Forum Post: FAA writing rules to allow civilian drones over U.S.
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 27, 2011, 11:15 p.m. EST by mserfas
(652)
from Ashland, PA
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
See http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-drones-for-profit-20111127,0,6584711.story?track=rss . Apart from by-now familiar police privacy issues, themselves quite serious, consider the effect when wealthy individuals and corporations can hire a $40,000 drone to fly over your land to do surveillance on it. Personally, I am also concerned about the noise of such things. But probably the worst is "legitimate" enforcement roles that have in the past been unenforceable.
Those will be great target practice.
Wow, just wow.
I'm convinced the best thing I can do for my offspring is leave them a nice piece of land on a secluded island somewhere.
Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
if they see a peaceful protester they can fire a hellfire missile at him. its a lot cheaper then a platoon of cops-
training web page http://vgdhi.cjb.net thrasymaque
you and your peacefull protesters, I would rather pay to see that then donate to OWS
You would make a great Senator or congressmen. training web page http://tinyurl.com/7rvpv43 thrasymaque
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These drones are mostly small drones being used at 500ft of altitude or less. These can easily be defeated with a blast or two from a shotgun and some #4 buckshot.
Hmmm, yes, no and maybe ... not really. I'm not really that familiar with the figures, so looking up on the Web quickly I found a page at http://www.securityprousa.com/4bushtaenga.html about #4 buckshot, which says that in their round it starts off at 1100 fps, which seems like it would be fast enough for this range not to be overly decelerated by gravity and perhaps not by air resistance (depending on the resilience of the drone). They say that they put 27 balls in a "6 inch area" at 12 feet. Taking this to mean a 6-inch radius, I'll assume that means that at 240 feet, 27 balls pass within a circle with area 78.5 square feet, i.e. 2.9 square feet per ball. The problem is, the drones don't look all that large in area, perhaps smaller than this, and as multiple balls can pass through one 2.9 square foot area, sometimes none will pass through another (a Poisson distribution, I believe - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution - meaning that you have 1/e = 36.7% chance of missing a 2.9 square foot drone). And even if a ball hits the drone, there is a considerable chance that they will pass harmlessly through some wing surface, visibly marring it on later inspection but not seriously interfering with it.
Of course, all this applies only if you can properly aim at the drone, guessing the arc that the shot will take under the influence of air and gravity toward its position in the distant sky while leading it properly. Actually this seems like skeet or clay pigeon shooting, done at 50 to 60 yards, except that this distance is up to 500 feet straight up, plus some sideways displacement, with no visual hints from the ground of what the range is; for those something more like #9 shot is used, but what breaks a clay pigeon might not harm a drone.
In any case, assuming you have some fair chance of shooting down the drone, you get into the real problems, which are...
Bottom line: as amusing as the notion of folks shooting down the drones might sound, I don't think that's a particularly meaningful safeguard against their abuse in any scenario short of some kind of civil war.