Near miss for a glider
We've had plenty of drone near misses with jet airliners around the UK's airports, but the Airprox Board has this month reported a frightening near miss between drone and glider at Dunstable.
Dunstable Downs Airfield, thirty miles north of London, is the home of a gliding club, and a popular spot for both gliders and hang gliders. There are well-understood rules that kite flying is limited to certain areas and will be below glider height, and that hang gliders use a different part of the ridge so that they do not cross over with glider plane traffic.
On New Year's Day, a glider pilot spotted the drone when on his final approach to land. The shocked pilot said the drone was dull grey in colour and difficult to spot against the backdrop of Dunstable town. If the drone had been on collision course, a glider is not responsive enough to have taken evasive action, but by sheer luck, the drone passed rapidly under the wing, missing the aircraft by just a few feet. Gliders are a lightweight construction, and a collision would undoubtedly have been serious. It is worth remembering too that unlike a powered aircraft, gliders on final descent cannot easily go round again if a landing needs to be aborted. Hang gliders and their pilots are even more vulnerable and a drone colliding with a pilot at speed doesn't bear thinking about.
The near miss at Dunstable took place at a height of 550 feet. It is illegal to fly drones above 400 feet, or within 150 feet of other people.
Drone enthusiasts will often claim that a drone in the airspace is no more dangerous than a pigeon in the airspace, and that pilots have had to cope with that ever since aviation began. This is a misinformed view. Birds have terrific visual acuity and spatial awareness, and where human brains can remember routes in two dimensions, the flying bird has to remember complex three dimensional paths, cope with cross winds, swaying branches, and unexpected obstacles, and they have to avoid even glancing collisions which would otherwise cause serious injury to their fragile frames. With the lower air speeds of gliders, bird strikes are rare, although they have happened and caused damage and injury. Birds can't read. Drone pilots can, and they should respect the law.
Birds are inquisitive creatures, and it is not unknown for them to come along and take a close interest in hang-gliders, as this cute video shows:
Sometimes though, even an experienced pilot can be taken by surprise. The pilot of a microlight in this video shows a remarkable degree of composure when the unexpected happens, one minute into the video. Well done Sir!
28th March 2018
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.