Woman Knocked Unconscious at Parade by Falling Drone

Re:Woman Knocked Unconscious at Parade by Falling Drone by ghaff on Monday June 29, 2015 @10:56PM (#9802638)

I don't really disagree with you but there are probably certain activities that we can generalize to a pretty wide of drones as being unsafe such as flying over a crowd of people. Just as we tend to have (albeit often informal and not always followed) rules around bicycles, skateboard, and baseballs. Those are all probably fine in most empty parking lots. Probably less so on a crowded city sidewalk.

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Re:Woman Knocked Unconscious at Parade by Falling Drone by bigiain on Tuesday June 30, 2015 @01:54AM (#9803187)

The thing is - I suspect there are three or so orders of magnitude more of this style of quadcopter:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ybtq960nzf8dxl3/Clarkson%20CX10X.j...

Than the sort that'd have any real risk of knocking you out of they fell on you.

I fly this over the heads of my friends/family/colleagues all the time. I probably wouldn't fly one around a newborn, but I've had it batted out of the air by a 2 year old in full view of his laughing mother.

I've got some bigger-but-still-small "250" size quads too - all up ready-to-fly weights of around 300g. I'm more careful with those - but I've intentionally flown them into myself with no more protection than a tshirt - and it kinda hurts, but doesn't "injure" me (again, I suspect the mother of the aforementioned 2 year old would think differently if I unexpectedly hit them with one of these in the local park, but it's still in the frisbee or football kind of injury risk - not a "this'll definitely need an ambulance" category. And I at least tell myself I'm _much_ more in control of this than a football or frisbee in flight, and I _really_ don't want to hit anybody).

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