Potential Bad News for Drone Enthusiasts

[mixedgas]

It gets interesting, US Congress is trying to pass a combined aviation bill that will direct FAA to allow package delivery drones within two years of passage.
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I can see it now, big a$$ package drone lands in bad neighborhood, locals quickly disable telemetry and it disappears. "Jawa Style" coming soon to a tech savvy neighborhood near you..
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One of the major issues is there is not enough reserved RF communications bandwidth for massive commercial use of drones in the US..
The frequencies that are desirable for this task are being gobbled up by cell phone companies at auction.
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They tied the drone act to a highly desired aviation bill that is being lobbied for by some heavy hitters and private pilots...

Steve

[Draco]

in one of my temp jobs i worked with the turbine blades and they will chew up and spit out lipo batteries just like any other type of trash, these engines deal with much worse during normal operation

on cooling the blades they do some neat stuff, one operation i did was to use an EDM machine with graphite electrodes and burn cooling slots into the blades at strategic points, the smaller blades are hollow to allow coolant to flow though the blade, the tolerances for the cooling slots was very strict and the electrode used to cut the slots was usually only used once, some blades we could the same electrode twice. one of my friends still works there and we took samples of the nickle alloy and for the most part survived a test done with thermite, so even a large Lipo battery would not be a problem, harder metal parts from the motors might if it was a fairly large drone

[lasersbee]

For those of you that actually do not own or fly a Multi-Rotor Copter...
The Li-Po batteries are housed in plastic not metal and do not explode
like dynamite. If pierced in a significant way or shorted they will ignite
but not explode like a bomb.

The motors used on these multi-rotors are much more likely to cause
any physical damage to a planes engines than the Li-Po batteries.
Then again the high speed spinning Titanium blades would probably
shred those small motors to shreds.

The guys flying "Drones" close to airports or clearly restricted areas
should be castrated so that they can't produce offspring with the
same "STUPID" gene IMO.


Jerry

[masterpj]

Don't forget that some people use carbon fiber blades though for heavy payload carrying drones.

[NobleGas]

Carbon fibre = brittle; CF are brilliant in tension, much stonger kg for kg (or lb for lb) than steel, but they're crap in shear; a turbine engine would turn them into so much confetti without batting an eyelid, so to speak.