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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, how much damage could you actually do with that drone? I mean, if it isn't armed then there isn't much too this story - failures happen all the time.

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But failures don't always go for a 23-mile joy-ride into restricted airspace. That's kinda cool.

As to damage, given the size, probably not a whole lot if it just died and fell. Might kill someone who's incredibly unlucky. But consider if it flew around at a really low altitude: power lines, people, windows, all in range of the blades. Given that it went 23 miles on its own, having working ground-avoidance software isn't an unreasonable assumption.

From the article: it "was flying at 2,000 feet".

I see no reason to assume it would have any ground-avoidance software besides flying higher if it detects it's near the ground.

And when something's glitching? Say an avoid-ground routine and a go-down routine, plus some sort of importance measurement (very near ground? go up fast). All reasonable in a self-piloting machine.

Now say the go-down routine gets abnormally high importance, or fires off a million times per second.

Unlikely? Yes, but so is what happened. And I specifically included "consider if", because it's not what happened, but could conceivably, and was probably one of the panicked fears going through their heads.

Even small private aircraft have GPS chart plotting terrain avoidance these days

A 600 lb helicopter landing on your house would do significant amounts of damage.

Or a parking lot, street or intersection.

Let's put that Chevy 'Like A Rock' slogan to the test!

Depends on how concentrated the weight is and how hard it hits. Most roofs can handle a bunch of 200 pound roofers working on them, or tons of snow, without any difficulty.

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