The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been quite vocal about the possible risks that drones pose to aircraft flying overhead ever since flying the unmanned devices became a popular hobby for enthusiasts across the U.S. The fact that a number of pilots have reported "near-misses" with drones while en route to their destination has also bolstered the FAA's arguments.
However, a study released on Monday by researchers at the Mercatus Center at George Washington University has concluded that, at least from a general standpoint, the FAA's viewpoints about the dangers posed by drones are largely overstated.
The researchers were able to reach their conclusion by studying the FAA's wildlife strike database, specifically bird-strike data. By going through the FAA's data, the study was able to determine that contrary to many reports, America's airspace is not crowded with random drones flying around. Rather, it is crowded by birds.
While it is true that almost 400,000 people have registered their drones to the FAA and there is a possibility that more people are flying their drones without getting registered, the number of drones are negligible compared to the number of fowls. The FAA's data shows that about 1.9 million turkey vultures and 2 to 3 million migrating snow geese pass through American airspace annually.
"Contrary to sensational media headlines, the skies are crowded not by drones, but by fowl," the researchers stated in their report.
But that's not all. Even with drones being far outnumbered by fowl, birds do not really cause that many accidents at all. Since 1990, the U.S. has received 160,000 reports of aircraft being hit by wildlife. From that number, only 14,314 actually resulted in damage to an aircraft. As for incidents that resulted in injuries or fatalities, the number gets even smaller, standing at just 238 incidents.
If commercial airliners are considered, the number falls once more, with the total number of incidents only standing at 37. Considering that there are about 27,000 commercial flights transiting U.S. airspace on an everyday basis, such figures are not bad at all.
In fact, more than 25 percent of all injuries related to airplanes colliding with wildlife came from one incident popularly referred to as the "Miracle on the Hudson," which involved Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger landing a U.S. Airways Airbus A320 in the Hudson River in New York. The incident was infamously caused by multiple geese, which were sucked into the plane's engines during flight.
Considering that the statistics regarding incidents involving aircraft and wildlife are fairly low, and that the researchers have determined that collisions between aircraft and drones number far less, the dangers posed by the unmanned devices to America's airplanes are very low indeed.
Then again, even if just one drone causes an accident, and that incident does result in injuries or worse, fatalities, it would be one incident too many.
