New Telemetry Suggests Shot-Down Drone Was Higher Than Alleged 528
AmiMoJo writes: The pilot of the drone shot down Sunday evening over a Kentucky property has now come forward with video seemingly showing that the drone wasn't nearly as close as the property owner made it out to be. The data also shows that it was well over 200 feet above the ground before the fatal shots fired. The shooter, meanwhile, continues to maintain that the drone flew 20 feet over a neighbour's house before ascending to "60 to 80 [feet] above me."
Really? (Score:5, Informative)
You would have trouble seeing such a drone at 'well over 200 feet above ground' let alone shooting it down with a shotgun.
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TFA mentions that they asked an expert who was able to confirm that the shot was possible.
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Have you guys ever shot a shotgun??? I call BS on this 200ft claim and the 'expert'.
Something that small, if he hit it at 200ft, he either got REALLY lucky or fired A BUNCH of times (and got lucky).
Even birdshot is only effective at 40yds (120ft for you metric weenies (because math is hard)).
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That's 200 feet, not 200 meters. HUGE difference.
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Even birdshot is only effective at 40yds (120ft for you metric weenies (because math is hard)).
Feet aren't metric. Way to perpetuate the arrogant+ignorant american stereotypes....
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The article mentions "200 feet" and "60 to 80 [feet]", not yards. The OP is making a joke that metric weenies either don't know the conversion from yards to feet, or that they are incapable of multiplying/dividing by 3 to convert between feet and yards.
Way to perpetuate the 'metric weenies have no sense of humor' stereotype.
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No, we have a sense of humour. It's altogether more civilised and allows for nuance, subtlety and more advanced forms of wit.
All of which were sadly absent from the alleged joke about weenies.
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The Military [yuku.com] claims 50 yards effective range, and up to 80 yards lethality with the proper load. If this guy was sporting 00 or 000 buck rather than bird shot a kill on a fragile drone at 200' is not at all impossible.
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Speakin of military, Hillview, KY is only a few miles from Fort Knox [wikipedia.org]. He should be careful what he shoots at, it might shoot back.
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If he was using buckshot, he'd have nine (or fewer) pellets to work with. At 200', with all of the spread in the pattern at that distance, he'd be extremely lucky to hit a tiny quadcopter. The pellets may retain the energy to break the quadcopter, but the likelihood of him actually hitting it is even less likely.
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People are so used to thinking in terms of the power the shot will have when it hits the target. In this case it ju
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I have a drone -- I don't know if his version works different, but the telemetry is relative to the drone's take-off. The drone does not have topographical data to determine actual altitude from ground obstacles!
Someone correct me if I'm wrong -- but all my tests with my drone flying over changes in terrain (say a hill a hundred feet high) changes the telemetry altitude by zero -- it's all relative to the home point.
Regardless the guy was a pretty good shot to take it down if they were just doing a fly-ov
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Unfortunately your opinion is not correct. The FAA asserts the right to airspace, including a few feet above the ground. There was the case United States v. Causby where military aircraft where flying at 83 above his farm and disturbing his sheep. The ruling was that the military did not violate his fifth amendment right, but still was compensated on the ground of the noise and commotion made by the planes.
The operator was flying the drone in class G airspace and had all the right to it. The safe flying alt
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
At 200 ft your shot would be a nice little cloud and any of those pellets hitting the drone would be enough to take it down.
Think a target about 8x the size of a clay and far far more fragile. The actual body isn't more fragile but the flight stability is.
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Because they only know how to multiply and divide by 10s, so he was assuming they couldn't even do the converstion to feet.
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He meant to say that it was 20 orguiai.
Re: Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
I might add that 50 meters STRAIGHT UP does not equate to a 50 meter horizontal shot. If the shot I'm shooting has a maximum effective range of 50 meters (or yards), I can expect that firing straight up into the air, my shot will only reach about 30 meters (or yards). Maybe 40. No matter how you cut it, shotguns are not long range weapons.
Duck hunters don't take those long shots into the sky for that very reason. They use decoys to bring the ducks down to landing approach height - 20 to 100 feet - then shoot them as they pass overhead. Even extra length, extra high powered "goose guns" can't reach much higher than 150 feet.
http://www.outdoorlife.com/pho... [outdoorlife.com]
Here, a collection of anecdotal evidence - http://www.duckhuntingchat.com... [duckhuntingchat.com]
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Umm, no. Your shot will reach considerably higher than 30 feet straight up.
