Posts by P13DM 11 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Aug 2017
He left DJI on Friday, gave his views on Gatwick over the weekend and started at Boston Dynamics on the Monday.
So he was expressing his personal view having kept an interest of the evidence being uncovered since 2018.
He didn't speak out against Gatwick while at DJI as he didn't want to drag the company into the debate.
He was one of the highest profile personalities in the drone industry.
Not exactly, not when the defence company Leonardo have said a rogue drone was never detected, the counter drone systems are there at the airport to prove something is not there so the airport can remain open when someone sees something in the sky they suspect could be a drone.
Admittedly the police never said anything at the time but from day 2 of Gatwick they had this on the roof at Gatwick which you can see in press photos at the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIB0qPS8P1A
If you pay attention to this you'll see a demonstration of a consumer drone (a DJI Phantom) being visually tracked at 1km. If you then look at the former police constable's evidence to a parliamentary committee he says you can't film a drone 1/2 mile away... Erm, clearly you can, then again every photographer already knew this...
As the person doing the FoIAs and delving into this, no one really knows if there was or wasn't a drone for the first sighting. But the first sighting is itself highly suspect. It was raining at the time of the first sighting and it had been raining for some time beforehand, so anyone flying a drone would have had to take off in the rain. Even these days IP rated drones aren't in most cases truly waterproof and they're big expensive and easy to photograph.
Add to this LED lights on drones are low powered, so a drone would have to be close for its lights to be seen, close means even easier to describe and photograph. Most commercial drone pilots have to manually stick a strobe on their drones to fly at night.
The weather data recorded at Gatwick is on Airprox Reality Check so can be downloaded and even used in a flight simulator.
The coincidence in all of this, was one of the few drones that could have flown in the rain is the SkyRanger, most police forces can't even afford this model, the police team stationed at Gatwick being the exception that do own them. So it could have been there was no drone, it could be the police drones were mistaken for rogue drones, we don't know.
We know the events after that don't add up and we know, thanks to the FoIA that the airport itself began to completely ignore the sightings of drones that were made 1 day after counter drone systems turned up, which were AeroScope, Skyperion & Falcon Shield.
Falcon Shield is especially interesting as it had an optical sensor with thermal that can visually track a drone 1km away at night, this never saw a rogue drone, yet managed to pick up each deliberate friendly drone sortie.
A nano drone couldn't take a model aircraft out of the sky, never mind a real one. Meanwhile on the matter of larger drones, which this article is NOT about, knock yourself out by reading the data from ASSUREuas that are researching matters on behalf of the FAA.
It's worth noting the DMAE even spoke out about the UK study and internationally known engineers such as Philip Rowse have condemned the test methodology and lack of transparent data.
The ASSUREuas data that was modelling on real drone designs found far less need for alarm.
http://www.assureuas.org/projects/deliverables/sUASAirborneCollisionReport.php
Meanwhile you might want to absorb this view from an air accident investigator discussing drones 1-2kg in weight, again a considerable magnitude of mass higher than this story is discussing:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/what-might-happen-if-airliner-hit-small-drone
You haven't understood the scenario, for one there's already a 1 km boundary and there's no disagreement with that. This scenario is talking about when you widen that.
A nano drone isn't going to fly that far to get kilometers away even with a malfunction. The question is do ATC even want to be handling calls for genuine toys? The chances are they don't, would it not be prudent to ask that question? Should ATC be picking a workload for toys which has come about due to political pressure to legislate?
There's no way a nano or any sub 251g is damaging an airliner, the testing done to date has shown you have to rig a test using a 4kg javelin shaped drone to even penetrate a windshield. Larger drones in testing cannot cause an uncontained engine failure.
We're talking about the issue of biscuit sized drones for the purposes of the £15 debate.
You could have a detached property or permission from your neighbours, ergo they are then in your control. It was one scenario, we could just as easily say a field.
The point of this story is sub 250g, the likes of nano drones, it is ludicrous when applying common sense to require ATC permission to fly a genuine toy drone, hence the emphasis in this example of a £15 drone.
This specific comment was in relation to trained CAA approved and insured drone pilots having to turn down work as the laws as they are or local council regulations prohibit some tasks from being done or make some tasks so difficult or expensive they are simply too much trouble.
That's not on the low side for drones these days, even many professional drone users are dumping larger rigs, going to the Inspire, Phantom and Mavic.
The Mavic is the go-to drone for consumers (sub 1kg) and so is the cheaper Spark (even lighter still). The latest ArduPilot drone, the Skyviper is under 250 grams.
Remember, the purpose of the testing is to assess the risk from consumers as licensed operators would be operating within the law.
I have read the report so have the DMAE (Drone Manufactures Alliance Europe) and they made the exact same observation, which was as follows:
“Some of the most alarming findings in DfT’s summary are based on an object that resembles a javelin more than a drone,” Brinkwerth explained. “The study’s authors could not find a way to launch a 4-kilogram drone against an aircraft windscreen, so they mounted two motors, a heavy camera and an oversized battery on nylon arms. This object could never fly, much less encounter an airliner at high altitude. Researchers need access to the full test results to understand whether this is an acceptable shortcut for scientific research.”
My point which you've not understood, is that the 4kg device was NOT a drone, it wasn't representative of a consumer drone, yet this 4kg device was photographed impacted in a windshield by the report's sponsors who included BALPA, this was their exact caption on the photo presented to the media "shows a larger hobbyist-class drone penetrating an aircraft windscreen."
So BALPA claimed the photo was of a drone (it's not, it's Nikon P900 which is a large camera with parts attached), they have also used the words hobby-ist class, so whatever way you try and spin it, the entire report has been actively misrepresented by those involved in the commission of the report.
To use the word hobby-ist on a 4kg "drone" is itself an oxymoron, the majority of hobby users are flying the Mavic and Spark which are sub 1kg.
They didn't trim bits off a drone for the UK study, they fired a Nikon P900, strapped to a large LiPo on a set of Flare Wheel arms, arranged like a javellin, it wasn't in any way shape or form a consumer drone, it was a Nikon camera unlike any typical hobby drone payload with mass added to it in the form of dated drone parts.
The photo of the Nikon bridge camera on the javellin was presented to the media, including the likes of the BBC as being a consumer drone, thereafter the legislation being justified by this testing method is being used to legislate against drones that are primarily lighter than 1.2kg. The popular drones now are the DJI Spark and Mavic, so already since both studies, drones are already arguably safer.
If you cannot conduct a test correctly with a cannon, that in itself is not justification for constructing a test using any components you can strap together and passing it off as a drone, if you're going to do that, you might as well fire a house brick strapped to quadcopter arms.
Actually Solo to this day has better Smart Shots than competing drones as the shots are excuted drone side on its companion computer so you don't have the latency of API interaction from a GCS.
With ArduCopter master you can now add RTK GPS unlike any other RTF drone on the market at the moment which is handy for those that wish to do precise mapping.
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