FAA: U.S. Airliner Nearly Collided With Drone in March

A U.S. airliner nearly collided with a drone over Florida earlier this year, a federal official said, a near miss that highlights risks posed by the proliferation of unmanned aircraft in U.S. skies.

A pilot of an American Airlines Group Inc. AAL +0.03% regional jet told officials that on March 22 he came dangerously close to a "small remotely piloted aircraft" about 2,300 feet above the ground near Tallahassee Regional Airport in Florida, said Jim Williams, head of the unmanned-aircraft office at the Federal Aviation Administration. Mr. Williams disclosed the incident publicly for the first time at a drone conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

"The airline pilot said that he thought the [drone] was so close to his jet that he was sure he had collided with it," Mr. Williams said. Inspection of the aircraft later found no damage, he said, but "the risk for a small [drone] to be ingested into a passenger airline engine is very real."

The incident appears to be the first case of a big U.S. airliner nearly colliding with an airborne drone, although there have been other occasions of aircraft pilots seeing drones in flight. In March 2013, an Alitalia aircraft approaching John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York observed a drone within 200 feet, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI on Friday said it is still investigating that incident.

The FAA said US Airways Flight 4650 from Charlotte, N.C., a 50-seat jet, was approaching Tallahassee airport when it passed the drone, which the pilot described "as a camouflaged F-4 fixed-wing aircraft that was quite small." The drone was more similar to a model aircraft flown by hobbyists rather than a so-called quadcopter that many see as the type of unmanned aircraft with commercial potential.

“Why not install lasers on both sides of the runways?”

Check this out (from my collection of web links):

US military’s RAY-GUN truck BLASTS DRONES, mortars OUT OF THE SKY

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/13/us_military_laser_truck_destroys_mortars_drones/

In month-long tests at the White Sands missile range in new Mexico, the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HELMD) blew up 90 mortar rounds and several aerial drones using a 10kW-class laser mounted on an armored vehicle.

“We had considerable success,” Terry Bauer, Army program manager for HELMD told the Christian Science Monitor.

The HELMD system uses radar (or as the military calls it “Enhanced Multi Mode Radar”) to track targets and focus the laser on them. Once locked, the laser raises the temperature of mortar shells to the point where the explosives they contain combust.

“It falls as a single piece of metal with a little bit of shrapnel. It basically falls where it was going to fall, but it doesn’t explode when it hits the ground,” Bauer said. “We turn it into a rock, basically.”

Boeing, which developed the system for the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command, said the technology is now ready for an upgrade so that it can carry a 50kW laser, with a more powerful 100kW unit also in the pipeline.

Eventually the military want to use the system to shoot down incoming cruise missiles, rockets and artillery shells, although it’ll need some improvements before then. Mortar shells are relatively slow moving and have a trajectory that’s easy to predict, but a cruise missile flying a variable course will be a much tougher target to destroy.

Soldiers on deployment in America’s many ongoing wars probably won’t get to see the system in action before they are retired. The HELMD system probably won’t be ready for deployment until 2022 at the earliest.

“Just wait until a passenger jet collides with a drone. The s@@t is going to hit the turbo-fan.”

Correct.

The 9/11 attack revealed a single point of failure that the terrorists exploited (no bullet-proof lock on cabin door) and the US and world air traffic ground to a halt until the crash correction of that defect.

IMO, using a GPS-guided drone to target the turbofan of a large airframe in the two-dimensional space of a runway rather than the three-dimensional space in the air is much more likely to be successful, despite recent close calls reported in the news.

If just ONE 737 was caused to crash catestrophically on take-off anywhere in the world in the same manner as Yukla-27 in the “runway kill zone” (RKZ) that I have identified and it was realized that this type of attack could be replicated at any time anywhere in the world...the world air passenger and freight traffic would STOP for who knows how long while authorities scrambled to develop on-the-fly anti-drone airport counter-measures.

See:

http://runwaykillzone.com/

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