Plane damaged after being hit by York police drone at Buttonville Airport

https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/plane-damaged-after-being-hit-by-york-police-drone-at-buttonville-airport-1.5554617

by zdw • 5 years ago

167 126 5 years ago

toronto.ctvnews.ca

umvi• 5 years ago

Hopefully the police get a fine and licence temporarily revoked just like a civilian would have.

java-man• 5 years ago

The fine will be paid by the taxpayers and nothing will change.

anonymousiam3• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure that if a civilian was operating a drone in restricted airspace and a collision almost took out an aircraft, it would incur more than a fine and temporary license suspension. Just look at all of the folks being prosecuted for pointing a laser the wrong way in the sky.

http://jdasolutions.aero/blog/aiming-lasers-at-aircraft/

ansible• 5 years ago

... pointing a laser the wrong way ...

I don't see how the two situations compare.

If you are shining a laser light towards an aircraft, you are deliberately trying to inflict harm upon the pilot, and could easily cause an accident.

The police drone pilot screwed up, badly, and was possibly criminally negligent, but wasn't intending to down a plane, though that could easily have been the result.

spywaregorilla• 5 years ago

These people tend to be intentionally aiming their lasers at planes, which is quite different from "point a laser the wrong way in the sky" which implies accidental. The headline example on your page also got a year of probation from a fairly understanding judge it seems.

garyfirestorm• 5 years ago

look at the headline 'Plane damaged after being hit by York police drone at Buttonville Airport' if it were a civilian I am sure it would be 'Major disaster - as civilian drone crashes into a plane - potential suspects at large'

djrogers2• 5 years ago

Just look at all of the folks being prosecuted for pointing a laser the wrong way in the sky.

That really smacks of being intentionally obtuse. If I said “look at all the people prosecuted for pointing their guns the wrong way when discharging them” you wouldn’t buy it…

JTbane• 5 years ago

A civilian would be criminally charged for this.

The police will likely get a slap on the wrist, or a token fine.

hellbannedguy• 5 years ago

It's weird how my perception of cops have changed. Actually that's a lie. I lost respect for the profession in high school.

That said, my immediate thought is they (cops) were fooling around with their new toy.

I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection, and solely zoned in on real crime? And what is real crime? I guess murders, white collar crime, organized gangs. It's not drugs.

ashtonkem8• 5 years ago

It’s worth pointing out that “real crime” is a social construct. Petty crime is a prosecuted, despite being dwarfed by wage theft. Shooting someone is a crime, obviously, but purposefully starving thousands of infants to boost Nestle stock values is not.

What you or I think of being the “real crime” that cops should focus on may or may not be what the laws define as real crime, which itself probably doesn’t map to what cops spend all their time doing

mschuster91• 5 years ago

I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection

For that, you need political change. Many a constituency has elected to rip off their people with absurd policing tactics - including asset forfeiture abuse - that primarily target poor people to fund their operations, instead of properly raising taxes, because raising taxes is a hard sell "thanks" to decades of small-gubmint, trickle down propaganda.

coliveira• 5 years ago

Cops are there to maintain their jobs, and their leaders are there to expand the corporation and make more money. The companies that support policing are there to make more profit. For all this to happen, they need to manufacture more "crime", even though all statistics say that crime is in a long term decline.

candiodari• 5 years ago

I guess my view would change if they lightened up on Revenue Collection, and solely zoned in on real crime? And what is real crime? I guess murders, white collar crime, organized gangs. It's not drugs.

Then I would suggest you do not look up the statistics on how many "real crime" cases get solved. Murders, most of which are done in the moment and not planned out at all. Even premeditated must be understood to mean "X tried to extort Y, fight ensued, knife was used, Y died", and very much not "the butler, after 2 years of slowly preparing for the moment, set in motion his plan ..." like in the books.

Of all murders, the police solve about 60% of cases. Every other crime it goes down significantly (and theft is far below 10%).

There's a reason actual premeditated murders usually make the news for a week.

alistairSH• 5 years ago

This wasn't a toy drone like a DJI Mavic or similar. Assuming they haven't changed hardware, it cost ~$125,000, takes a team of two to operate, and weighs 2.4kg (5.2lbs).[1]

This is the damage done to the airplane.[2] It will require body work and an engine tear-down (prop struck the drone). If the drone had been a bit higher, it could have done major damage to the prop or worse the windscreen and possibly pilot.

1 - https://www.toronto.com/news-story/5728426-york-regional-pol...

