Originally Posted by
catboater
Another incident at JFK this weekend. Report I heard said the FAA is saying there are a reported 2 incidents a week near commercial airports.
This is getting totally out of control.
You mentioned sweeping generalizations in your last quote.....
There are about 85,000 flights in the US everyday, about 64 million takeoffs and landings a year (
http://sos.noaa.gov/Datasets/dataset.php?id=44). Lets say you don't like the number and cut them in half, so say 30 million. Now juxtapose that to the annual reports of "drones" being sighted by aircraft, no hard and fast number but it's less than 50 (at least reported). Not one of those "drone" sightings was confirmed and the perp caught.
This doesn't appear to be an epidemic, nor "out of control". Saying that just sensationalizes it, like the people did last year saying the FAA was going to shut down modeling as we know it, and that didn't happen either.
Some context is needed, and based on the numbers alone, it's a tiny statistically negligible percentage. That being said, there shouldn't be any of these incidents to report if people used some common sense.