Military
A prototype of Piaggio Aero's P.1HH Hammerhead unmanned air vehicle crashed into the sea near Sicily during a test flight on 31 May. The P180 Avanti II twin-pusher-derived prototype – registration CPX621 – was operating from Vincenzo Florio airport in Trapani, Sicily. It is believed to have lost communication
Commercial
A lack of regulation has been blamed for a drone hitting a British Airways passenger jet, as it emerged that police have failed to investigate 40 near-misses in the past year. Calls for action to mitigate the threat to passenger aircraft from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) came from Europe’s
Accidents
A police investigation is under way after a passenger plane approaching Heathrow Airport was hit by what is believed to have been a drone. The British Airways flight from Geneva, with 132 passengers and five crew on board, was hit as it approached the London airport at 12:50 BST
Commercial
Drawing upon its work integrating unmanned air vehicle use into the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch’s (AAIB) wreckage assessments, Cranfield University is in discussions with international bodies exploring the use of the technology for post-crash analysis. The accident laboratory at Cranfield has been working on safely integrating UAVs into
Commercial
An Air France Airbus A320 jet narrowly avoided colliding with a drone while descending for an approach to Paris Charles de Gaulle airport last month, the French aviation investigation agency BEA said. The aircraft had been operating a service from Barcelona on February 19 and was flying at 5,500
Accidents
A U.S. Air Force MQ-9 assigned to the 451st Air Expeditionary Group, part of the 455th Air Expeditionary Wing, crashed Feb. 20 at about 9 p.m. Kabul time, at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan. The crash was contained on Kandahar Airfield and there were no injuries or damage to civilian
Accidents
An accident investigation board found that a remotely piloted MQ-1B Predator that was intentionally crashed into an uninhabited area of the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility on May 27, 2015, suffered an engine failure due to loss of coolant. At the time of the accident, the aircraft was
Accidents
An American MQ-1 Predator has crashed in wasteland 15 kilometers away from the city centre of Doğankent in Turkey. The aircraft which took off at night from the Incirlik Air Base in the district of Sarıçam, crashed in a field in the Doğankent neighbourhood in the central Seyhan district. US
Accidents
An MQ-1B Predator remotely piloted aircraft crashed during an Operation Inherent Resolve sortie supporting operations over central Iraq last week, Air Force Central Command officials announced. Controllers lost contact with the RPA during mid-flight at approximately 12:50 p.m. local time on Jan. 7, and were unable to re-establish
Accidents
A recreational drone possibly crashed into a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. overhead conductor Sunday evening, causing a power failure that lasted more than an hour in a small section of San Francisco. A witness, Scott Kurth, was working at his computer when he saw a flash of light and
Accidents
The world’s best Alpine skier was nearly taken out by a drone camera in the middle of a slalom run recently. Marcel Hirscher, the four-time reigning World Cup overall champion, was about 10 seconds into his second run of a night slalom in Madonna di Campiglio, Italy, when the
Accidents
A report just released from the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College identified 327 "close encounters" in U.S. airspace from December 2013 to September 2015 in which drones presented a hazard to manned aircraft. Of that total, at least 241 incidents met the