2 - https://s30121.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/plane-hit-...

jollybean3• 5 years ago

You must not know anyone who does heroin, fentanyl or addicted to scrip. opioids, and therefore would have difficulty imagining how free and open access to those substances would lead to something much worse than COVID for civilization, and therefore maybe don't get quite why in the 'Supply Demand' equation, that law enforcement in totality (not just Police) basically keep a 'lid on things' such that the cost (economic and social) for such things is quite high, resulting in only relatively marginal demand.

Your statement also belies a couple of other misunderstandings in that 1) Police don't make the law and 2) 'go after organized crime' ... when almost all organized crime activity is actually drugs.

Some drugs like mushrooms we can probably move off the watch list, others, like MDMA feel like there should be options, but we are just not structured well for it, but most of the more potent ones just won't work in society irrespective of how a relatively small group of conscientious burningman-ers can 'handle their stuff'.

As for the drone - it was involved in some kind of operation, we have no idea the parameters of the situation or what kinds of risks were taken, why, or even where the civilian plane was at the time, hopefully we will. The Police obviously operate under a completely different set of parameters so it's hard to fathom what's going on.

What's 'wierd' to me is how people can use such casual thinking to make such broad social assessments kind of devoid from reality. I think it has to do with the fact that all systems are imperfect, and when we see an imperfection from the outside, we tend to extrapolate that to the entire system and don't have a developed intuition at all for the material reality of it all. I'll bet anyone most police skeptics, were they to just ride with police for a few days, would be bored out of their minds at the relatively mundane applied pragmatic reality of it all.

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

Hopefully the police get a fine

The police don't get fined - the taxpayer does.

vanattab• 5 years ago

I am pretty sure if a plane is actually struck by your drone near an airfield your going to get more then a fine and license revoked your going to jail.

justinclift• 5 years ago

... or at least pay for the plane repairs and whatever other expenses arise from it.

lisper• 5 years ago

The last sentence made me laugh:

The cause of the collision is not known.

I'll give you long odds that the cause was the drone being someplace it was not supposed to be.

ashtonkem8• 5 years ago

The rule on not using the passive voice in journalism is suspended the moment it’s about cops misbehaving.

guerrilla• 5 years ago

I hope someone out there is documenting just how consistently, it's astounding.

I still wonder how this happens. The only theory I know of is that if they don't give them positive coverage then they'll never get comment form them again, but is that really sufficient for it to be so universal and why have so few papers gone adversarial on this?

Hello71• 5 years ago

"officer-involved aircraft incident"

SilverRed• 5 years ago

Obviously. But why were they there? Were they told to be flying there? Were they given the correct info on where to be flying? Who or what process lead this to happen?

phkahler• 5 years ago

Yeah, this is another case of the police thinking the rules don't apply to them. The "don't fly drones in certain airspace" isn't even about good guys and bad guys, it's about safety.

teeray2• 5 years ago

Uh, why were they allowed to operate a drone within the glide slope of a runway?

version_five2• 5 years ago

NAV Canada, the country’s air navigation service provider, had not been notified about the YRP drone, Transport Canada said.

They didnt ask

jandrese• 5 years ago

They were not but they did so anyway.

marcellus232• 5 years ago

They're not, but they're cops, so...

teeray2• 5 years ago

Ah, yep. The plane should have pulled over when the pilot saw the blue lights.

version_five2• 5 years ago

I'd be interested to know about how York police operate their drone "unit": if it's a group of trained people with flight experience, appropriate training, and the right connections with aviation authorities, or if it's just a couple constables "takin' the drone out".

JamesCoyne2• 5 years ago

I found this article from 2018

https://www.toronto.com/news-story/8102547-video-peel-police...

Nearby Peel ON has a drone unit and probably flies similar equipment to York

stanski• 5 years ago

Flying a drone at or near circuit altitude within the vicinity of an active airport, without prior notification... You can probably guess about the kind of person who was operating the drone.

coldacid2• 5 years ago

York is where they go when they can't get hired by Toronto or Peel.

coldacid2• 5 years ago

Given the quality of York cops, it's most likely the latter. (They're still better than the Durham cops, though.)

hbrav• 5 years ago

If it was >250g, you need a license: https://tc.canada.ca/en/aviation/drone-safety/learn-rules-yo...

joemi3• 5 years ago

I know a lot of people are viewing this as the police getting their comeuppance, but there's not really enough info in this article to go on. The last line of the article is pretty explicit about this: "The cause of the collision is not known."

minitoar• 5 years ago

The only thing I could imagine that would exonerate the operators of the drone would be if it turned out this was an unforseeable equipment failure (eg an uncommanded climb into controlled airspace), and they weren’t already being excessively risky at the time of failure.

bigiain6• 5 years ago

Less than a mile out and directly in line with the landing approach off an active runway? Having the drone powered up at all was "being excessively risky" in my opinion.

