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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 12 2017, @09:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-at-all-inspiring dept.

A drone was filmed crashing into Seattle's Space Needle viewing platform on New Year's Eve, where pyrotechnics were being assembled:

Video footage confirms that a drone aircraft flew directly at and crashed into the Space Needle's utmost viewing platform on New Year's Eve. The craft, which was subsequently recovered by the staff, was handed over to the Seattle Police Department on Tuesday.

Space Needle representative Dave Mandapat has provided Ars Technica video recovered from the drone, a camera-mounted DJI Inspire 1. The three-minute clip, which includes a few fade-to-black edits, shows the perspective of a craft ascending from an area east of the Seattle Center district (without identifying footage of a takeoff or origin point), then hovering above and around the Space Needle's top platform while pyrotechnic experts arranged and worked on the tower's annual New Year's fireworks show.

Roughly two minutes into the video, the drone shifts perspective to aim its camera view directly at the tower's topmost platform, at which point it apparently flies at an incredibly high speed until ramming into a spotlight. The collision took place mere feet away from both the pyrotechnic experts and their various arrays of electronics and fireworks equipment.

It's time for another round of FAA restrictions!


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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:25PM (#453095)

    FAA [faa.gov]

    You can fly your drone in Class G (uncontrolled) airspace without air traffic control authorization, but operations in any other airspace need air traffic approval.

    More likely we're going to see increased use of police drones around events, and probably some monitoring equipment scattered around crucial areas to detect if any drones are in the air. It is a real problem to have drones flying in shared airspace, and the potential for relatively anonymous damage is pretty high. Even with no malicious intent the drone can lose signal, get a cross-signal, and cause a collision.

    As long as they do not regulate uncontrolled airspace, and do not require that every drone be licensed (did that already happen? or just for specific use cases? can't find the info...) then this is just common sense. I'm not a big fan of adding extra data for tracking, but each case is a balance between public safety and personal privacy. If you are flying a drone around the Space Needle then you should be licensed or have a permit. If you fly in the altitude of any aircraft same thing. Pilots need to know of potential hazards, and the only way for that is if air traffic controllers know the hazard exists.

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:33PM

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:33PM (#453098)

    The only problem with this is that, to enforce this, you need some technical means of doing so. A law saying "you can't fly drones in controlled airspace" isn't going to stop someone determined to do so, nor are some police-operated drones buzzing around. Right now, all they can do is attempt to recover the lawbreaker's drone so that it's as intact as possible, then use evidence collected from it to positively identify the illegal operator. Good luck with that. And that certainly isn't going to help much if, for instance, someone wants to pilot a drone into a jetliner's engine intake during takeoff.

    What they need is some way of actually shooting these drones out of the air, or capturing them intact before they can be used to cause real harm. On top of that, some type of way of identifying the location of the radio signals used to control it, quickly, so the operator can be apprehended before he escapes the vicinity.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:52PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:52PM (#453107)

      There are some really big drones out there which can carry a movie camera and its accessories.
      You need to equip one of those with that net bazooka, and hand the control to someone with drone racing skills, and that's your defense system (unless you get attacked by a swarm).

      You don't mind the 10k$/event cost, do you? It's for the children's safety. We're not allowed civilian use of that Navy anti-drone laser, yet...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:07PM (#453112)

      I was thinking more along the lines of drones that can triangulate a controller's transmitter, and cameras detecting any drone activity. They could probably detect the launch point. Personally I don't like the idea of added surveillance, or the idea of police drones monitoring events, but situations like this are hard to ignore. The best compromise I can think of is to have strict regulation of police hardware such that any drone tracking/policing tech is limited to drones frequencies and we don't end up with Stingrays flying all over the city.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @01:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @01:25PM (#453275)

      The only problem with this is that, to enforce this, you need some technical means of doing so. A law saying "you can't fly drones in controlled airspace" isn't going to stop someone determined to do so

      But I guess it gives the police authorization to shoot down any drone that violates the rule, instead of first waiting whether it tries to do something bad, and then possibly reacting too slowly.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:34PM (#453099)

    ...and should have a bunch of liability insurance.

    What is biggest deterrent on actions in today's world?
    Criminal sanctions? Maybe.
    Civil $ liabilities? Yep, for most people.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:40PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:40PM (#453102)

      No prob dood, I'll just put the fine on my credit card and add it to my student loan debt. Bail me out, bankruptcy.

      • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:55PM

        by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Thursday January 12 2017, @10:55PM (#453109) Homepage Journal

        Last I heard bankruptcy does not void student loan debt. Am I wrong?

        --
        jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
        • (Score: 2, Informative) by nitehawk214 on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:06PM

          by nitehawk214 (1304) on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:06PM (#453111)

          You are correct. Designed to prevent exactly this situation.

          --
          "Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:15PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 12 2017, @11:15PM (#453115)

            They realized just about every student would take this route, what a goddamn scam!! While loans can be important I think we should limit interest rates to 5%, that would decrease all the CC spam since profit margins wouldn't be so insane, and it would eliminate the borderline criminal contracts people get duped into. Oh, and remove late payment fees. The interest they get from a continued balance is enough >:|

            Do we frown on emojiis here? Is that opening the door to all the hipster douches which probably 1/2 of us already are?

          • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @04:32AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 13 2017, @04:32AM (#453180)

            Nope, it's designed to ensure that students have access to loans because the taxpayers are too cheap and short-sighted to properly fund education. We'd have more than enough money to cover the cost of college for all college age students if we'd stop giving money to people who already have tons of it or stopped dropping bombs on brown people.