Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, engineering can reduce the risk, but even passenger aircraft sometimes suffer catastrophic failures and drones will likely be under much less scrutiny than passenger aircraft - $10,000 metal fatigue scanning may make sense on a $3M aircraft, but on a $10,000 drone? what will happen to your 8 armed aircraft if the batteries burst into flames, metal fatigue in the central hub makes 3 of the arms on one side fall off, or a rogue drone runs into it?

When drones are making millions of flights a year, even a one in a million malfunction is likely to occur many times a year.

View on HN

Cars kill ~38,000 people per year just in the US. Considering the number of cars on the road would go down (used for deliveries or trips to the store) The number of lives saved would most likely counteract any lost to the 1 in a million chance of a drone falling and killing you. Zero risk is not going to happen but given enough care is provided and sane regulations are in place drones should have a net positive impact on the number of people killed each year.

It's a shame we have become so risk adverse as there are plenty of things way more likely to kill you then drones.

While I agree with you, I think people are concerned because they know how to deal with a car accident. However, as one user asked before, who do you call when the drone crashes into your house? What about your child? No one is really proposing an established procedure and quantifying the risk yet, which is scary.

Regulators could address this concern by requiring drones to carry identifying documents (e.g., license plates) and liability insurance. This model has worked for truck deliveries for a century.

Sure. But somebody has to start having the conversation about actually implementing those requirements.

It's not scary to me. Who do you call when a drone crashes into you house? You call the police, obviously, or emergency services (911) if someone is hurt. Who else would you conceivably call?

Police: "A drone? Was anyone injured?"

Me: "No."

Police: "Did it cause more than £2000 worth of damage?"

Me: "I don't think so."

Police: "Call your insurer. This is not a police matter. Bye."

Insurers will presumably say "that's not covered" up until the point where they have an extra charge for drone insurance when they can say "you don't pay for that cover".

I have no idea if that's a realistic hypothetical. Why would drones be any different than something else causing minor damage to your property? What do police do if a kid hits a baseball through your window? I'm sorry, I just can't work up the existential fear of drones that people express.

Why would my child crash into my house?

Jeez, tough crowd.

All I'm asking is to show me the numbers and quantify that risk. With dozens of drones flying around there's minimal risk, but what's the risk look like when there are many hundreds or thousands of drone flights every day across every city? People and buildings have already been hit by drones despite the fact that drones are relatively rare.

There as well over 1 million drones currently in the US. I get that number by adding up sales figures or estimates of the bigger manufacturers. (Parrot, DJI, 3DR etc..) There could certainly be well more then that (and most likely are) as that's not including hobbyist DIY drones. I've yet to find more then a handful of references to deaths by drones over the past few years and even then those were caused by Single Rotor RC helicopters or RC planes (if you want to lump those in as "drones")

Different risk profiles.

Where I live, if a drone crashed in flames, it would start a fire that would replay the Oakland Hills fire [1] with people getting killed. If a car were to crash on Sand Hill Road, not so much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakland_firestorm_of_1991

That's pure FUD, a car could easily cause the same fire, and the average fire in the hills does turn into a firestorm, it requires a particular set of circumstances.

Not FUD at all, "pure" or otherwise. Here's why:

- Cars travel defined roadways having mandated brush clearance zones that diminish the likelihood of a vehicle crash/fire propagating into uncleared country. A fiery crash is very likely to be noticed and reported immediately, with no uncertainty about its location. Fire responders will be quickly dispatched to the correct location. The road on which the crash occurred will very likely give responders good access for their suppression work. If evacuation is needed, it's easier to direct evacuees to routes that will be most effective in getting them out of danger.

- A drone isn't constrained to defined roads. Compared to the car crash scenario, when a drone crashes away from roads and ignites vegetation, more time will pass before the fire is noticed - reported - located - and fire suppression resources put on site. Away from roads, this means airborne fire suppression and that adds at least 30 minutes to the response loop, even when (as now) there are airborne assets on alert. So an off-road ignition is almost guaranteed to have a longer incident response time than a car crash. Same is true of other off-road fire events like careless hiker cigarette toss, camping fires, etc. Directing evacuees which way to go becomes more difficult.

- Favorable firestorm circumstances: even small fires can combine with topography to generate fast up-slope winds that, while local, are very effective in broadcasting burning material that ignites locations remote from the original burn.

Summarizing, if a drone crash starts an initially unobserved fire in an uncertain location that's tough to access, there's a larger chance that it will become a danger to the local rural population than one started by a car crash.

It's FUD because you're citing a worst-case scenario. I'll acknowledge that a drone is more likely to crash in a dangerous fashion (from a fire perspective), but it's still insignificant compared to the real risk that we live with every day from automobiles.

> drones will likely be under much less scrutiny than passenger aircraft - $10,000 metal fatigue scanning may make sense on a $3M aircraft, but on a $10,000 drone?

I'd like to think that the cost of a passenger aircraft isn't the only reason why they come under more safety and regulatory scrutiny than a motor car. I'd hope that it's because they have an additional severe failure mode that cars don't called falling out of the sky.

I realise that I might be going on about this and I'm a layman, but it seems a bit overlooked that any object that is airborne and needs to be made safe surely starts at a large handicap compared to objects on the ground.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com