Muzzle speed from a 12ga is on the order of 1500 fps (call it 450m/s for the metric types). For it to have a ceiling of 30 feet (10 meters) straight up, the shot would have to be decelerating at ~50G's.
And that isn't happening unless you're shooting through a wall/ceiling.
Note that the problem with taking things out wh
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Thirty yards, or 150 feet. And, I used the term "maximum effective range", rather than "extreme range". Yeah - the pellets might break that 200 foot ceiling, but what are they doing? Moving slow, and decelerating, thanks to gravity. They'll bounce off a goose, or a duck. Hunters in the know generally don't take shots over 40 yards, as evidenced by the posts I linked to. That is, shooting at ducks and geese more than 120 feet away usually means no kill. Or, if they get a kill, they generally chalk it
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Exactly, which is what is throwing off the term effective range here. This is a consumer quadcopter. Pretty much anything bouncing off it is going to drop it, especially if it hits one of the rotors. Bird shot that missed on the way up and hit on the way down would still have enough force to drop one. You could toss a BB at one casually from across the living room and if you hit it, you'd crash it.
Ducks and Geese are far more stable than these drones. Bird shot would
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Note that the problem with taking things out when shooting straight up is that human's are really pretty crappy at judging distance directly overhead. Which makes judging the lead you give the target pretty much guesswork...
That's why you don't lead the target. Instead, you sweep the barrel. Get the bead moving with the target and pull the trigger. Then you don't have to guess. Humans are pretty crappy at gauging distance in general. We use tricks to compensate.
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Hey, I think I saw that in a movie once. It was called "Wanted." Angelina Jolie could curve bullets around obstacles.
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I might add that 50 meters STRAIGHT UP does not equate to a 50 meter horizontal shot. If the shot I'm shooting has a maximum effective range of 50 meters (or yards), I can expect that firing straight up into the air, my shot will only reach about 30 meters (or yards). Maybe 40. No matter how you cut it, shotguns are not long range weapons.
Duck hunters don't take those long shots into the sky for that very reason. They use decoys to bring the ducks down to landing approach height - 20 to 100 feet - then shoot them as they pass overhead. Even extra length, extra high powered "goose guns" can't reach much higher than 150 feet.
Olympic clay pigeon shooting occurs at ranges of 50 metres. Targets are thrown into the air 45-55 meters away from the shooter. Olympic trap targets are set at 76 metres.
A shotgun can easily shoot 50 meters and you dont have to do much damage to a drone to make it crash.
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Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
And you believe this? Even with good shotshell and a patterned gun, it's very unlikely to score a buckshot kill at more than 40-45 yards away. Hard to do for a stationary deer, impossible with a drone in the air.
The telemetry was either faked or, as an astute AC explained already, was showing the altitude at the launch point, which may be lower than the "trigger-happy" guy's backyard.
It simply doesn't pass the smell test.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Informative)
This [shotgunspo...gazine.com] seems to suggest that at 200ft the type of shot used here would be quite painful. Granted that isn't firing upwards, but even so it should be enough to damage a small, plastic drone. A broken prop would be enough to bring it down.
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I'm a competitive trap shooter who dabbles in what is called handicap trap shooting. Basically you shoot a normal round, then move back several yards to make it harder based on how well you scored in that first round. A 2 yard increase in distance has a HUGE effect on your ability to hit a target. It almost feels like a different sport, such are the changes you must make in your shooting habits.
Even if you are making your own shells and putting 1 and 1/8th ounces of powder in (which for many shooter
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If you don't understand how shotguns work, specifically when he mentioned patterned, don't try and refute him. At 200 feet the pattern of a buck shot would be such that the drone was unlikely to be hit by 1 pellet, much less the multiple it would probably take to disable it.
When trap shooting, if you have a perfect shot at too far of a distance past where your gun is patterned for you still don't hit because the pellets are so dispersed by the time they reach the clay there is far more open space than pell
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Typical shotgun spread is around 0.5" per yard. Some are as low as 0.3" per yard. So the spread at 200ft is going to be around 20" across. A drone is also about 20" across. So if the shot was good, it's highly likely that almost all of the pellets would hit the drone.
