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by mlyle 1284 days ago
> We do have confirmed strikes with fatalities from birds.

Yup.

> There is not much difference between a bird and a drone when an aircraft strikes it at speed...

Open to debate.

Even if true: There's a whole lot more birds near airports than illegally operating drones. So even if there's some tiny, absolute risk, the relative risk appears low.
1 comments
Alupis 1284 days ago
There is no debate.

The claim was, hitting a drone has a high chance of being fatal - the same high chance hitting a bird has... particularly in vulnerable stages of flight. Nothing you, or anyone else has offered counters this claim, because it's just reality. Hitting things in aircraft is never a good thing, and is always a significant cause for concern.

We've been lucky so far more idiots haven't flown drones closer to airshows or airports. There are plenty, and there have been collisions with devastating damage but luckily no fatalities (perhaps yet). There are plenty of pictures on the internet if you want to compare damages to bird strikes.

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mlyle 1284 days ago
> the same high chance hitting a bird has.

It's unclear whether it's the same chance hitting a bird has. You assert it is.

As to a high chance of fatality from bird strike: no. There's >10k bird strikes per year in the US and most years there isn't a single bird strike related fatal accident. Estimates of death are on the order of 1 death related to bird strike per billion flight hours.

Even if drones are the same risk per collision, drones are much rarer near runways than birds.

There's no such thing in the world as zero risk, but if drones are a small fraction of a risk that's less than 1 death per billion flight hours, I'd say that we have bigger fish to fry.

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rootusrootus 1284 days ago
> There is no debate.

Sure there is. On average there are about 13000 bird strikes a year. What fraction of those result in a fatality? The FAA says a bit under 400 pilots die every year, however since 1990 there have been just 292 fatalities globally that can be attributed to wildlife strikes (and not all are birds).

That is a pretty clear repudiation of any claim that hitting a drone has a "high chance of being fatal."

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