https://ghostarchive.org/archive/kyqWG
At least five drone shows have been canceled, or have paused the use of the systems, after several drones struck a crowd at a holiday show in Orlando on December 21.
Universal Orlando, Orlando World Center Marriott, the cities of Dallas and Austin, Texas, and a New Year’s Eve event in New York City’s Central Park have either canceled drone shows or the drone components of larger holiday events following the incident.
It is unclear which companies were under contract to produce the shows in each location.
Footage captured on December 21shows drones colliding with each other before falling from the sky during a holiday show at Lake Eola Park. Some drones fell into the lake, some onto the ground and some into areas where a crowd was watching.
Among them was a 7-year-old boy who was struck in his chest by one of the drones. He underwent emergency heart surgery, according to a GoFundMe campaign posted by his family, who spent Christmas in the hospital as he recovered. CNN has reached out to his family for an update on his condition.
The videoshowed several red and green drones crashing into one another before hitting the ground, in what the city described as “technical difficulties,” following the incident.
Flying drones over crowds of people is an FAA violation. They were fucking up before the fuckup even happened. The lawsuits should be swift.
What a lot of people need to remember about these things, is that even the mid-sized drones have enough rotor energy to decapitate people.
They’re basically blades whorling about at high speed. Worse is if something collides and causes the cheap-ass rotor to break off, that’s a flying dagger.
this is not something you can “fix”, it’s an inherent necessity. the more drones in the sky, the greater the risk something gets overlooked… and they should absolutely not be flying where they can fall into people. if that’s happening, walk away, because the pilots are probably over looking other incredibly basic safety protocols too.
And with hundreds of drones up at a time, the amount of time a person has inspecting any one drone is significantly reduced.
Here, at least, flying above people is illegal. Surely the operators in this case will be at least losing their licence, if not facing charges.
Pretty sure the rules with the FAA make that clear. If they have a permit for sUAVs… they’ll probably get that tweeted.
I’m not sure that would stop them. But eh. We can hope.
I saw a video (no gore) about a dude flying an RC Helicopter and ended up decapitated in front of family. Horrific.
I’m wondering if someone in the crowd was interfering with the signal or these were point failures on individual drones
I’ve only ever seen one drone show, during which a few drones started misbehaving, crashed into each other and then into the lake. So from my sample size of one, drone shows are error prone.
It’s Florida. Just assume they used the cheapest garbage available and this all starts to make sense.
That sounds like a really low-value way of committing terrorism, while simultaneously coordinating across 3 cities. More likely, all drone shows outsource their collision avoidance software to like 2 companies and one decided that they won’t waste their money on quality control.
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I hear it’s always a smart idea to perform drone airshows right above big groups of people.
I hope those pigs get sued.
Flying aircraft over groups of people.
You’d think that after Ramstein people would have learned, baaaad idea, that sort of thing.
I guess some people just never learn or think about the obvious
Ohhh. The airbase, not the band.
Also the band if you’ve watched any of the videos coming out of Ukraine.
Read the title thinking - a few drones fall and suddenly there’s nothing on TV.
Helicopters have this ability, why don’t drones?
Drones are controlled by varying the speed of the motors while helicopters are controlled by varying the pitch of the blades at various points in the rotation. If a motor fails on a drone then it’s lost, there is no way of controlling it. The helicopter rotor will spin while falling and the pilot can then mechanically control the pitch of the blades purely mechanically which gives some control.
The change of pitch in the helicopter rotor throughout the rotation can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0shLv2_Rtnc
Thanks, I appreciate the explanation.
The bit that confuses me is how anyone got hit. Drones have this neat ability that if you just stop the propellers they drop like rocks. It’s pretty standard practice to not fly drones directly over people. In a drone show they shouldn’t have really been moving fast enough where horizontal momentum would account for much and in the event of a collision they should have just cut power to the drones. The only way I can figure for this to happen is either a) they didn’t follow basic safety precautions and were flying over the crowd, b) rather than cut power they tried to save the damaged and uncontrollable drones, or c) there was major radio interference and the drones aren’t setup to cut power when they lose signal and/or crash.
From the video I saw of the incident, it looks like they were flying them from a safe distance to the crowd. But possibly some kind of interference or routine code bug caused some to drop and others to shoot out in random directions at full speed. As an FPV pilot, it’s crazy how fast they can pick up speed. I wonder if they lost all TX/RX abilities in order to turn them off. It happened to me once, luckily in a field alone and was only able to find it because of the stupid loud beeper I put on it.
I think drone shows are super neat, but there maybe needs to be a minimum distance regulation and required netting in front of crowds before we keep bringing the tech to events.
That’s a great idea, although I still think the drones should be programmed that in the event they lose RX for more than a second or so or if they detect a collision to immediately cut all power to the motors.
And as with anything, there are exceptions:
One of the rare ones that CAN control the pitch of the blades. You don’t see this often because it greatly increases cost, weight, and complexity for not that much benefit.
If you’re going to go full collective on a quad, the only real reason to do that is because you want to spin up your rotors to higher head speed. (aka, you’re trying to set speed records.)
The reason for this is because if your rotor speed starts going transonic, when the rotor is retreating, it’s slower and that causes massive amounts of flutter. (and excessive flutter causes shattered rotor blades. Or worse… sheared masts.)
but if your goal is to just go freaky fast… getting rid of the tail rotor and flopping so the rotors are more like “propellers” remove this problem.
because Quads (and more-numerous rotor systems), don’t use a variable pitch rotor, and the rotors are directly connected to the motors. Attitude is controlled during powered flight by spinning up or down specific rotors. To roll starboard, you sped up the port-side rotors and slow down the starboard. Yaw, conversely speeds up the two rotors that are spinning the same way and slows down the other two, creating a torquing moment.
Without power, you have no control, and it will generally turn to fall with least resistance.
This is opposed to helicopters which have a swashplate allowing the rotor’s pitch to be changed as it spins around. (you have to sets of controlls, ‘cyclic’ which alters the pitch over specifc points in its’ rotation; and ‘collective’ which adjusts over all pitch.)
Even from a hover, you can autorotate into a forward glide (and this dramatically increases lift production), and more importantly, can build up energy in the rotor system letting you briefly come to a hover just before you, uh. not-quite-crash.
It should be noted, that the sole reason we’re using quads for these systems is because they’re cheap. Collective pitch helicopters are more complicated to build, and more expensive to maintain. They’re less energy efficient, their control inputs exhibit significantly more lag, and they’re even more unstable than helicopters (whose single rotor provides a significant amount of gyroscopic stabilization.)
The only reason unskilled people can fly quads at all (or even modestly skilled people…) is because of the shitloads of flight stabilization routines running on them. If you add the cyclic control you’d need to change that, then they’d be significantly more expensive and complicated.
There is a lot of actual control that goes into an autorotation as well as a lot of variables that have to be taken into account. It’s not like a plane where you can glide for a while before hitting the ground. You’re going in hot either way. Not sure it would slow a drone down that much even if they could.
Autorotation is for more of a controlled crash than anything. Also I don’t think it works without a larger blade, not multiple small ones.
I was thinking the same thing about the blades. I don’t think there would be enough upflow of air to spin them fast enough for control.
Why not have one drone with a string of lights hanging off of it? Or small enough drones (under the faa weight limit) that falling drones won’t hurt you?
Because the string of lights will whip around in the wash of the propellers and the small drones won’t have enough batteries or margin for lights to make it interesting.