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No, it doesn't. It says they showed a chart from an online hunting course. Said chart shows 'maximum projectile range'. It does not say that is when shooting straight up, or that there is enough energy left at that distance to do any harm.
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The shot doesn't have to have much more than potential energy to break the thing. A prop hitting a stationary metal ball is destructive enough (to the prop)
Re: Really? (Score:3)
That wasn't an expert, it was a lawyer referring to a web site. Those are also maximum horizontal ranges, not maximum effective range vertically. It may still be possible, but this doesn't prove it.
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Ars asked an attorney who is an avid drone advocate, not an expert.
The lawyer pointed them to a website w/a chart listing the maximum effective range for various sizes of shot. Even if the chart is accurate, it lists max. effective ranges, as in horizontal distance, and not a max. effective heights. It's likely the numbers are for a nominally horizontal shot The slide lists neither a trajectory, nor a source for its numbers.
Height, potential energy, etc
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the drone pilot came storming over to the owners property and menaced the owner.
And how do you/they know that? Oh yeah, the owner told them.
The previous article had *nothing* from the point of view of the pilot, all you heard from was the oh so reasonable owner -- how he carefully used the safest shot, how it was hovering over his daughter, how it wasn't the first incident, how his careful display of force is what kept the belligerent pilot and his crew at bay, how he doesn't dislike "drones" -- he thinks they're fine and dandy, etc. Personally, it sounds like he was setting himself
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I beg to differ, and have a great example.
Trap shooting [oxfordfishandgame.org] is where a shotgun is used to hit a clay "pidgin". They are about 5" in diameter, way smaller than most drones, and moving at relatively high speed. The shooter stands 16-27 yards from the launch point of the clay, and typically hits them about 15-25 yards downstream of the launcher. That means they are regularly hitting a 5" target at 150' away, the best shooters with basically 100% accuracy.
A larger, slow moving drone at 200', hardly a challenge
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Two easy points of dispute. A) They use guns made/modified specifically to shoot that target. A standard shotgun some guy has behind his door for protection is going to have a very different pattern. B) How do you know this guy is such a crack shot?
And a third easy point, that has been mentioned many times above, is that shooting vertically, at a drone above you, limits the maximum range of the shot.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
B) Trap shooters are shooting one shell at a very fast moving target. This guy just had to shoot a stationary target with one of his several shells.
As for your third point, a shotgun pellet at 5 grains and 0.05 BC (typical for a light sphere), loses half of its 1200 fps velocity within 200 yards (600 feet), and does that between a quarter and a half of a second due to aero drag. It doesn't matter which way you shoot the shot, because in that tiny time span, gravity at its very weak 9.8 m/s^2 doesn't affect that hardly at all, as it makes up less than 10% of the velocity change.
poorly researched article, if at all (Score:2, Informative)
The 200 ft displayed on video is based on position where drone was turned on and calibrated, based on a barometric altimeter.
Was the house on a hill or small rise i comparison to where the flght started? Then yes, drone was lower.
This took only a few minutes research of the drone manuals and the tech support forums.
The missing part of this story's coverage (Score:3, Interesting)
Is why a long list of seemingly obvious criminal charges hasn't been brought against the drone operator.
I'd start with whatever laws relate to peeping Toms, disturbing the peace, and perhaps harassment.
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The telemetry shows that it was too high to be "peeping", and didn't linger over the guy's property before he shot it down. Might be fake of course, but more generally speaking my understanding is that it's something of a grey area just how low aircraft can fly over property before it becomes a legal issue.
If the shooter had thought to take a photo of the drone (there must have been a few smartphones around) he could at least try to press charges, but by shooting first he had left the drone operator with th
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I find the interesting part to be the telemetry data is all that is being released. Most of the drones like the one in question that I am aware of record the entire flight as well as transmit it back for live viewing. Why is there non of this footage over this guys house available?
