[ChuckMcM]

They do abuse engines a lot for testing (http://www.gereports.com/post/101784637445/where-jet-engines...) and the golf ball hail seems pretty challenging. I doubt an R/C drone is going to give the engine much trouble. Not that it couldn't damage the engine, just that it wouldn't take out the airplane.

Personally I think the drone discussion is more about the safety concerns they aren't talking about rather than what they do talk about. A lot of security scenarios are compromised if you can accurately deliver a small amount of payload from the air into an arbitrary space.

I think the FAA would do well to allow property owners, or their designated agents, a free hand to do what ever they want to drones over their property at altitudes below 400'. Whether it is shoot them out of the sky, or capture them with nets and resell them on the used drone market. Drone pilots would self limit their flying activities at that point I suspect.

[cmurf]

Frozen turkeys almost completely disintegrate, they're mostly water. Drones have components that won't completely disintegrate, and those pieces can cause significant nozzle or turbine blade damage. An engine loss in turbine powered aircraft isn't exactly routine, but shouldn't result in the loss of the aircraft. It's still considered an emergency though. And a huge amount of air traffic isn't turbine powered, it's smaller general aviation aircraft with normally aspirated engines.

[ChuckMcM]

Agree but you can't have it both ways, a propeller plane is going to destroy the drone with a prop strike or the drone will bounce off the wing or vertical stabilizer. Any jet engine that ingests a drone will contain the damage to the engine itself (expensive, but again probably not the loss of an aircraft). And that is the "funny" part about the drone conversation in the press, it is highly unlikely that you'll ever bring down an airplane with a hobby (< 10lbs) drone. You can with a 1/10 scale jet powered model airplane, and those have been flying "unregulated" for over a decade. So why drones?

And I think it is the other things that hobby drones can do which is the actual target of regulation. Photographing sunbathing movie stars as a fairly banal example, but much more severe scenarios as well. And giving the property owners immunity from prosecution for destroying somebodies drone over their property would pretty much quench a lot of those (and create some interesting new markets like net guns)

[cmurf]

Composite propellers aren't assured of surviving a drone strike. If any propeller were to crack essentially anywhere along its length, you're talking about tens of thousands of pounds of shearing force in operation. If the propeller separates, the imbalance very easily could cause the engine to dismount. If the engine departs the plane, the plane is no longer properly weight & balanced and will not be glidable, it will tail spin into the ground uncontrollable. So I completely reject the "is going to destroy the drone" comment.

Read FAR 33 and 35, and then also do a simple Google search about engine containment failures. They can be catastrophic despite the design and testing done. So I reject the "will contain" comment.

The difference with drones and hobby model aircraft is a moron can get and keep a drone airborne, model airplanes have analog input by a human and if you don't know how to fly "by the stick" with such airplanes, it's an expensive mistake very quickly.

In theory I have little problem with the idea of property owners being able to destroy overflying drones, but in practice this is covering vigilantism and is not compatible with civil society.

Inevitably there will have to be some regulation requiring drones to identify themselves (there's a color coded flashing LED proposal, that's like a license plate); from which police can look up the owner and operator and current flight plan; and then issue directly to the operator in real time either an order to cease current operation (return to home) or reveal operator location/ID.

We just can't have people shooting things out of the sky, and having them drop on someone's dog or kid in the back yard. It'll start neighborhood feuds that will not end well at all.

[digikata]

Just because you test one sub-system to a degree doesn't mean you are going to casually allow the possibility of damage to the engines or aircraft.

Air safety is a set of overlapping precautionary approaches, just like different layers of computer security.

[ChuckMcM]

You miss my point completely. Radio controlled aircraft all have a similar threat profile to commercial and private aviation. That has been true before the big drone explosion. Drones don't pose any more threat than any other R/C plane[1].

And yet there has been a concerted effort to call out drones as a threat, so why? And the only reason that comes up is that drones in the form of quad/hex/octa copters can do things that regular R/C planes can not, and those things are threatening to people and privacy on the ground, not the air. So why not talk about the real problem instead of this "made up" problem?

[1] Ok so balsa or styrofoam gliders are probably not on anyone's list of threats.