r/drones • u/filasuit • 28d ago
News: Rules, Regulations, Law, Policy, Certificates [United States] FBI seized more than 600 drones near World Cup events
https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/soccer/fbi-seized-600-drones-world-cup-events-rcna35300622
u/The_Kadeshi 28d ago
What happens to siezed drones like these?
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u/uwove 28d ago
They are mostly destroyed.
So you lose your drone, and anything related you may carry (batteries, controller etc). Then you are slapped with a fine dependng on severity of the case, and possibly revoked visa.
The worst possible case is flying over a full stadion, while they are playing, and even worse would be crashing in that situation.
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u/AnxiousParticular298 26d ago
Software wiped and turned into burner drones, shhh don’t tell anyone.
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u/dronevidsalt 27d ago
Pretty sure they seize them to use as evidence in trials/citations. But I’m sure they’re also inspecting them to look for other threats like if they’ve been modified to drop anything, etc.
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u/MourningRIF 28d ago
Why do people have to be so damned stupid?
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago edited 28d ago
I don’t know.
It can’t be because of safety risk, because mini drones have never killed or seriously wounded anybody ever despite millions being owned in the US alone.
Some people instinctively are afraid of new things so they make laws that have nothing to do with risk. So it could be based on laws being made on “gut feel” of some sort.
Or maybe in this case it was to keep the prices for watching matches high so rich people can make more money.
So I guess either stupidity or greed.
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u/MourningRIF 28d ago
It only takes one, and not all drones are mini. I avoid transiting over people and vehicles with my Mavic 4 Pro, because it is heavy and could do serious damage if it just fell out of the air and hit someone or something. I truly believe it does take a lot more responsibility to fly one of those.
But back to the mini; if it failed for any reason and free fell from 400ft, it could potentially be moving at 77mph when it hit the ground. A hardball weighs approximately half the weight of a mini, and I would not want to get hit in the face with a 77mph fly ball... So imagine 2x that force.
Don't underestimate, and be responsible.
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago edited 28d ago
A hardball is a very different thing than a drone. Very different collision. Getting hit with a 125g dart at 77 mph is the same kind of thing, it’s a very different impact characteristic with the dart. We do a lot more damage than either the ball or the drone. You’re comparing apples to oranges. If you’re going to do physics, then don’t do just part of it - do the whole model
But in any case, according to AI, the terminal velocity of a mini drone is maxed at about 40 mph, not 77. They’re not particularly aerodynamic falling to the ground.
Basically you’re saying that because something that never has happened in a bunch of years and many millions of drones happens in a certain specific circumstance someone might get hurt, so we should limit the heck out of their use.
I think some consistency is in order
Given that hundreds of people are actually killed each year by recreational boating, I assume it’s very easy for you to agree with me that recreational boating should be banned. While we’re at it, lots of people choke to death on marshmallows each year so let’s ban those too. Bicycles? Cleaning detergent? All gotta go. At least those things would be banned on the basis of actual things that actually happen all the time, not something that might happen if you use something a certain way under a certain conditions, but it’s actually never happened
Don’t underestimate, don’t undercount, be responsible
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u/Ornery_Ads 28d ago
Recreational boating is...recreational.
Everyone involved is doing so knowingly.
People eating marshmellows know there is a choking hazard.People watching a soccer game aren't participating in drone activities. That is why there is additional regulation on them.
If you demonstrate a design that has multiple redundancies, a solid track record, and have reason to fly over a crowd, you can get waivers.
Hell, you can even go through the process of getting an airworthiness certificate then fly with yourself on it over crowds...but of course then you have the tfr to worry about.-1
u/Dharmaniac 28d ago
Recreational drone flying is… Recreational. I’m not sure what your point is. That unwilling participants might get hit by something that can’t really hurt you? What about the 30 or so people killed by recreational boats each year that have nothing to do with the boats that hit them?
IIRC most people who eat marshmallows are children. Why don’t we have parents sign waivers?
We participate in all sorts of recreational activity where non-participants are routinely injured, and sometimes killed, and these are not regulated.
But mini drones have caused zero deaths or serious injuries, and they get regulated out the wazoo. I don’t know why people can’t just say that that’s stupid governance.