I have a DJI drone that will not power up at my house, I'm about 3km out and 7-800m to the side of the runway centreline of my nearby airport. I've been known to test fly and pid tune small (sub 150g) drones in my backyard at lower-than-tree-height or about 3-4 meters up max, but even that "feels wrong" to me if there's a plane I can see on approach or on FlightRadar, so I'll land and wait for a gap.

caconym_2• 5 years ago

You don't need to know much more than that the manned aircraft was on final approach within a mile of the airport^[1] and that the police drone got in its way. Short of some one-in-a-million (but probably actually a lot more than a million) malfunction, there is very little wiggle room here for the police operators to have been anything but profoundly and (one would assume, by "civilian" standards at least) criminally negligent.

You simply do not fly drones anywhere near an airport without coordinating with the relevant air traffic control authorities, and this is exactly why. The people in the 172 could have been killed. Every person operating a UAS needs to be positive they aren't doing so in restricted or conflicted airspace, even casual hobbyists flying tiny sub-250g drones.

Equipment failure is usually not an excuse (for the operator) either, since the limits and failsafes on the drone should always be set to prevent it from ending up somewhere it shouldn't be. Every time I'm going to fly one of my drones, I evaluate these settings and choose new values tailored to the situation and "mission". This includes disabling automatic return-to-home if there is any chance of that function causing it to fly a dangerous route, e.g. one over people.

^[1] https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/172-substantially-damage...

joemi3• 5 years ago

You proved my point by bringing a second (more detailed) source into your argument. At the time I commented, there was no second source in any of the HN comments here.

JamesCoyne2• 5 years ago

You can see a little more detail on the TSB incident page, this is CADORS report 2021O1096: https://wwwapps.tc.gc.ca/Saf-Sec-Sur/2/cadors-screaq/rd.aspx...

Scoundreller• 5 years ago

Because it involved non-police, the CADORS got filed swiftly.

When an RCMP (Canadian federal police) drone collided with their own helicopter, they took 4 months to report the incident:

https://skiesmag.com/news/rcmp-drone-flying-wrong-altitude-c...

giantg22• 5 years ago

If this happened I the US, I highly doubt the police would have admitted to it.

tjohns3• 5 years ago

Assuming they're flying under Part 107 or as a public aircraft, the police drone operators would have the same obligation to report accidents to the NTSB as would a regular aircraft pilot.

giantg22• 5 years ago

And they're also required to report misconduct of other officers, but how often is that ignored...

tjohns3• 5 years ago

There's a photo of the damage here:

https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/172-substantially-damage...

There's also a copy of the incident report here:

https://wwwapps.tc.gc.ca/Saf-Sec-Sur/2/cadors-screaq/rd.aspx...

More generally, I really hope the drone manufacturers invest in genfencing off controlled airspace and installing ADS-B receivers as part of a sense-and-avoid scheme to avoid potential collisions entirely. As a pilot, I'm impressed by the work DJI has been doing in this space.

(Though it's worth noting that sense-and-avoid won't solve the problem entirely, since there's a fair number of aircraft that are not transponder equipped. Canada also doesn't yet mandate ADS-B equipage.)

jcrawfordor2• 5 years ago

The details in the avweb article are pretty damning... 500 AGL and one mile final is not even "near an airport," it's very obviously right in front of the approach end. Hard to imagine how anyone was operating a drone there without complete reckless disregard for safety.

walrus01• 5 years ago

Any reasonably professional part 107 operator (or Canuck equivalent thereof) would say hell no to operating in the glideslope of a runway like that.

jollybean3• 5 years ago

The airplane reported both 500AGL and 1NM (nautical mile) which is oddly the exact lower limit for altitude, and the exact limit to distance for 'advanced operating' drone from the airport, as far as I understand. Why those exact legal limits? What are the odds of that?

If the drone operator reported those numbers, they'd only be 100ft outside of where they should be legally.

Since both '500' and '1' are pretty arbitrary numbers, any reasonable margin of error puts a ton of range for the drone to be flying in safety while the pilot being at error. Or both.

