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posted by takyon on Monday January 01 2018, @09:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the line-of-slight dept.

Submitted via IRC for Fnord666_

On September 21, 2017, just as dusk fell, Vyacheslav Tantashov launched his DJI Phantom 4 drone from a spot near Dyker Beach Park in Brooklyn, just southeast of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Tantashov wanted to see some spectacular views, he said, and he flew the drone nearly 280 feet up in the air and well out of his line of sight. The drone hovered over the shipping channel near Hoffman Island, some 2.5 miles from the launch site. Tantashov maneuvered the craft a bit, watching the images displayed on his Samsung tablet, and then punched the "return to home" button. The drone, which had a rapidly dying battery, made a beeline back toward the launch site.

But it never arrived. After waiting 30 minutes, Tantashov assumed there had been a mechanical malfunction and that the drone had fallen into the water. He returned home. On September 28, Tantashov received a call at work. It was an investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), calling to asking if Tantashov was the owner of a Phantom 4 drone. He was, he said, though he had lost it recently near the Verrazano Bridge.

Would Tantashov be surprised to learn, the investigator asked, that his drone had not crashed into the water? And that it had instead slammed into the main rotor of a US Army-operated Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter that was patrolling for the UN General Assembly in Manhattan? And that it had put a 1.5-inch dent in said rotor and led to the helicopter diverting back to its New Jersey base? Tantashov was surprised, and he agreed to a one-hour interview the next day, during which the full story came out.

[...] Tantashov didn't know about more detailed flight restrictions, such as the [temporary flight restrictions (TFRs)] around Manhattan and Bedminster, New Jersey, where the president had been staying. "He said that he relied on 'the app' to tell him if it was OK to fly," the investigator noted. "When asked about TFRs, he said he did not know about them; he would rely on the app, and it did not give any warnings on the evening of the collision. He said he was not familiar with the TFRs for the United Nations meeting and Presidential movement." (Both TFRs were apparently violated by the drone flight.)

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/drone-collides-with-us-army-helicopter-puts-1-5-dent-in-rotor/


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @11:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @11:12AM (#616387)

    Did you read the part about the president staying there, you know, that guy who lives in New York?

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