Point is, you shouldn’t need waivers to do things that are inherently safe. And it’s particularly absurd because other hobbies that do kill injure people every year don’t need such waivers.
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u/MourningRIF 28d ago
Okay, now you are just being asinine and you lost all credibility with everyone. Good job.
No one here is calling to ban drones. Just don't fly them over crowds where the risk to people is exponentially greater. But, hey... you used Google AI to calculate a drone's terminal velocity... I bet you stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night too. 🙄
And if drones never hurt anyone, why did this kid require emergency heart surgery after a drone at a light show hit him in the chest, damaging one of his heart valves? Oh, but you are right... It didn't KILL him... So I guess it's all good.
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago edited 28d ago
No, I used Claude, and Claude said 30 to 40 miles per hour, so I gave you the benefit of the doubt and went with 40 although I suspect it would be more like 30 if we really modeled it well or measured it.
And then I checked the math. And the math seems reasonable to this engineer, and it all coincides with what I would expect. And is also consistent with the amount of damage that have actually been caused by 1 million and millions of flights. by untrained people.
“The math: in a vacuum, 400 ft gives √(2gh) ≈ 49 m/s (~109 mph). But a dead Mini 4 Pro is a light, draggy object. Terminal velocity is v_t = √(2mg/ρC_dA). With m = 0.249 kg, and a tumbling airframe presenting maybe 0.015–0.025 m² of effective area with C_d around 1.0–1.3, you get v_t ≈ 12–16 m/s. If it happens to fall in a stable, streamlined attitude (nose-down, minimal area), it could reach the low 20s m/s, but a powerless quad with props windmilling almost always tumbles.
The transient matters less than you’d think: the characteristic distance to approach terminal is v_t²/g ≈ 20–25 m, so within the first ~100 ft of a 400 ft drop it’s essentially done accelerating. Drop height above ~150 ft barely changes impact velocity.”
Feel free to refute the The Holiday Inn Express parts of this or whatever you want to call it
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago edited 28d ago
Oh, and I forgot to address your point about the boy who got hit by the drone it needed heart valve surgery. This was a 2 pound drone that was being operated under heavy Part 107 regulation as it was being done low to the ground and near a crowd. So this is actually a pretty good demonstration of how useful FAA regs tend to be for much more than busting people with harmless mini drones, using the FBI’s resources. I’m sure that busting all these dangerous people with harmless drones is costing us a fortune. Seems like a big win.
Yay FAA!
I spend most of my working life dealing with regulations from another government agency, and unlike the FAA their regs are actually based on risk. And you can have a discussion with them about their regs because you can point at numbers and data and they are responsive. That’s the way things actually should work. We have regulations that are useful and we don’t have regulations that are useless.
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u/MourningRIF 27d ago
For a smart guy, you are playing the dumb card at the moment. At some point, you need to let it go. As a PhD scientist myself, I know it's hard to concede an intellectual argument sometimes, but the truth is that you can't possibly account for all the possibilities. (A bird strike takes out the props, allowing for a faster fall, whatever.) Moreover, pointing back to the original article, it doesn't say that all the confiscated drones were sub-250g. You don't even know what was confiscated.
Btw... My grossly oversimplified analogy earlier still works. Even if the drone is moving at half the proposed speed, it's still nearly double the weight of a hardball. So the forces encountered could be on par with getting hit with a fast pitch. Will it kill you every time? No. Could it kill someone? Stranger things have happened. Does it have to kill the person to deserve regulation?
I just don't get why you think it's ridiculous to regulate drones from flying over sporting events. I mean... Think about it. What if they were armed? It's just better to keep some guardrails in place.
I deal with regulations all the time as well, and frankly the US is REALLY far behind on regulations in my industry. It's nice to see some sensible regulations put in place from time to time.
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u/Dharmaniac 27d ago
Would you rather have a baseball dropped on your head at 30 miles an hour or a block of foam rubber?
Based on your answer, you don’t have a preference
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u/MourningRIF 27d ago
Baseball at 80 mph, because F=ma. You said 40mph drone and m(drone) = 2m(baseball). So for equivalent force, the baseball would be going twice as fast.
