Re: Kudos to the idiot responsible
Having tried to land a drone in the centre of a field but ending up in a hedge 200 yards away it won't be so easy for a terrorist to deliberately fly a drone into a jet engine.
Well, if the drone has sufficient power, getting to an aircraft on approach won't be that difficult - the flightpath is well known, and there will be little deviation as they're all coming in on auto anyway.
For a little more accuracy, a commercial airliner will be shouting its position, direction and speed over ADS-B. It would be a trivial matter to compute an intercept course. I suspect someone would need to aim at the engine manually, but that won't be so difficult; a jet engine will suck in anything that gets near the front. I've no idea whether a drone going through the bypass would destroy the engine, but a determined terrorist could probably do the damage with a small explosive charge and a motorcycle chain.
There's a bunch of planning - and training - to make this feasible, but writing off the possibility just because it's difficult is probably a touch premature...
Vic.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
