I fought Ohm's Law and the law won: Drone crash takes out power to Silicon Valley homes A wayward quadcopter is being blamed for a power outage in Google's back yard this week. The city of Mountain View said that a large portion of the city, including city hall and the central library, were without power from 8:15 to 11:00 Thursday night, as part of an outage that knocked out service to around 1,600 customers. …
"The damage of the drone crash totalled tens of thousands of dollars, and the repair work was completed early Friday morning," the city said.
Personally, I would have said from those photos that the drone was already totally totalled and wasn't worth fixing.
What are they not telling us?
Hard to choose between this and the flames icon. I want to be able to use more than 1 icon! >>
Sorry, Downvoted.
With the normal expected level of police competence should that not have read "Police went on to say they have apprehended 4 black female suspects"?
All of whom would have to have been carrying concealed loaded weapons or drugs. Or am I reading elReg too much these days?
Does anyone else think that this Amazon / Google rivalry is going a bit far?
Or did someone get the delivery coordinates wrong?
Or did someone order a drone and the broken winged messenger just delivered it in his normal manner as there was no one in?
Already used to it in Cali. There was one in West Hollyweird back in '15 and another in San Frisco in '16 so I suppose it was due although it's probably already a thing that has stopped being news if it only takes out one block or so and only bigger ones like this make the news now.
And the more idiots who ignore common sense when playing with these stupid machines, the more ridiculously baroque the laws governing their use will become.
So:
DRONE OWNERS! STOP BLAMING THE LUMPEN NON-DRONE OWNERS FOR THE LAWS SPRINGING UP AROUND YOUR HOBBY AND START YELLING AT THE IDIOTS IN WITH THE IN-CROWD!
Trouble is they are not the in-crowd no mater how much you shout.
Most users who are part of the community are not connected to the "bought it fly it" users who probably saw some faked advert promising them "moving 4K selfies that will get them laid" and head on outside the house to give it a go.
In the same way you as a licensed driver are not responsible for the drunk driver because he bought a car.
Missed the point, powernumpty.
So tgere are now two classes of drone owners? The ones who cause all the problems, and the ones who raise their hands and say "no one of us" while decrying how lumpen non-drone owners are calling for "unworkable" laws.
Self-police the hobby by being more inclusive or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous legal restraint.
It's curious that the main rule quoted was flying too close to an airfield, which had little or nothing to do with the accident.
They also all say "drone", when it was probably a regular R/C aircraft. I can't really tell from the picture of the charred remains of.. something. It's more likely a newspaper than a DJI quadcopter.
I wonder how a presumably small craft could cause this much damage. Quadcopters are small and mostly non-conductive. Uninsulated power lines are widely spaced, and the equipment should be protected against brief overloads.
Usually when there's a fault on power lines of this magnitude, they are automatically re-engaged a couple of times to see if the obstruction has cleared itself (tree limb burning off, for example).
So most likely is that the drone actually broke something - an insulator perhaps, or some HV switchgear.
"I wonder how a presumably small craft could cause this much damage. Quadcopters are small and mostly non-conductive. Uninsulated power lines are widely spaced, and the equipment should be protected against brief overloads."
Carbon fiber is conductive and many small drones are made from CF. Also throw in the wirings, metal in the motors, etc.
Not tiny drone could destroy the grid. At the very worst trip breakers for a few seconds. And Think about the size and strength of the insulators compared to the few hundred grams of drone.
OTOH, I once hit high tension wires with at glider winch launch cable. 1000 times more solid than a plastic drone. It made a huge explosion as the cable vaporized. But did not seem to do any permanent damage, although we thought it best not to inquire...
DJI have been recently getting people to update their products to the newest apps & firmware.
The update has introduced a whole heap of new NFZ's, which has apparently angered a lot of DJI product owners because they can't fly in the areas they used to be able to, often 'safe' areas, and once the new NFZ's are in the craft they can't currently be removed, so not everyone is updating.
This is going to force some people to start looking at other manufacturer's offerings, notably ones with open source flight controllers that have no such imposed NFZ restrictions other than those you program into them, if you so wish.
It'll also boost the currently growing market of people selling services to derestrict DJI craft, especially once someone figures out how to completely erase the NFZ's.
Do you mean no-fly zones are just there to annoy drone users, and not often for a good reason? Do you decide what is "safe" and what is not?
It's this mindset that will make most drone users jerks which will need strong regulations and fines. People who like to fly very well understand the needs of following the rules. There's very little space for arrogant egoists, because they're simply very dangerous.
Often, above my house, flies the air medical services helicopter because one of the waypoints along the corridor to reach the nearest hospital is jut a few hundreds meters away (and it flies already quite low because the hospital is close enough it's already approaching). Would you like someone buzzing his drone to take a good image of it while it's transporting you?
I'm saying that the NFZ's are over-reaching and forcing people to avoid updating their craft so their flight area isn't restricted beyond the law, or they'll look to getting craft that don't have those automatic restrictions built-in.
For example, this user has pointed out the difference between DJI's new NFZ's and the US airspace in Hawaii, wth two map images: https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showpost.php?p=37706503&postcount=76488
Trying to say it'll make most drone users jerks is an unfounded blanket assumption. Do I have to even mention that drones usually only make the news when something goes wrong whilst vast numbers of users are happily flying within the law and not causing any trouble?
