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Comment by larrys | Hacker News Reader

"Kimchi also laid out his thinking on how autonomous drones could safely fly in the same locations as helicopters. Helicopters are much more problematic than planes for drones because of low-altitude flying."

I wonder what size drones they are envisioning. For example with a typical prosumer drone out there now, it would be completely obliterated by a large helicopter when coming in contact with the moving blades or hitting the windshield or other parts. Likewise the downdraft of the heli would force down anything of that size in it's path.

After all if a drone is such a threat to a heli then what kind of threat is it to a person that it comes into contact with by accident?

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Seems like they would need to be much larger than prosumer drones in order to carry anything bigger than a blu-ray. If a drone the size of the one in the 60 minutes demo hit helicopter blades you'd probably be looking at fatalities.

Watching the latest Mythbuster episode is enlightening, particularly if you take the weights of the crafts they're testing into account.

THe TL;DR of the episode is - carbon fiber blades directly connected to motors (likely the setup for commercial UAVs) is capable of slicing deeply enough to hit your jugular, others are not (unless the motor is being held solidly and used as a form of saw).

I'm more concerned with UAVs and payloads in excess of 10 lbs falling from 400 feet up onto my head because a wiring connection came loose and cut power to the UAV (happened to me recently, minus the head).

In short, don't fly UAVs around people, or in no-fly zones.

Of interest:

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2013/09/05/remote-control-he...

"A 19-year-old model helicopter enthusiast was killed Thursday when a toy helicopter he was flying struck him in the head, a law-enforcement official said."

If Amazon is going to be using these aircraft to deliver packages they are going to have to be a fair bit larger than the prosumer drones out there now to have any sort of useful payload capacity.

Likewise the downdraft of the heli would force down anything of that size in it's path.

Downdraft wouldn't help safety: presumably there are locations above the helicopter from which a drone would be pulled into the rotor.

Falling parts could still be a huge danger even if they are small. So it doesn't have to be a danger to the helicopter to be a danger to someone.

> Likewise the downdraft of the heli would force down anything of that size in it's path.

I imagine even the downdraft coming off of a helicopter would be enough to ruin and take out any drones that got within a certain level of it.

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