“It’s been a big week in drone safety,” a headline straight out of bad dystopian science fiction. But it’s true: welcome to 2016.
Cleveland Indians’ star pitcher Trevor Bauer had to miss game 2 of the American League Championship Series (ALCS) against the Toronto Blue Jays due to an unelaborated “finger injury.” He started game 3 yesterday with the injury still present and barely patched up. His pinkie started dripping like a leaky faucet within the first inning. Turns out that Bauer is a drone enthusiast, and while doing a repair on his device, the rotors turned on. OUCH! Indians’ management pulled him off the pitch, and although they went on to win, Bauer has been blasted on social media for potentially endangering his team’s chances. Maybe he should’ve found a company providing reliable drone repair instead. The wound doesn’t seem too bad, but the picture is pretty gory. Hope you’re not eating anything.
We’ll be conducting our own test with some dollar-store hot dogs. Keep an eye out for the results.
Speaking of tests…on the other side of the Atlantic, drones rules the skies. Commercial airline pilots are concerned over what might happen should one strike a drone in mid-air during takeoff or landing. British ministers in the Department of Transport have decided to answer the question the old-school way: by doing. In a landmark study employing 7th-grade-science-fair hypothesis-testing, the British government has contracted a company to fly a drone into the path of a moving commercial airliner.
Hopefully it’s not as bad as assumed. There have been several close calls over the past few years as lax regulation (compared to the US) has seen unmanned aerial vehicles being used in a wide variety of British industries, such as safety inspections for industrial chimneys & railways and aerial surveillance for wildlife control. Even then, it’ll take some time to match the number of collisions between aircraft and the original unmanned aerial vehicles: birds. Don’t worry, we don’t have a picture for that.