Of course people are jumping in saying there’s no proof it was a drone. I’ve hit birds with my car, and there’s feathers and blood. I’ve seen bird strikes on aircraft, and there were feathers and blood. So I’m excluding a bird strike for now. If not a bird, what else could it be other than a drone?
I’ve flown through the Sepulveda Pass many times, and I can virtually guarantee there are no Flying Spaghetti Monsters in that area.
Impact with a flying spaghetti monster (or is it the fsm?) would leave entrails of spaghetti and sloppy meat sauce. If they didn’t see it, I’m going to run with the Invisible Flying Pink Unicorn theory.
Just as a birdstrike would leave feathers and blood, a treestrike would leave bark and leaves/needles embedded in the helicopter. It should be fairly easy to say what didn’t hit the helicopter. Conversely, a drone strike seems likely to have left at least some small parts of it embedded in the helicopter, and a search of the area where the collision happened should turn up a dead drone on the forest floor.
Allowed past 400 is a regulation, not a mechanical or programmed-in limitation.
If the things can fly at all in Denver they can fly at 5000 feet above the ground in Los Angeles. And almost all toy drones can fly just fine in Denver.
The limiting factor is probably remote control radio range. But if it can get 1/2 mile away horizontally it can also get more than 1/2 mile away vertically. Which is ~2500 feet
And that’s just the toys. 800 feet is nothing to them. The drones sold for commercial use are vastly more capable than that.
It’s not *quite *that simple. There are careful users, clueless users, and malicious users. Of anything. Including cars, guns, lasers, and messageboards.
The former aren’t a problem. The latter as you say aren’t deterred by regulation.
But the vast majority of misbehavior comes from the group in the middle. And the vast majority of them will move to the careful camp, not the criminal camp, once educated.
Sadly a lot of otherwise decent people refuse to become educated unless there’s a pound of flesh attached to their not becoming educated. Hence the need for rules with legal force, fines, etc., behind them. Voluntary codes of conduct work only on the community-minded. For everybody else there’s Officer Schmutz & his traffic ticket.
That’s IMO mostly due to laziness compounded by selfishness; not due to malice.
Back when I was flying RC gliders ~20 years ago, I was told that if you could see your plane, you could control it. Which sounds about right, since radio control beyond visual range was kind of useless at the time.
These days, with first-person onboard video, now it’s just a question of how powerful your onboard video transmitter is (and how powerful your own control transmitter is). Assuming enough power, you could control your drone from the far side of the city, and send it up as high as you like.
There’s been semi-serious talk about installing laser defense systems near major airports to shoot down MANPADs or drones targeting airliners. Between those things going off and yokels or baddies with laser pointers and maybe even laser-based aircraft-mounted self defense systems, pretty soon the LA basin on a Friday night is gonna look like the final battle scene in the original Star Wars.
Putting lasers on the drones too would be the icing on the cake. Maybe LAPD drones can laze both the attack drone operators and the laser pointer yokels.
What’s next, frickin laser beams on frickin’ flying sharks? Being jumped over by frickin’ flyin’ Fonzies? The future will be a very strange place indeed.
While I have personally seen people operating drones where they shouldn’t be & think this is a possibility, I also know that (almost) all of the drones have different colored lights on them so that you can tell front from back while standing on the ground trying to fly them.
Depending upon speed, background lights, & the fact that they weren’t looking for it, it is possible that they missed the lights, but I’m wondering about their statement about it having no lights.
