Drone Stuff of the Week video
A drone enters a restricted airspace and hovers above thousands of spectators, including several state presidents and many iconic athletes. Tensions run high, expensive anti-drone systems are trained on the target and ready to fire. Now what?
Disable the drone and let several kilograms of metal and plastic and sharp bits plummet onto the crowd below?
Interfere with the drone’s GPS system and make it enter ‘Return to Home’ mode? What if the drone is running on its internal IMU and not GPS?
Do nothing and hope for the best?
Not too far fetched as this exact situation occurred not once but supposedly three times at the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics 2016.
Many a vendor have been punting their anti-UAV systems to many an anxious client, all nice and well and some of these systems are probably very good. But when push comes to shove and a drone needs to be disabled at the risk of severely injuring or even fatally injuring bystanders on the ground, will the ray-gun-operator-with-finger-on-button actually press said button, and will it work?
These are some of the questions the team discuss this week.
Some of the other topics covered:
- Drone flies into a South African nuclear power station
- Some new info on Part 107
- Who is responsible for educating UAV pilots, both commercial and recreational, on what is safe, legal and possible?
- Beating Amazon, DHL, UPS, 7eleven and all the other big players to the punch with drone deliveries, criminals are already delivering contraband into prisons
- plus a few other interesting topics
Subscribe to the sUAS News YouTube channel and keep an eye out for next week’s episode.
Mail any questions or issues you have for discussion on next week’s show to tiaan@suasnews.com.
