Researchers say FAA is overblowing risk posed by small drones

Re:Researchers say FAA is overblowing risk posed by small dr... by Houshalter on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @08:25PM (#11294097)

I wonder what the true risk of flying a drone is. Lets say their number is 50 times greater than realistic. The 1.87 million years divided by 50 would be a more reasonable 37,400 years of flight time per accident. Assuming every plane has 200 passengers, that's about, or about 6.105×10^-7 deaths per hour of flight time. If I did my math right, that means it's about 0.6 micromorts per hour. By comparison, the average person has about 1.6 micromorts of unnatural causes of death per day, so it is a fairly large relative increase in risk.

If you were to require every drone operator to pay for insurance, assuming an economic value of life at about $9.1 million, then it would cost $5.56 per hour of flight time. Not cheap!

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Re:Researchers say FAA is overblowing risk posed by small dr... by matheweis on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @09:01PM (#11294234)

As with many things, there are a number of factors. Just of few of these include the weight and speed of the drone, the location that it is being flown, the competency of the operator, and so on...

You're also assuming that a drone vs aircraft incident would result in the complete loss of the aircraft. I would imagine that we will eventually see such an incident, but it probably won't result in catastrophic loss...

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Re:Researchers say FAA is overblowing risk posed by small dr... by Houshalter on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @09:07PM (#11294268)

Well we are doing a (very rough) estimate of the average expected risk of flying drones. Obviously some people would be far more riskier than others.

As for the number, I just took that from the article. It's probably an overestimate of the risk, and certainly most planes don't have 200 passengers.

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