This site upsets me. I'm viewing this page on a 32 inch monitor and I can only see 8 lines of content. <a href="https://imgur.com/a/EAMYr" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/EAMYr</a>
<a href="https://screenshots.firefox.com/CRxzfF7mvaXZPYNJ/www.economist.com" rel="nofollow">https://screenshots.firefox.com/CRxzfF7mvaXZPYNJ/www.economi...</a><p>Holy sweet mother of ....<p>I'm sure there's an article in there somewhere.<p>[Edit] Actually, no, I've reached my limit and been cut off.
ADS-B is not a great solution, the latency/accuracy is such that you might know a drone is in the area, but seeing it and avoiding would be difficult. It's a lot easier to spot a small plane than it is to spot a drone.<p>As a pilot, I have had to avoid large birds more often than drones. They tend to actively avoid planes, which helps. Some sort of active avoidance, even super-minimal, on the part of the drones is likely to be more effective in reducing accidents.<p>Just my 2 cents.
I recall reading a proposal about this before, and I'll echo it here. There's already a solution to avoid aircraft collisions, mentioned in the article: ADS-B. Why not equip drones with ADS-B transceivers, enabling both drones and planes to be aware of each other's presence and avoid one another?<p>A counter argument I can anticipate is that with all those drones in the air, broadcasting ADS-B, they will clog up the system with too many signals. Those who make the argument aren't wrong. I propose a solution for that as well: reduced transmission power on drone ADS-B transceivers. Small craft have a minimum transmission power of 75W, and craft that can fly over 15000 ft or faster than 175 kt have to transmit at at least 125W. Few drones are going to be moving that fast or that high. So why not make them have say, a transmission power of 1W? I'd think that would be enough power to warn planes on approach to an airport to watch out for nearby drones, without clogging up the system with useless noise about drones the next city over.
After the mid-air collision over Brazil in 2006 (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/business/03road.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/business/03road.html</a>) I corresponded with a well-known pilot columnist. We didn't agree. I revealed myself to be a mathematician, and he revealed himself to be exactly the conformist one hopes a pilot following rules will be.<p>I observe planes holding their assigned altitudes to very close tolerances. It strikes me as completely idiotic to quantize these altitudes independent of heading, rather than scaling 360 degrees to 2000 feet (or pick your favorite modern units) and adding one's heading to base altitudes. Then planes won't cross each other's paths on a giving heading, avoiding accidents like Brazil.
The paywall prevents me from finding out the economist's theory, but I can put forth my own.<p>The two movies Sully and Deepwater Horizon, which both came out in 2016, are near mirror images of each other in many ways.<p>Sully is partly the story about a pilot who has spent his entire career landing failing airplanes, effectively training him to do it again with higher stakes, where its never happened before. But its also the story of all of the regulation that has prevented all commercial aviation disasters since 2001. Sully may stay calm under pressure, but he's standing on the shoulders of giants. The flight attendants stick to their training. The port authority and the captains of the boats that rescue all of the passengers stick to their training. The NTSB even sticks to their training in certain ways. Plans were set forth, and followed. Even at the end of the movie, it is made clear that the NTSB's flaw was to control for all of the time constraints Sullenberger faced, all of the stress, and hid the fact that it was something like the 20th attempt in the simulator that was the first successful landing.<p>Deepwater horizon is the story about a company that has successfully captured their regulatory framework. There was inadequate training, inadequate safety measures, inadequate equipment to properly measure the specifics of the well. And so when the shit hits the fan, does everyone stay calm and exercise the plan to effect their continued survival? Nope, they all panic, and they nearly all die.<p>Planes and Trains are far safer than automobiles because of ratio of humans to engines.