L.A. is a brightly-lit place. From the horizon to lower than flight level, it’s all lights. I’m guessing they were not in the pass, but flying 800 feet above the hills to the west. Or they could have been above the 405, but still 800 feet above the level of the hills. You really don’t want to be flying below the level of the hills at night on a civilian training flight. Even if the [alleged] drone did have lights, they would almost certainly have been lost in the clutter.
.
There is a difference between a legal limit (you can not exceed 75 mph on the freeway, for example) and a physical limit (my speedometer goes up to 120 mph, let’s see if we can get the red needle that high).
Lots of types of drones are able to exceed 400 feet, even if they’re not supposed to. I expect a lot of them can exceed 800, too, even if the authorities would rather they not.
I’ve taken a Flying in the Wires Environment class. Some of the photos they used were scary. Depending upon the background: from different sides of the same wire, different elevations of the same wire, & from the same position with different lighting conditions - sun vs. clouds had wires either appearing or disappearing.
I was suggesting that a freight train that’s only as big as your pinky nail in the distance is really big up close. Drone lights could have absolutely gotten lost in the background clutter but I’m thinking they’d get noticed just a few feet away either ¼ second before or at the time of impact.
For wild speculation, what’s the possibility of an over-flying plane dropping something, say a bolt came loose?
Stuff drop off airplanes with some regularity. No one wants that, of course, but like you say - bits come loose over time, not in the least because aircraft have a lot of vibration. Usually, it hits no one and nothing, but once in awhile you get some damage and a brief story in the evening news.
You don’t want to be flying below the level of the hills through Sepulveda Pass, day or night. There is at least one high bridge going from mountaintop to mountaintop across the freeway, isn’t there? (Mulholland Drive? Is that bridge still there?)
There’s a bridge at Mulholland, but it’s not especially high.
I need to correct something I posted earlier when I said something about flying over the hills to the west. I was misremembering. While I did like to fly over L.A., what was in my head when I posted was the Newhall Pass north of Van Nuys. I flew over that a lot too. So I was picturing flying south through the Newhall Pass toward VNY instead of north to VNY through the Sepulveda pass.
But you are correct; you don’t want to fly inside of the passes. I never did, and I don’t know anyone who did. I don’t know what LAPD or LASD did, so that’s why I said ‘civilian training flight’. Flying in confined areas limits options. The guys at Group 3 were very big on safety.
What do you suggest be employed to hamper the outlaws?
This is the problem. Like laser pointers, people have a new toy but little to no understanding of how to use it responsibly. Let’s go back to the mid- to late-'70s when I was building radio controlled airplanes and flying model rockets. Back then, it seemed everyone knew instinctively not to fly their toys around aircraft. Granted, I lived in the Mojave Desert at the time; but I still knew, and other people knew where it was OK to fly. I remember mentions of ‘Let’s go here, because there are no airplanes that fly here.’
But back then, you had to build your own r/c planes; not just take them out of a box. Yes, there were ARF models, but the majority were built from flat pieces of balsa. And they were fairly expensive. Radios typically cost at least $100 (a lot back then) and many cost hundreds. Engines ranged from inexpensive Cox .020 and .049, to ones from other manufacturers that were bigger and had throttles. Those could cost as much as the radio. So fewer people were into the hobby, and they took it seriously. Today, it seems people are all into the coolness factor and don’t think beyond that.
When enough people behave irresponsibly, TPTB start making regulations. That’s the only way to ‘educate’ people. (It will take some time for the message to get through.) The bad actors will be malicious for whatever reason(s) they have, and count on the lack of enforcement to get away with it.
yeah, this is what pisses me off. I’m run R/C vehicles (boats) and these dumbshits are giving the rest of us a bad name. People like us belong to national sanctioning bodies like AMA, IMPBA, etc., secure permission to run our vehicles in certain places, and most importantly insure these locations with millions of dollars of coverage through those sanctioning bodies.
Meanwhile, any be-Axe-body-sprayed dudebro can whip out a credit card, buy one of these quadcopters because “LOL I can sky pictars!!@1” and after enough of them fly up in business where they don’t belong, they’ll eventually be banned. Then these douchetwats will mope away moaning “man, this is bullshit!!” as though they had nothing to do with it.
That’s it, I’m lobbying Congress to add a rider to the Drone Act so that Axe Body Spray can be also federally regulated. Or outlawed for anyone over 18.
If you use ‘Old Spice™’, you are automatically law abiding…
… What??
That seems like a bit of overkill, since they should be able to jam the control frequencies much more easily.
OK, I guess you can’t jam that. Bring on the death lazers…