[time-nuts] Spoofing GPS

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Tue Jun 26 22:59:25 UTC 2012


On 6/26/12 3:38 PM, J. Forster wrote:
> Whether it's spoofing or jamming, domestic drones are becoming ubiquitous,
> because they are just so tempting, and sooner or later one is gonna crash
> onto a populated area, either by accident or deliberate mischief.
>
> A piloted aircraft may be able to avoid hitting a school; a drone may not.
>
>
That *is* the significant problem with non-government UAVs.  All fine to 
run them over the desert on the southern border or out over the Mojave. 
  By and large, UAV failures, as you note, don't have the option of 
doing a Great Santini.

The  (catastrophic) failure rate of UAVs is something like 100 or 1000 
times higher than for military piloted craft, which in turn is something 
like 100 or 1000 times that for civilian craft.

I did some calculations last year, and if Los Angeles decided to put up 
a UAV 24/7 to replace things like helicopters, we could expect a crash 
into the city about once a week.

The MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-1 Predator have a reported Class A mishap rate of 
about 10 per 1000 flight hours...  Class A = >$1M in damage or death.. 
bear in mind that if a $500k drone augers in out in the desert, that's 
not a Class A mishap.

So, 1 year is about 8760 hours, so we could expect 87.6 Class A 
mishaps/year if the LAPD decided to fly the current flavor of UAV.  Yes, 
that would create some interesting news stories.  How long til we see a 
tailfin with LAPD sticking out of an elementary school a'la Cerritos.

For comparison, in around 2000-2005, the commercial accident rate was 
about 0.01 per 100k hours.  The Air Force reported about 1 per 100k 
hours.  General aviation is 10/100k hours.  (these are non-specific 
"accidents", so they aren't directly comparable to Class A mishaps)

There's a great report from MIT on this.. google for Weibel ICAT report 
UAV safety





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