The person flying the drone will face the same penalties/punishment as a “regular” person, right?
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahah! Of course not! And it has nothing to do with Canada vs. any other country. It has to do with big government. Politicians/bureaucrats/tyrants get away with all kinds of things, whereas they will destroy the lives of us peons without giving it a second thought.
A couple of points need to be made:
-Chip-
*https://www.faa.gov/data_research/aviation/aerospace_forecasts/media/Unmanned_Aircraft_Systems.pdf
Near misses are not as uncommon as you may think. I fly an airbus now, I have seen 2 of them dangerously close to us on approach in the last 2 years. One in Tampa, one in New York on downwind to LGA. Take out 6 months of furlough, I was flying another jet and had 2 near misses in that period of time alone. Once in the Ft Lauderdale area and one near for Meyers. The pulsing position lights are usually the giveaway. Otherwise the closure rate is too great to really get a good look at it. Thankfully no collisions.
Look at this another way, in my short career I have seen 100s of balloons pass by at surprisingly close distances, birds too. The thing with drones, is that they are manned, and people like to fly them close to other things for the view. Buildings, boats etc, what’s to say getting a sweet view of a 172 or 737 on approach is excluded from that desire?
Hopefully it’s from the perimeter fence line! Otherwise, going by the center and out five miles is not going to fully cover many of the larger airports.
I have a sticker on my truck that says BLUE LIVES MATTER. But all the discussion about various drone regulations in either Canada or the US ignore that police and other enforcement organizations regularly ignore the rules for everyone else, or consider themselves above the law, or at least allowed to bend the laws and regulations. Most of these deviations never make the news, but we have all seen numerous sometimes spectacular examples of local, regional and national law enforcement agencies caught breaking or simply ignoring the rules with serious results from Ruby Ridge, to the Branch Divididians, to framing Trump and his associates to “I can’t breathe”, with terrible consequences. Simply put, cops don’t necessarily follow the rules as is apparent in this instance.
University Airport at UC Davis, is located about half a mile north of Interstate 80 between Sacramento and the Bay Area with the runway perpendicular to I 80. The landing/departures included patterns across I 80. IDIOT California Highway Patrol pilots regularly flew directly through the landing/take-off pattern at KEDU while doing low altitude patrols along I 80. I had two near misses with CHP planes while in the pattern there. I filed complaints, never heard a word back. So all the regs on the books have not detoured the above the law attitudes of the cops! Now if a drone downed a police aircraft, there would be hell to pay.
Another case of a police UAS colliding with a crewed aircraft happened in British Columbia in February 2020.
"A collision between an RCMP AS350-B3 helicopter and an RCMP FLIR SkyRanger R60 RPAS (drone) occurred over Wet’suwet’en Nation traditional lands 24 miles southwest of Houston, British Columbia on February 6, 2020 but only revealed to the public via a CADORS report on June 03.
“The AS-350 was reportedly in cruise flight at less than 300 feet above ground level when the collision with the 2.4 kg drone occurred while it was ascending from below. The RCMP was monitoring the pipeline protests taking place at the time, and the drone was one of two operating in the area.”
Source: “RCMP Chopper Collides with RCMP Drone”, By Steve Drinkwater - June 11, 2020. COPA news bulletin. copanational.org/en/2020/06/11/rcmp-chopper-collides-with-rcmp-drone/
“Kudos” to the police? Are you kidding me?
Thanks for letting us know you broke the law and we can properly adjudicate this mishap investigation. Now get out of here and continue to violate laws and rights with impunity!
You frogs don’t even know your pot is bouling over.
Boiling.
I believe @Chip’s Horse-Less Carriage analogy is best. The days of VFR flying are numbered. The lobby for Beyond Line of Site (BLOS) Drones is hundreds of times greater then the (nonexistent) General Aviation VFR Pilot lobby. Once the first FAA approved BLOS Drone delivers my pizza… game over for VFR operations. Maybe Class E and Class G airspace will still allow Horse-Less Carriages. 
“The lobby for Beyond Line of Site (BLOS) Drones is hundreds of times greater then the (nonexistent) General Aviation VFR Pilot lobby.”
Not non-existent. It’s the primary reason the AOPA (and to a lesser extent the EAA) was created. But too many people don’t join or angrily drop out because they don’t see enough articles about their favorite PuddleJumper 120.
AOPA is a lobbying group with a magazine, not the other way around.
And what will the consequences be for the operator? This isn’t the first time a police drone has been involved in a collision with manned aircraft either. Police operations of UAS should have to obey all of the same rules with all of the same penalties as hobbyists or photographers, they should actually be held more accountable since their existence is supposed to be for public safety and when they create a hazard it’s worse than negligent. I don’t care about the use cases for surveillance, police are public servants and need to be treated as such instead of a class above with special privileges and limited personal liability.
This subject always draws its share of naysayers, and some of them are commenting here.
Call it “pretty rare” if you want, but doing so ignores the “inconvenient truth” that it IS happening, and it will continue to happen. Why? Simply because these drones are relatively inexpensive and readily available to the general public, as well as government agencies, and there’s no guarantee they will be operated responsibly and in compliance with all regulations and guidelines.
A quick YouTube search will turn up a large number of hits in which someone has videoed his attempt to break his last (or someone elses’) altitude record. Nevermind that there are FAA rules governing when and where they can be flown - we’ve all read the news reports of pilots seeing a drone near their aircraft in the vicinity of an airport. These same YouTube heros think nothing of blasting up through a cloud layer, such that they’ve lost line of sight contact with their drone, and are controlling it solely by means of the first person view they get through their video link with the controller they hold in their hands.
Anyone who tries to minimize the risk this kind of cavalier attitude poses needs to think again - the risk is real, and it’s only a matter of time until a drone ends up inside a cockpit, with potential disastrous consequences. And, as with guns, it’s not a problem with drones, it’s a people problem, but a problem nonetheless.
Drone operators are typically not pilots of manned aircraft. The approach the FAA is taking clearly is an attempt at raising consciousness of those who are not. A 107 ticket requires the applicant to know about airspace and where traffic is likely to be encountered. But a 107 is only required for commercial (paid) operators not for hobbyists. Canada seems to require some form of knowledge and licensing.
Was the police operator required to have a license? Pass a knowledge test or even have knowledge of airspace? Would a police helicopter or airplane pilot be as careless?
If it were my command I’d have a few butts in chairs in my office doing quite some explaining. Give me your badges and firearms people.
Russ, if you read this I’d sure enjoy knowing the followup story.
The risk of a drone causing a fatal aircraft accident exists, but it is not “pretty rare,” it is extremely rare such that it has never happened in something like 200-500 million worldwide flight hours.
It is certainly worth mitigating it, but any mitigation needs a cost benefit analysis that lives in the reality. All too often we get government interventions that are complete nonsense and costly, because real risk analysis and cost benefit isn’t done.
Any easy mitigation that would likely pass the cost benefit here would be going after those idiots who post youtube videos of violations and giving them steep fines and community service.