This seems to be a 'threshold' issue, not some arbitrary invasion of space, but we'll have to wait for Transport Canada, hopefully the drone will have precise information. Correct me if I'm wrong.

labcomputer3• 5 years ago

The last time drone training came up, I pointed out that drone operators have no skin in the game, and often act like it too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27618757

I was admonished that I was describing the behavior of only the most psychopathic individuals. So clearly my fears were unfounded.

From the avweb article: "The police department has not commented any further on the mishap except to say the drone was part of a police operation in the area."

Perhaps someone would care to explain how the department's response is substantively different from "opsie daisy"? Is it just that the pilot happend to get lucky this time, and the mid-air collision only caused a massive dent on the engine cowling?

WrtCdEvrydy• 5 years ago

that sense-and-avoid won't solve the problem entirely, since there's a fair number of aircraft that are not transponder equipped.

To be honest, I kinda hate the fact that DJI won't bring Airsense to the smaller drones. I love my Air 2S and I've seen it in action many times, helicopters often give you a 30-40 second window to get out of the way before you even see them.

lazide2• 5 years ago

I generally haven’t found it useful. Too many false positives, and too many aircraft not using transponders - especially helicopters in Class G airspace.

Personally I’m hoping for some basic radar functionality, but that is going to be tough in smaller drones!

jdavis703• 5 years ago

At least in the US there are both LEO and military aircraft that fly around with their transponders turned off. I’m not sure that “sense and avoid” would’ve worked in this case if the cops decided for whatever reason they’d turn off ADS-B.

sokoloff7• 5 years ago

Canada also doesn't yet mandate ADS-B equipage

Neither does the US in an overwhelming majority of airspace under 10,000’MSL.

I chose to equip as I’m based at an airport in airspace that requires it, but if I were willing to move airports about 20 miles up the road, I could conceivably operate for years without ever needing to access airspace where ADS-B is required (and waivers are, anecdotally, readily granted at least for now).

“See and avoid” is the law in VMC, not “sense and avoid”. FAR 91.113.b*. (That’s US law; I suspect Canada is similar**.)

* - https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.113

** - Transport Canada, TP 14371E, Transport Canada Aeronautical Information Manual (TC AIM) (26 March 2020), RAC – Rules of the Air and Air Traffic Services, section 4.5.6. (Probably not regulatory, but likely based on a regulation.)

miketery2• 5 years ago

Neither does the US in an overwhelming majority of airspace under 10,000’MSL.

This is a bad take. It’s required in all controlled airspace. That’s what’s important.

It’s like saying there are no traffic laws on majority of land in the US. It’s moot.

Edit: I'm wrong, read below.

tjohns3• 5 years ago

Neither does the US in an overwhelming majority of airspace under 10,000’MSL.

You are of course correct. But that's getting into the finer details of the FARs, and there's only so much comment space here. We could also talk about aircraft which don't have an electrical system. ;) I did mention that not everyone in the US was equipped, which seemed sufficient.

“See and avoid” is the law in VMC, not “sense and avoid”.

"Sense-and-avoid" actually is the the correct term in this case. This is part of how the FAA wants to integrate commercial drones into the NAS. The idea is that future drones will have an ADS-B receiver and maneuver to avoid known traffic.

See the section on "detect and avoid" strategies here: https://www.faa.gov/uas/research_development/information_pap...

Though again, as mentioned... there are a good number of aircraft are not equipped, so this doesn't cover all possible cases.

tzs• 5 years ago

I had never heard the term "airbox" before. To save people some Googling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbox

throwaway0a5e• 5 years ago

I used to work in aviation. The police fly like they drive (i.e like the rules don't apply to them, because they don't). This isn't surprising in the least.

bernardv• 5 years ago

Buttonville airport is a small regional airport with few flights in/out on any given day. Anyone can monitor the tower on VHF and get a clue as to what is coming in, and some smaller planes do have ADS-B transponders and show-up on flightradar, or a basic SDR rig. It is flat terrain and any low-flying aircraft is visible well before it passes overhead. Can’t think of any excuse as to how this might have been allowed to happen.

Buttons840• 5 years ago

Is this the first known incident where a plane hit a drone operated by another person / organization?

8eye• 5 years ago

don’t give them jet packs

ncmncm2• 5 years ago

That pilot is lucky the police didn't try to arrest him for damaging their drone. US cops would have. But he should sue them personally for reckless endangerment, and for repairs for the damage to his aircraft.

Suing their department would do no good, beyond maybe getting his repairs paid for.

Plane damaged after being hit by York police drone at Buttonville Airport

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