower controller and Ground (Movement) controller didn't foresee the hazard.
I disagree, the physics of large planes make extreme movements on the plane's z-axis like this via just it's control surfaces near impossible. All the control surfaces can really do is tilt the plane, which in absolute terms will change verticality but relative to the plane is still a longitudinal acceleration. The only thing that can overwhelm the momentum of something with the mass of a small building fast enough to cause injury like this is turbulence.
That being said having the plane lose instruments from the turbulence is a major problem that needs to be fixed
Edit: Rereading the article I did notice a passenger comment about the plane going in a nosedive, which would match the scenarios the others below me have replied with that dont involve turbulence. Always thought the airframe couldn't survive actively maneuvering at such extremes on big jets like that, guess I was wrong.
But failures don't always go for a 23-mile joy-ride into restricted airspace. That's kinda cool.
As to damage, given the size, probably not a whole lot if it just died and fell. Might kill someone who's incredibly unlucky. But consider if it flew around at a really low altitude: power lines, people, windows, all in range of the blades. Given that it went 23 miles on its own, having working ground-avoidance software isn't an unreasonable assumption.
A 30 lbs / 15 ft glider can probably cause very serious injury when landed on a highway.
Any propeller plane / fast glider can cause death in a crowd.
Maybe a model airplane can cause a real plane to crash.
A firearm can probably do some serious damage to a flying plane too.
But... is it likely? does it happen? often?
When so-called risks are not measured, they're often mentioned to justify blind repression.
In the startup world, it's commonsense to measure things before taking action. It should inspire politics.
BTW, I recently saw a video titled "a drone almost crashed into an airplane" (or another catchy headline). Judging by the video, the distance between the two was at least 100 to 300 yards...
Hail is far less than 8lb and can crack an airplane's windshield. It's a function of momentum and density. If the drones are designed to be fragile when impacted, maybe structural damage can be avoided, but sucked into an engine all bets are off.
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