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Drone Collisions: A Growing Risk

Larry Anglisano

·Friday, August 01, 2025

 
Credit: Pexels-Jeshoots

Key Takeaways:

Frankly, I haven’t worried much about running into a drone as much as other aircraft. I had a close one in an uncontrolled traffic pattern in Florida recently where a guy in a Cherokee dropped onto the downwind—from above—and then broke off and never said a word to three of us established in the pattern. But when a hangar neighbor rolled back in with a story of how she almost smacked a drone when landing at a small field in New Jersey, I reached out to Christian Ramsey at uAvionix for a real discussion. 

You probably know the company for its popular sky/tailBeacon series of ADS-B systems, plus the AV-30/20-series retrofit flight displays, but before it ventured into GA avionics, uAvionix specialized in UAV electronics and its current products for UAVs are on the cutting edge and hugely popular in the unmanned aircraft avionics market. I asked Ramsey what the chances are of ingesting a drone into the propeller during a typical GA mission and while he admitted the chances are pretty low (he’s a fixed-wing pilot and Part 107 operator), I got the sense that the collision chances are increasing at low and slow altitudes because it isn’t like UAVs are going away. While the majority of drones flying around at low altitude are hobby drones, the tough thing about the hobby drone environment is that it’s probably the highest risk. Helicopters, agricultural ops and even seaplanes (I’ve seen plenty of drones zipping around lakes) don’t have a lot of buffer when it comes to a failed see-and-avoid situation. There’s a big pool of risk.

Ramsey said there are roughly 500,000 licensed Part 107 remote pilots in the U.S. and while the bar for earning certification isn’t high compared to manned aircraft ratings, the requirements do teach applicants about sharing the airspace, traffic awareness and the responsibilities of avoiding other aircraft. As much as we want to do the right thing and not run into drones, the responsibility doesn’t fall on manned aircraft pilots.

“It’s really the UAS operator who has the legal responsibility to detect and avoid aircraft, just as our responsibility is to see and avoid other manned aircraft, but not drones,” he said. The problem, though, is that many of these drones aren’t really equipped with the right tech to detect aircraft. “It’s nearly impossible for the human eyeball to spot a small drone while piloting an aircraft with enough time to react,” Ramsey said. Don’t count on your ADS-B traffic system (or TAS or TCAS for that matter) to alert you of threats because the majority of drones are prohibited by the FAA to have ADS-B Out systems to preserve the ADS-B frequency spectrum. The issue will likely get worse as more drones operate beyond line of sight.

Still, Ramsey said that a lot of drones do have ADS-B In receivers (uAvionix provides the equipment for most of them), which enables them to detect potential threat aircraft from a good distance away. uAvionix has also been developing what seems to be effective new technology (the image at the top depicts the company’s traffic network that gives fleet operators a bigger picture of the traffic environment). There is also the uAvionix skyAlert wearable ADS-B In receiver that drone operators can use for seeing ADS-B Out-equipped aircraft. 

Watch the discussion with Ramsey at uAvionix here:

https://tinyurl.com/2sxhmk6h

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