So drone pilots decide NZF are "over-reaching" because of course they know more and better, right? If you want a better view of airspace over Hawaii, please use FAA charts, or at least skyvector.com, and you'll see Oahu airspace is quite complex (https://skyvector.com/?ll=21.461796608405063,-157.9435757613748&chart=38&zoom=3). For example there are areas with parachuting activity, requiring to monitor a given radio frequency - drone pilots probably won't. Same for the warning about the high volume touristic traffic.
There could be an issue if DJI supports only circular NFZ - in this case it has to err on the broader side. But it looks to be using AirMap geofencing - and it does use temporary restrictions as well, those you'd need NOTAMs advertising TFRs - temporary flight restrictions - to be aware of. So it may enforce NFZ you won't see on a standard chart.
Flying carelessly into NFZ will make drone users look like jerks - will just lead to stronger regulations, and it will just damage exactly those happily flying abiding to the rules.
Flying has always been a very cooperative environment, because, after all, if something goes wrong you have a good chance to die too. The issue with drones is you risk someone's else life, but not yours. Maybe each drone controller should have explosive inside - if the drone crashes, the controller blows up. It would make drone pilots more careful... <G>
And he doesn't understand the difference between the various DJI zones, it looks, because probably he never RTFM (and when it comes to flying, that's very bad). See http://www.dji.com/flysafe/geo-system
The green areas are warning zones. DJI will allow you to "unlock" them. They are there because they have safety or other concerns. For example, a protected wildlife area will be indicated as such (and you shouldn't buzz around and disturb wildlife, especially in some periods, just to get a photo for Instagram). Using a drone there may not be forbidden by flying rules, but it could be forbidden by other laws (i.e. prisons). And often common sense may also suggest it's better to avoid it.
"Do you decide what is "safe" and what is not?"
"Do you decide what is "safe" and what is not?"
I'm riding along in the car with a friend of mine, and he blows right through a red light - didn't even slow down! I said "Dude, you just ran a red light!" to which he replied "Yeah, I know." The next intersection we come to has a red light, and he goes right through it. Once again I exclaim "Dude, that was ANOTHER red light!!" "Don't worry about it," he says, "My brother does it all the time and there's never a problem." We get to the next intersection and the light is green, and he comes to a screeching halt! I say, "Dude! It's green, why are you stopping?"
"Because my brother might be coming the other way."
People who make up their own rules in a society tend to throw things off for everyone else. Most laws and rules have a very good reason for being there, even if you don't think they should apply to you.
It's a nice analogy, but in this case users are not required by law to update to the latest DJI firmware / app which imposes flight restrictions that go further than those set down by law.
If I'm not mistaken, it seems a lot of non-drone owners are in favour of manufacturers implimenting flight area restrictions, however can you imagine their outcry if vehicle manufacturers started implimenting - without being required by law to do so - speed control based on their GPS location so you couldn't get your car to go over the speed limit for the particular road you're on?
(yes yes I am aware of some very high performance cars that limit their top speed unless they detect you're at a racetrack but I don't think they have a variable top speed limit that corresponds to the road you're on)
Tabloid scaremongering much?
If you'd like to take your head out of your arse for a moment you'd see that terrorists have been resorting to far less complicated tactics such as vehicles driven into crowds.
A drone database will only mean the police have a list of those who aren't likely to do stupid / dangerous / deadly things with drones, whereas those who are intent on causing mischief won't register.
"A drone database will only mean the police have a list of those who aren't likely to do stupid / dangerous / deadly things with drones, whereas those who are intent on causing mischief won't register."
The Feds would have the database of the registration numbers not the local police although they could ask for a lookup if they recovered a craft after an accident. With so many people doing stupid things with copters, it's not a bad idea to have the requirement. Search YouTube for "Drone Fail" and you will see the tip of the iceberg of stupid. I recall an idiot that crashed his drone while flying around high-rises in NY and barely missed hitting somebody after is plummeted 20 stories. The guy is almost hit grabbed it and gave or sold the memory card from the camera to the local news. What the heck, the owner wasn't going to reclaim his property. Although, there are people that stupid.
Amazing that they managed to identify the drone from that lump of carbonised stuff without motors, arms, camera or anything recognisable as drone bits.
What is the big metal looking thing? I suppose that that the flammable and potentially explosive Lipo battery that survived the fire.
Hang on....
If anyone can find me a higher res image I'd love to see it.
Having lived in the area in lhe late 90s my recollection was th\t you dion't need errant quad-copters to cause power outages (remember several in the 3 years I was there compared to the, I think, zero in the last 15 years back in the UK!) ... and despite a PGE spokesman reassuring everyone on the news that Californians had "the best electricty in the world" - this was after there'd been a outage that had taken out power from Canada down into Mexico and across as far as Texas
Any half-assed alarm system will have battery backup. Though there is no guarantee that the batteries in a given system are fresh, it's hard to find that out without inside help. And kinda stupid to risk the penalties of bringing down power to the entire neighborhood just to find out.
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