Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Drone incidents involving airplanes rise ‘dramatically,’ FAA says

By

Drone Plane
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Close encounters between manned aircraft and drones in U.S. airspace have risen “dramatically” recently, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) revealed on Friday.

Data collected between August 2015 and January 2016 revealed near misses taking place on average 3.5 times a day, up from less than one a day in 2014.

Recommended Videos

While the FAA’s figures appear at first glance to mirror increasing ownership of the flying machine, it could also be that a number of the reported incidents have been caused by the same operators. If it’s the former, it’d be an even bigger worry for the FAA as most of its recent data was collected before the spike in new owners over the holiday season.

Earlier this month we learned of a near-miss incident involving a Lufthansa passenger plane coming into land at Los Angeles International Airport. The pilot of the Airbus 380, the largest passenger plane in the world, said the drone passed about 200 feet above the plane as it flew at 5,000 feet.

And it’s not just airplane pilots that need to keep their eyes peeled. A police helicopter flying near San Francisco last December was forced into making a sharp turn after its pilot spotted a drone close by while flying at 800 feet. While in most cases so far the drone operator has gotten away, in this particular case he was quickly apprehended.

The troubling data adds a sense of urgency to the government’s need to introduce an effective anti-drone system to deal with rogue UAVs spotted close to not only airports, but also busy public events, nuclear plants, prisons, and other restricted locations.

The search for a solution has resulted in the emergence of a new industry for anti-drone systems. Proposed technology has so far included anti-drone death rays, electromagnetic shields, and net-firing bazookas.

The FAA is also hoping its recently introduced drone registry will help foster a greater sense of responsibility among drone owners, while the agency has also been promoting use of its new B4UFLY app that offers tips on proper drone operation and up-to-date information on safe flying locations.

“We have a number of educational initiatives with our government and industry partners to teach drone operators how to fly safely, including the drone registry we launched last December,” FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said in a release. “But enforcement goes hand-in-hand with education, and we will take action against anyone who operates irresponsibly to the full extent of the law.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more