Drone Accident

Just read an article in Google where FBI have arrested a Drone Flyer crashing his Drone into a police helicopter causing emergency landing

Edited By Keith Berriman on 21/11/2020 12:22:21

Oops. That probably would get you the wrong kind of attention from the authorities...

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I wondered how the helicopter could be so low it collided with the same organisation's (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) unmanned aircraft. Apparently the UAS should have been below 300 feet but the 300 units the operators were working to were - - - meters.

Never did like those French yards.

I seem to recall a rather costly space probe crashed during its landing phase due to a similar Feet/ metres conversion issue. Murphy still rules.

IIRC, it was a Canadian airliner which fuelled up in pounds rather than kg and ended up gliding onto a disused airfield being used as a drag racing strip. Aviation really shouldn't mix systems and I suspect that the French influence in Canada may have a bearing on these incidents.

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Martin - that would be the 'Gimli Glider'. It was a catalogue of errors, including non-functioning instruments and conversion errors between metric and imperial.

I would rather blame the US influence in persisting in using the should be obsolete imperial system of measurement when the vast majority of the world is living in the 21st rather than the 19th century and using metric units.

Geoff

Give them an inch and... er... they'll take a metre?(

Actually Geoff, the metric system is an 18th century one. Imperial is much more fun and far more flexible, allowing division by the useful factors of 2,3,4 and 6 as opposed to just 2 and the rarely useful 5 for the froggy one!

I remember, back in the pre-metric days, being told that us Brits were better at mental arithmetic due to being taught to use the old imperial system.

I was once taken for a flight in a Finnish Army helicopter (MD 500) and the pre-flight conversation between the pilot and the ground crew included him asking how many 'lubs' of fuel had been put in the tank. I explained that the abbreviation 'lbs' on the fuel gauge was short for pounds but I don't think they believed me!