I mean the easiest way to refute the claim that the drone was hovering over his house and peeping and all that would be to release the flight video itself and show that for a fact it did not do any of these things. The only thing
Re:The missing part of this story's coverage (Score:4, Informative)
The telemetry shows that it was too high to be "peeping"
The telemetry also shows that it was at -45.9 feet when it crashed (see the video.) We can presume the telemetry is accurate and it crashed so hard that it buried itself 46 feet under the ground, or we can assume that this "telemetry" is bullshit.
You seem to want to presume accurate telemetry even when the evidence is right in front of you that it isnt accurate. Why is that? Why have you stopped giving a shit about accuracy and veracity? What motivation do you have to be willfully ignorant?
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Or the telemetry altitude was referenced to a zero point 46 feet higher than point it crashed. Or the altimeter was damaged when the drone was shot.
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As such, his "evidence" will not be of any value in court. The height will be judged to be as high as the witnesses claim.
It will be a he-said/he-said, and it is well known that untrained persons have little ability to judge the altitudes of airborne objects. Even pilots have difficulty, since most of their experience is from looking down at the ground and not looking up at something small overhead. Both parties will have been sworn, and if you want to automatically assume that one is lying despite having telemetry as evidence, then you need to assume both are.
"I was spying on you from 200 feet, not 60!" (Score:2, Interesting)
Umm, no. Doesn't really change anything.
Kentucky is for Drones (Score:3, Funny)
You are all drones. Drones make Rrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrr. What do drones make? Rrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrr rrrrrrr make the drones. YOU DRONES!
Impossible with #6 or lesser shotgun shot (Score:4, Informative)
... simply put at that range ( 200 ft ) any pellets the size of #6 or smaller would simply not have the ballistic energy.
2 ply cardboard wouldnt be penetrated at 200 feet.
Source : Years of hunting and shooting with 12 guages
Re:Impossible with #6 or lesser shotgun shot (Score:5, Insightful)
Go grab a model aircraft. Spin up the prop, and drop a piece of shot into the prop.
You'll probably end up with a broken prop, without any appreciable ballistic energy being involved.
Re:Impossible with #6 or lesser shotgun shot (Score:5, Informative)
You're simply wrong.
Source: actual ballistics tables [shotgunspo...gazine.com]
60 yards is 180 ft -- 20 ft short of the target distance. 500 FPS will still hurt quite a bit.
Maximum range with "no" ballistic energy is 200 yards, and we're talking about smaller birdshot (#7.5-8), not #6.
Sign a liability waiver, stand 200 ft away, and allow me to blast away at you with Remington 12 guage #6 if you're so sure of yourself...
Re:Impossible with #6 or lesser shotgun shot (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Impossible with #6 or lesser shotgun shot (Score:4, Informative)
Source. [utah.edu]
I can keep this up all day. Vague references to your so-called "hunting experience" don't trump actual data.
Re:Impossible with #6 or lesser shotgun shot (Score:4, Interesting)
Vice president Cheney shot a man in the face with birdshot. It barely broke the skin. And the victim was 78 years old. Skin gets easier to tear as we get older.
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I'm offering to give you that actual experience. The shells and Mossberg 500 are sitting in a gun safe about 25 yards away, along with my other firearms.
Blowhard.
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As to your question - yes. From a standing position 2 yards away. (:P) Distance tables are handy.
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terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it a drone, capable of flying by itself, or is it a radio controlled vehicle that must be piloted?
Was it lingering over the guy's property or passing through his airspace?
Clearly the pilot did not take evasive action. Being able to shoot it makes it seem like he was pestering the homeowner.
Where is the drone video itself? (Score:2)
Where is the video from the drone itself? If you know the angle of view of the camera, and can measure the distance between actual points on the ground, you can PRECISELY calculate the height of the drone from that video. Telemetry data can be faked. The live video of the incident itself couldn't be nearly as easily.
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The card was gone when they got it.
If you look, it is a microsd card, with no locking mechanism on the outside. It most likely flung out with much force when it hit the ground. When the quad crashed, it probably turned/tumbled a few time flinging the card out in an unknown direction. Have you ever tried to find a microsd card in your yard? (Good luck)
Then where did they get the telemetry data?
80 versus 200 with no points of reference (Score:2)
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200 feet is still pretty close.
