While you might pick a spot to place a drone, what you cannot do is pick a spot a plane will be at. The plane cannot re-read and factor out the error, nor does it need to. It just shows the pilot where in the sky the plane is at 4-500 miles an hour and the pilot and autopilot steers the plane to an accuracy that is suitable. At 450 miles per hour, you travel 10 feet in .00017667 seconds. An aircraft GPS keeps the plane in a straight line down a lane that is as wide as a a 250 lane highway. Anywhere in that highway is in your lane. While most pilots would generally tend to drift to the middle of the lane, an 8 foot intake compared to a 229 foot wingspan in a lane that is 23 planes wide is beyond luck.
Just in the horizontal plane, assuming an intake 16 foot wide you have over 600 engines wide staying in the lane!
Adding in a horizontal error of 200 foot vertical drift you are staring at a 30,000 to 1 chance of a hit.
Hitting one engine does not crash the plane, to do that you need to hit two engines.
To put this in perspective:
Chance that Earth will experience a catastrophic collision with an asteroid in the next 100 years: 1 in 5,000
Chance of dying in such a collision: 1 in 20,000
Lightning Strike Probabilities
1. ASSUME -
4 CG flashes/km2/yr/average
House is 10 X 20 m2 = 200 m2
Direct strike to house when lightning hits within 10 m
Predicted strike (1200 X4)/1 000 000 =
4.8 X 10 -3 or once ea. 200 years
Therefore - 1 out of 200 house will be struck per year.
2. ASSUME -
USA population = 280,000,000
1000 lightning victims/year/average
Odds = 1 : 280,000 of being struck by lightning
So if we are going to freak out, lets freak out about being hit by a asteroid, cause that will kill you and blowing out one engine won't. And your odds of being killed by lightning is 3000 times greater than taking out two engines.
900,000,000/280,000 =3,214What happens if GPS autopilot systems are jammed or the link to a base station gets dropped during a drone attack in the RKZ?
Then the plane drifts from the intended path and your odd of sucess begins to go down equal to your drift rate. In real life, nothing changes because you are picking a hit spot at random, there is a 50/50 chance it will drift into your lotto number as drift away.
Can we please put this to rest now?
I believe that I have covered all your objections in the following previous posts on the thread. Note that according to the Jeppesen ILS map for JFK runway 31R at point ZULAB, a point at altitude 1,900 feet almost exactly where the JFK done was spotted an airliner would be travelling 160 knots. In the past three months two drone/UFOs have been placed hovering within 300 feet of
airliners on landing approach. IMO, someone is practicing of failed in an actual attempt at a collision!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3014942/posts?page=8#8
To: McGruff
“That doesn’t sound very easy.”
Imagine yourself in two-dimensions in a small boat trying to intentionally collide with a large ship.
If you have a navigational chart of the ship channel and know the shipping schedule you could position yourself in the middle of the channel using newly available GPS guidance.
You would have the best chance of achieving a collision if you selected a passage in the channel where the large ship would be following a constant bearing as it approaches your intended collision point.
You could sit there at the most likely collision point facing your craft towards the oncoming ship and you would only have to make very small adjustments to the port or starboard (left or right) to insure a collision, assuming you were not detected on the bridge of the approaching craft.
As a boy my Navy dad taught me “beware the constant bearing” meaning that if your craft is following a constant heading at constant speed and another craft is heading across your bow at a constant heading and constant speed, but the “bearing” (compass position) of the other craft is remaining constant (constant degrees to the left or right of your bow) then you are heading for a collision.
Sitting in your small craft facing an oncoming ship it would be easy to determine whether you should maneuver to the left or right to guarantee a collision, assuming the large ship doesn’t change course. All you have to do is observe whether it is coming straight at you and adjust accordingly.
Now imagine a remotely piloted multi-copter drone remote pilot attempting to achieve a collsion with an airliner where the airliner, like the Alitalia jet approaching JFK, is flying a constant bearing(315 degrees, per Jeppesen) and constant altitude (1,900 feet per Jeppesen) for a mile as it approaches a known optimal collision point (labeled ZULAB on the Jeppesen map and GPS identifiable in three dimensions) right before the airliner begins final descent.
Point ZULAB on the Jeppesen map is a known constant three-dimensional location through which all jetliners must pass on approach to runway 31R at JFK right over Long Beach, NY where the rogue drone multi-copter was spotted “hovering” only 200 feet away from the Alitalia Jet.
A remote terrorist drone pilot positioning the attach drone multi-copter at point ZULAB and facing the drone at bearing 135 degrees (opposite of landing bearing 315 degrees) the terrorist now has a two dimensional target to collide with. The terrorist would only have to position the drone up or down, or left or right to maintain the “constant heading” of the incoming jetliner relative to the drone.
In particular the terrorist would want to target one of the jet turbines of the airliner.
8 posted on Thursday, May 2, 2013 12:31:43 PM by Seizethecarp
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3014942/posts?page=21#21
To: Revolutionary
“The odds of bringing down the aircraft are almost zero because they can land just fine on the other engine. But the fear factor would be great.”
True. But two terrorists operating two drones could knock out both engines. This JKF drone event on March 5, 2013 could have been a proof of concept.
The cost of drones is now so low and drone swarming software is now available so that a swarm of drones could be maneuvered into the GPS coordinates for ZULAB in the Jeppesen. This would reverse-engineer a bird-strike crash such as Captain Sully experienced.
Here is a video of coordinated drone swarming recently achieved which terrorists could soon be bringing to the Runway Kill Zone (RKZ) or the Landing Approach Kill Zone (LAKZ) near you!:
Video: Swarm of Tiny Quadcopters Do a Delicate Dance
“Towards a Swarm of Nano Quadrotors”
Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger, Vijay Kumar, GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania
“Perhaps it’s somewhat hyperbolic, but seeing the ease and grace with which these things move in and out of formation, negotiating obstacles and ducking seamlessly between each other as they execute a figure eight really tickles the fanciful, sci-fi-friendly part of the brain. GRASP Lab creations have already shown us how quadcopters can work together to manipulate objects and even build structures together. The idea of looping more than a dozen of these things together—as we see in the video below—and putting them to work on complex projects makes this kind of precision performance feel very much like the future.”
21 posted on Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:20:30 PM by Seizethecarp
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3014942/posts?page=34#34
To: wxgesr
“CBDR
Constant Bearing Decreasing Range”
There you go. This is what my Navy dad was trying to explain...as opposed to “increasing range” which would avoid collision, of course.
In our scenario with a jet aircraft approaching Jeppesen point ZULAB at 160 knots with the remotely piloted drone held nearly stationary on autopilot, “decreasing range” is a given!
34 posted on Thursday, May 2, 2013 2:30:51 PM by Seizethecarp