The current panic on drones near airports

There has been a spate of incidents where the various news outlets have someone flying a drone (insert stock picture of a dji phantom 2 here) within feet of an aircraft!

Unless they've suddenly stopped making aircraft out of aircraft grade aluminium and decided to start using paper a drone is not going to bring down a jet airliner. If it hits its props will snap and it will plummet out of the sky.

If it got sucked into the engines it might bring down a jet but still any sizable jet liner has to be able to fly on a single engine for quite a long way to be certified for international routes. It's unlikely it manages to fly through two or three or four engines in one go.

Yes these morons should stop flying near airports (why are they doing it in the first place? Are they plane spotters that want to get an up close and personal view?) but the risk here is pretty low.

There are no studies on the dangers drones pose to commercial aviation as such. There is this study that uses data from bird strike to estimate the possible risk. They concluded the risk of any collision, including the majority which would cause no injuries and no fatalities, with any UAS is around 3.06x10−5 per 100,000 flight hours.

Some of these dangers are getting taken care of in software for the more smart drones. A lot of the DJI machines and some of the 3DR already enforce the height limits to prevent a drone going above 400ft (in the us). There has been suggestions of loading airport locations into their gps software and adding no fly zones where the things will refuse to fly or fly into. That's not going to prevent the person that builds a machine themselves.

It's typical overblown tabloid nonsense exaggerating the risk. There are incidences where people have caused damage by flying where they shouldn't but those times were typically people flying near fires preventing firefighting aircraft from coming near and therefore allowing the fires to continue to burn destroying more property and risking lives.

We've already gotten a registration system here in the states partly due to this sort of thing (although how that helps catch these people is beyond me people that do this sort of thing either won't register or if they do the chance of getting caught is slim). It's a case of morons ruining it for everyone else. But the associated risks of drones near aircraft is blown way out of proportion and isn't helping.