Yes, but if I shoot someone's car who parked is on the street 200 ft outside my property and assert it was my right because he was parked "too close" to my property, the law is not going to consider "pretty close" to be close enough.
Airspace in general is the public domain. At what point it above your property it becomes yours is a legal grey area.
What's the deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
In addition, this fear is too fearful to even look like fear - it's masked with goofy bravado. It's like the friend's husband who sleeps with a .45 under the pillow, no safety engaged. (takes time to take it off yaknow) Brags about it. The friend who keeps one in every room, and vehicle and a shorty strapped to his ankle. That's fear
This Tennessee case is just anther example of that fear. "Oh a Drone! Must be th' Guvmint spying on me, or maybe a homo looking for a place to marry hi
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Wow, the stereotyping is strong with you. You just can't live with the idea that people would like laws to be followed, want to be protected from aggressive thugs, and don't want their private property being violated and invaded. It's people like you that made me leave the Democratic party (I'm and independent now).
Re:What's the deal? (Score:4, Interesting)
Took a while...is the data real? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder that the video and data didn't go up immediately. A couple of days is enough to edit the telemetry and video. Maybe they're honest, maybe they're not. However, it seems really unlikely that someone would be massively offended by a drone 70 meters up.
If they were going to file charges against anyone, it was really stupid for the police not to impound the drone as evidence.
Altitude is difficult to estimate (Score:5, Insightful)
Altered telemetry is a possibility. (Score:2)
And how do they know the telemetry hasn't been altered - it might be trivial to do.
home defense drone (Score:2)
Probably the best solution to this is to get a drone yourself for your home and equip it in a way in which it can take down other drones. It shouldn't take much: a trailing net, a trailing string, or even just dropping something.
Then I start becoming suspcious it was shot down (Score:3)
200 feet up is a LONG way for most bird loads in a shotgun, even straight up with no extra slant distance. I can't think of any goose loads that would carry enough energy to drop a metal and plastic drone at that distance. They struggle to take down a soft-skinned animal at 150 feet.
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It's painfully obvious, the property owner needs to get a lawyer that can pursue the drone owner for criminal misconduct.
Actually, everyone should take a chill. All the charges should be dropped and these people should just work it out. The neighborly thing to do would have been to tell the neighbor not to fly over his property before shooting it out of the sky or anything like that. I think some partial compensation would be appropriate as a civil matter negotiated between the neighbors or in civil small claims court. The only reason that this is being given any attention is because "drone" has become the catch all word
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The neighborly thing to do would have been to tell the neighbor not to fly over his property before shooting it out of the sky or anything like that.
Exactly how would he have done that? It's not like he knew the drone owners and recognized their drone. Also, according to the shooter, he did wave it off initially, but they came back a little while later. That seems perfectly "neighborly" to me.
Finally, according to the initial report, when the shooter shot down the drone, four men drove up in a vehicle an
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If the drone was under 500 ft, in the US there is a potential case for criminal trespass. It's not a slam dunk, because under 500 ft, AFAIK you're really dealing in the realm of common law and precedent. If the drone was over 500 ft, the landowner would be guilty of downing an aircraft flying in navigable public airspace. I believe that's taken pretty seriously.
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Might want to reconsider paying the fine... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can pay the fine
Federal Law [cornell.edu] does not put drones in a special category. They are just another aircraft. The penalty is up to 20 years in federal prison, and a $250,000 fine. That's in addition to the charges this individual has already faced for discharging a fire arm in the city he lived in, as they make that illegal there.
More interestingly, there is a line here that is not well defined. What's the difference between:
I think most people would say the first is fine, and it's not legal to try and shoot down the google satellite. Similarly, I think most people would be ok with taking action against the last one to protect privacy (even if that isn't legal per the federal law I cited above). This technology is so new, we simply haven't decided as a society where the line should be drawn, and our old laws probably don't work well.
It's not just personal houses either. What about the drones used by activists to fly over industrial operations breaking the law and get footage of it? Can the industrial operations shoot them down? If they do the same thing with a Cessna at 3,000 feet everyone would say no. What makes a drone at 400 any different?
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Federal Law does not put drones in a special category. They are just another aircraft. The penalty is up to 20 years in federal prison, and a $250,000 fine. That's in addition to the charges this individual has already faced for discharging a fire arm in the city he lived in, as they make that illegal there.