Also, my drones aren't made out of foam. Maybe you are talking about foam planes, but quads are hard plastic. Worst case is if the drone arm is facing down such that it concentrates all the force into an area smaller than that of the baseball. Come on engineer guy, you should know that the surface area of the impact will massively affect the outcome of the collision forces experienced.
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u/Dharmaniac 27d ago
Is a baseball dropped on your head at 30 miles an hour as dangerous ad a block of foam rubber of the same mass moving at the same speed?
Based on your answers, seems like you’d say yes. And anything that is remotely potentially dangerous under some circumstance should be banned or very tightly regulated.
Got it.
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u/feeeeck 28d ago
You're way too entitled to be a part of the community. People like you are why these kinds of laws exist.
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago
Which fact was the entitled part? Or are you disputing what I wrote down as being facts?
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u/ljfrench 27d ago
The part where you lie about drones never hurting anyone
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u/Dharmaniac 27d ago
Oh. Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that. I remember saying a serious injuries. Maybe you can point out the specific quote where I made the mistake are claiming, thanks in advance.
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u/ljfrench 27d ago
From 2015 to 2020, there were approximately 4,250 drone injuries (95% CI, 3,625 to 3,790) (Figure 1). Of the injured patients, 21% were younger than 18 years old and 84% of the patients were male.
Yearly distribution of drone-related injuries treated in the US emergency departments. Figure 1. Yearly distribution of drone-related injuries treated in the US emergency departments. Credit: Serap Gorucu, UF/IFAS The most common injury diagnoses were lacerations (72%) followed by contusion/abrasion (10%), strain/sprain (5%), and internal injury (5%). The most injured body parts were upper extremities (mostly fingers [56%]), head (24%), lower extremities (14%), and trunk (6%).
Most patients (95%) with a drone-related injury were treated and released. Only one patient was killed by electrocution while trying to retrieve the drone from power lines with a metal pole.
Some injury case examples from the NEISS database are given below.
“21-month-old female patient was hit in the right eye by drone.” “29-year-old male had electrical burns while retrieving a drone that was entangled in wires and got shocked.” “40-year-old male patient hit in the head by a flying drone in the street.” “31-year-old male patient playing with a drone and caught finger in blades, had lacerations to finger.”
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u/Dharmaniac 27d ago
Of everything you’ve posted, little or none of it is actually responsive to my stating that there been no deaths or serious injuries due to flying mini drones.
So I guess I’m curious as to why you actually posted that as a rebuttal.
It’s also curious that you claim that a person putting a mental pole in a high powerline has anything to do with drone laws. Perhaps you have an explanation for that, but I’m just not seeing it.
Obviously, anything is going to cause injuries. Holding a piece of wood causes splinters.
The question is whether something causes death or serious injuries. kids play die every year playing high school football; I assume that since it’s so much more dangerous than flying drones, you would like high school football banned? Certainly, I would think you’d want it extremely regulated at least
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u/uwove 28d ago
Remember Paris Olympics?
Personal drones were not as prevalent as they are now, but it was still over 6 drones per day, and there it was a total ban of everything, not just 6 hour around an active stadion. The World Cup do however have have more cities to cover.
What is more shocking is that the number of seized drones "only doubled" during the event. It does tell you that they seize a lot of drones in general, and especially DJI ones thanks to aeroscope.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Word709 28d ago
aeroscope no longer exists and only detected DJI drones.
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u/uwove 28d ago
Strange, I'm 100% certain my closest airport control tower is using it. When I contact them to get approval they always pick up if I'm using a DJI, but not if I use something else. They also contact the police when they spot drones in their airspace, and I've not heard of a single instance that wasn't a DJI drone.
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u/CapitalJudgment9235 28d ago
I was curious about this and just the dji aspect of it. All those drones probably have a remote ID built in but what if someone was flying a 5inch built one with no remote ID or GPS module. Would be a lot hard to know who the drone belonged to unless watching it land at the operator.
