To think drones need to banned ASAP

[Wanttoretirebefore90]

It's not going to be long until one takes down a dreamliner and kills 600 :(

I agree.

I hate them
I think there should be laws and registration permits to buy them
I feel they can be unsafe if used for spying on people, theft, watching people
I dont like them

Not banned but definitely licensed and greater regulation on how and where they are flown

don't watch this if you are about to fly:

(simulated impact of Drone and Aircraft wing)

It’ll be more than 600 hundred with the casualties on the ground.

Flying thousands of aircraft over the most densely populated area of the UK is utter madness.,

In short, ban aircraft overflying big cities, not only drones.

I agree. Heathrow should be moved also.

They don't need to be banned. They need to be treated the same as regular aircraft. Properly licenced pilots, penalties as severe as regular pilots for any breach.

At the moment none of the above is enforced. Laws are there but ignored.

Neither banning nor licensing will have any effect whatsoever. Those who wish to disrupt will simply build one anyway - the tech is freely available.
Couldn't believe when I heard that plan number 1 was to require drones to be built with shutdown circuitry that can be activated near the airport - exactly how would that stop purpose built malicious drones from being made that lacked such circuitry!!? Bit like that story of MEPs voting to ban AI-robot-soldiers. Great. And the countries without such a ban won't simply build them then anyway and then invade?

What the airports need is signal jamming tech to simply disable any drone that comes near; turning it into a paperweight.

Licensing would require a method for determining the pilot. Easy enough with a plane, not so easy with a drone controlled over the internet, by someone in another country.

Signal jamming wouldn't work, they canbe programmed on a route

They’re licenced in other countries. Just like any other aircraft.

Drones are actually pretty useful for lots of things (firefighting, search and rescue, police investigations, film work, surveying, accident investigation, farming, renewable power, etc etc) so I wouldn’t like to see them banned but better implementation of the current legislation might help.

Of course if Amazon get their way they’ll have exclusive rights over all the airspace amateurs use and I imagine they’ll enforce that pretty heavily (luckily I don’t think they will get what they want).

To where would you move Heathrow? The nature of such a ‘building’ or facility is that it needs people to both run it and work in it. Those people need homes, shops, other facilities such as hospitals and schools. It creates a place where people live. West Drayton, Hayes etc did not look as they currently do before Heathrow existed.

And drones can and do provide valuable services in the correct (licensed) hands.

Banning things rarely banishes things...

A big airport in London’s case should be in the north east because of the prevalent westerly winds. This way the landing aircraft won’t have to overfly the city and departing aircraft can disperse ove less densely populated area most of the time.

So Newcastle etc take the ‘risk’ (we’ve not had many (any?) huge disasters during landing / take off in my ancient memory).

I agree move it east. Then build a high speed railway. Solved! Crazy where it is

Or the Thames estuary, which was the only sane thing Boris ever wanted.

Landing over water minimises the risks for the population.

Heathrow was, and still is, a huge planning mistake.,

Actual proper lol at just moving Heathrow

How would moving Heathrow help? Wasn’t Gatwick also affected? There needs to be access to a wide variety of international flights close to London. Many people who pay very high taxes do a lot of traveling and there’s only so far they’re willing to go. We love 30 min east of Heathrow and we hate even going as far as Gatwick to be a pain. There are no major cities without international airports close by— otherwise they would no longer be major cities.

It's not at all clear that in either the lhr or lgw cases there actually was a drone: reports of sightings were all there was.

My experience of people that fly drones is that they are tossers: the sort of people that The Fast Show was guying with "let's offroad!", who drive around small towns in Land Rovers fitted with extended air intakes. On the bright side, at least it's harder for them to get access to guns than it was a generation ago.

There are legitimate uses for drones, for whom a licensing regime would be no hardship at all. Otherwise, a blanket ban for unlicensed use would be tricky to enforce, but a few high-profile jailings would get the attention of the tossers.

Moving it would save thousands of lives in the case of a jumbo coming down in a densely populated area. Not to mention all the pollution London gets

On my community fb page, there were at least two posts on Christmas Day asking if anyone had a drone that landed in their garden, because their kid (that got given the present) lost control .

Bad enough un licensed adults having them, never mind kids!

Don't worry they'll be a solution along soon. Problem, reaction, solution.

You can't just ban everything and anything because some people cause harm or disruption with a given type of object. People get injured and murdered with knives pretty much everyday but I'm sure you can see how ridiculous it would be to ban knives outright.

The pilots' union BALPA have been going on about the threat to a passenger aircraft for years with little or no notice taken until drones have actually started to be flown inside controlled airspace in close proximity to aircraft taking off and landing. Here's a press release from July 2017 asking the UK government to tighten up drone licensing.

The idea that Amazon deliveries by drone is a good idea is terrifying to me. I've seen various delivery vans crash badly over the years, including an Amazon one going through the front of a building and a badly driven Royal Mail van causing a 3 car pile up at the end of my lane. I'd like to think if drone deliveries ever happened they would use and entirely different workforce to the lot they use now, but I've no idea where they'll find that many experience drone pilots from. Let alone how they will get round the rules that state a drone operator must always keep their drone in sight and not fly closer than 50m from any building or person.