• 7 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Downvote all you want without responding but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re not quite the aviation expert you think you are internet . A sub 250g drone is quite unlikely to bring down a large, multi engine aircraft on its own. You really should give the aviation engineering and safety world a bit more credit, the worst generic and isolated damage that could do is take out one of its engines, but realistically it’s probably more likely that they could continue to run it just fine until they are well clear of everything with little to no immediate ill effect, it would just make it more expensive to repair to keep using it. For low level ops they will have a one engine out climb out calculated for ridge crossings and several other things would need to go very wrong to compound a small drone strike into a full crash. The bottom line is drones are more or less equivalent to birds and planes hit birds all the time. Occasionally they lead to some bigger mishaps like the massive flock of very large geese that caused the miracle on the Hudson, but in general, large planes don’t stop flying from a small object hitting them.

    Now none of this means it isn’t still incredibly fucking stupid, selfish and dangerous. The asshole that did it deserves to have the entire book thrown at him with serious federal jail time. What he did was horrendous enough it doesn’t need ignorant hyperboles about nearly bringing down the plane from a small ding that could have gone unnoticed in flight. It’s still expensive to repair, degraded the capability of the plane and reduced firefighting against the fire and could have been far worse had it gone into an engine, but the plane landed just fine after the impact.


  • Except it kept flying and made a safe landing. It would be completely possible for the crew to not even notice that impact if they didn’t happen to see it and only discover it on landing.

    A small Cessna or helicopter are a different story but for a single impact from a drone of that size to cause a CL-415 to crash is extremely unlikely. Losing and engine or going through the windshield and injuring a pilot are definitely possibilities (although I would be surprised if the windshield wasn’t rated for some gnarly birdstrikes due to its low altitude based mission) and it’s still dangerous as fuck but planes like that are built to withstand far worse and have sufficient redundancies to keep flying safely in the event of an impact like that.


  • Insurance is literally a market of risk assessments. The odds of any given event are x, y and z and the cost of each of those events are a, b, and c. Take the number of people who are applying for policies and spread the cost based on the risks and figure out how much each needs to pay to be able to cover x, y or z should/when any of them occur. There’s discussions to be had on how much a percentage of profit should be allowable on the top and how much to subsidize on known high risk coverage that is not mathematically reasonable but it all boils down to buying risk based on the chance and cost of any given event happening. Act of God/Force Majeure make complete sense when framing it this way. The insurance policy is based on known and predicted risks. You don’t have volcano insurance in NJ and you don’t have hurricane insurance in Kansas because they aren’t expected disasters so they aren’t included in the risk calculations. Act of God is a catch all term for things beyond the expected scope of the policy which is based on clearly established limits and scenarios.











  • I’m all for the most humane and ethical means of getting meat and the day I can get a steak that didn’t require a cow to die but is indistinguishable from the real thing I will absolutely switch over, but until then I’m going to enjoy delicious, delicious duck and not feel bad about. Wouldn’t eat a dog even in an apocalypse though.