Don't try to embellish, the guy was flying a quadrocopter not a Cessna. It is a toy and not an aircraft. So that law does not apply.
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A judge will decide whether a sister swatting down her brother's mall-bought $10 RC helicopter is a 20 year federal/$250,000 crime, or if that is asinine.
Same goes for this guy and the pervert's few hundred dollar RC quad-copter.
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No, not really. What the FAA has to say is really meaningless. The relevant trial court judge has all of the real power (and real say) here.
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You think the law doesn't apply, the FAA says it does, the courts will have to decide.
The FAA hasn't said anything about this case and I doubt they will. The only charges were related to firing a shotgun within city limits. As for the law the previous poster cited it is obviously concerning commercial and civil aircraft, aka real airplanes and helicopters. Not someone's overgrown RC helicopter. Or do you think the FAA should press charges the next time dad steps on little Timmy's Air Hog [airhogs.com]?
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"It's not just personal houses either. What about the drones used by activists to fly over industrial operations breaking the law and get footage of it? "
That's already illegal in many states. Indeed, it's considered a form of terrorism to film on a farm without permission in some states. The agricultural lobby is very powerful, and after a long series of covertly filmed videos revealing mistreatment of animals they set to work writing laws to make sure animal welfare activists could be prevented from filmi
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The line is the same as it usually is with other areas of the legal system: mens rea
The first two examples are pretty straightforward. It's very unlikely that Google or Bing directly intend to spy on you. The police might be out for a joy ride, wildly abusing their authority and equipment, but that's very unlikely (outside the mind of anti-government Slashdotters). The 400-foot and 100-foot drone flights lose the expense and oversight a helicopter flight would need, so it's much more likely they would be i
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Re: Might want to reconsider paying the fine... (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.faa.gov/news/updates/?newsId=76381
Myth #1: Unmanned aircraft are not aircraft.
Fact â"Unmanned aircraft, regardless of whether the operation is for recreational, hobby, business, or commercial purposes, are aircraft within both the definitions found in statute under title 49 of U.S. Code, section 40102(a)(6) [49 U.S.C. Â 40102(a)(6)] and title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations section 1.1.[14 C.F.R. Â 1.1].
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What's the minimum altitude requirement for flying a non-military aircraft over a residential area in the USA?
The laws do not refer to residential or non-residential areas.
Here is what the basic aviation regulations say.
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The rational reason not to, at least in the case of the man in Kentucky, is that it was illegal to do so. This whole story does little more than to illustrate why shooting at them is a poor solution to the problem, and you're not helping.
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I agree 100%.
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Pretty much comes down to the privacy vs. security issue in the back of everyone's mind. No doubt people are a bit touchy over that with the changes in policy of our government. Perhaps remote voyeur isn't such a good idea if you have an expensive drone and an operator might just want to keep that in mind, drones themselves are likely a peeping tom's wet dream and that is actually a sickness as well as a crime, and the cure over the ages for that has often been a 12ga.
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When you have children, then you will understand.
Bullshit I have both.
The drone owner is lucky to be alive.
That say it all. Sir - there is something seriously seriously wrong with you.
That someone would rationalize murder because of a toy drone is just completely unhinged. You have arrived.
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Self defense isn't murder. That you think people are allowed to spy on your children and you have no recourse other than hiding inside your house says all we need to know about you as well.
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It is not self defense because neither life nor property was in any danger. It is self defense, though, if the drone owner is threatened by an armed wacko and shoots him. It is maybe even a good idea to arm drones so they can defend themselves.
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He was referring to the drone owner trespassing in person after trespassing with his drone.
Personally, I think a garden hose would be a better solution both for the drone and the guy.
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Damn them for insisting that the Constitution safeguards their rights as well as yours.
Why do you think it only protects your rights, and not theirs?
Re:shooter should have talked to owner first (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it the property owners reponsibility to go find and talk to the drone operator? The drone operator, on the other hand, knows where his toy is going so maybe HE should actually act like a responsible person and let the property owners know what he is doing ahead of time.
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Just because someone is paranoid doesn't mean that people are not spying on him with toy helicopters with cameras strapped to them.