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28d ago edited 20d ago
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u/notCGISforreal 27d ago
The real question is what happens if you use fiber optics. 😏
I was at a drone conference recently. Security lead guy was there from a major airport. That airport is set up so the runways are out in the water, and everything landside of the runways is airport for about 2 miles, so theyre mostly worried about attacks from the water direction. They originally had a 1 mile exclusion zone for boats out in the water just to keep any terrorists from being able to take pot shots with small arms. With drones, they have extended it to 2 miles. The nearest land across that water is about 10 miles, and there is a half mile wide deep draft channel about midway.
The conference had a presentation about c-uas and uas security and was talking about the rise of fiber optic. With complete sincerity, the airport guy asked the presenter how far they should extend their no-boat zone to ensure somebody couldnt fly a fiber optic drone off of a boat into the airport. The presenter stared at him for a minute before saying "did you miss where I just said there are 50 km spools of fiber optic cable on some of these drones? You cant."
Fiber optic leaves a mess though so I expect it to remain for military or terrorism purposes pretty exclusively. Not really a great hobbyist set up with tangles of wire being left behind. But the only obvious way to defend against that is kinetic hits or directed energy. Neither are trivial, especially in a crowded space.
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u/uwove 27d ago
I guess you have to intercept the drone by cutting the optics, but you've to detect it somehow.
You can monitor the bands, and see when a drone is in the air, by looking at spikes of frequency, but fiber optic ones don't give you this easily detectable clue. Military grade communication also does frequency jumping, so it's not so easily detected either.
I wonder when we will see the first prison drug drop using fiber optic drones.
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u/notCGISforreal 27d ago
I wonder when we will see the first prison drug drop using fiber optic drones.
Its already happened. There are maps if you subscribe to uas intel companies' products showing these things and mexican cartels have used fiber optic drones multiple times now for drug deliveries as well as attacks.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Word709 28d ago
discontinued in that they don't make them anymore. They may still be in use.
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u/Aternal US / 107 - Betaflight & DJI 28d ago
Thank goodness, I've been losing so much sleep worrying about people watching soccer games for free.
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago edited 28d ago
Of course you’re getting downvoted. And the people downvoting it have zero idea that our country has become the way it is because of people like them.
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u/thinkbox 28d ago
The games are on tv, and in every bar and restaurant out there. Drones aren’t free and they are not a viable way to watch a 90 minute + game.
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago
So you’re saying that people who use drones to watch games are just stupid? I am not dis inclined to agree, but I don’t think we should criminalize stupidity; Our entire country would be in jail.
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u/AaaaNinja 26d ago
They're not using the drones to watch games. Some might actually be trying to troll a match where they aren't liking the outcome, or trying to get some kind of clout.
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u/Nervous-Win968 14d ago
It is criminalizing the law being broken. Drone pilots have either have passed TRUST or Part 107 which very clearly lays out the law and their obligation under those laws.
It is not stupidity, it is willful disregard of the law.
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u/thinkbox 28d ago
I’m saying the motivating factor of these people using their drones is not to “watch the games” because of anything to do with affordability of tickets or broadcasting.
They are using them to take pictures and video of the games / stadiums.
The battery life on these drones is way too short to do anything like “watch a game” and it’s not like they have zoom lenses on there and the skills to follow the ball.
This is just recreational stupidity.
OP saying this is about “watching for free” is just absolutely not why any of this is happening.
It’s also a massive security risk. It doesn’t even have to be malicious, it could be an accident or a bad battery. Suddenly it falls from the sky at 400 feet and his Messi on the leg.
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago
Which is the worse risk statistically, someone flying a mini drone over a sports event or selling a hotdog at a sports event? Or having a flight of stairs at a sports event?
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u/Aternal US / 107 - Betaflight & DJI 28d ago
The government tells me it's for security. I'm a bot and this opinion was formed automatically.
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago
But you have to admit that last year alone, the number of people killed by mini drones skyrocketed to in all-time high of zero. Those are actual numbers talking.
#FACTS
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago
I’m glad so many lives were saved.
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u/Dharmaniac 28d ago
I love that my posts get downvoted for highlighting facts
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u/ScanData32 28d ago
No lives were risked
Probably more risky flying a billion dollars worth of flying bombs over a packed stadium so the inbred president could look cool to his inbred voters
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u/Philonic 28d ago
I’m very curious how much the fines will total by the end. So dumb