Drones are overcrowding the skies and endangering the safety of flights

The skies are getting overcrowded with drones in the air and, experts are apprehensive about the safety of the crews and passengers of aircraft in view of two commercial jets coming to within 100 feet of a drone at the time of landing at New York's John F Kennedy International Airport.
This has been reported in dailymail.co.uk dated 2 August 2015.

JetBlue Flight 1843 reported sighting a drone as it approached the airport at an altitude of around 800 to 900 feet at 2.24pm on Friday. As per the statement of the pilot as told to the control tower – the unmanned aircraft had passed just below the plane's nose.
Within three hours, Delta Flight 407, carrying 154 passengers back from Orlando, Florida, saw a drone flying just 100 feet below its right wing as it approached the runway at 5pm.
Drones could break through the windscreen and injure the pilot or could get ingested into the engine and lead to a major accident. In both cases, the lives of crew and passengers would be at stake.
It is not clear whether it was the same drone that had been sighted by both the pilots but, neither plane needed to take any evasive action - both the flights landed without incident. As per the directives of FAA - unmanned aircraft are not supposed to fly above 400 feet and operators must not fly within five miles of an airport unless they 'contact the airport and control tower before flying'.
(Image courtesy wikimedacommons.org)

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Private jet crashes into a house in Maryland – six killed

It was a tragedy of no mean proportions that happened in Montgomery County in Maryland when a small, private jet crashed into a house crash in Gaithersburg, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It left at least six persons dead – the dead were three persons on board the aircraft and a mother and her two young sons inside the home.
The victims on the ground have been identified as 36-year-old Marie Gemmell and her two sons, 3-year-old Cole and a 1-month-old Devon – they were discovered in a second-floor bathroom. The woman was lying on top of her young sons in an apparent effort to shield them from the smoke and fire.
Other members of her family namely her husband and a school-age daughter were not home.
Dr. Michael Rosenberg, founder and CEO of the clinical research organization Health Decisions of Durham, North Carolina, was among those killed.
Incidentally, Dr Rosenberg was a pilot who had crashed a different plane in Gaithersburg on March 1 2010 and investigators are trying to find out if he was at the controls at the time of the crash.
As per FAA, preliminary information indicated that the Embraer EMB-500/Phenom 100 twin-engine jet was on approach at the nearby Montgomery County Airpark.

Drones are a new source of danger for aircraft

Drones used to be called UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) and were operated by the law enforcing agencies in order to track down unwanted elements for elimination. However, with the introduction of drones for use by commercial establishments the sky is getting overcrowded and airlines are finding it difficult to avoid these airborne gadgets.
As reported by the Federal Aviation Administration in Washington, airline pilots have told safety administrators regarding at least of 25 near misses which could have been catastrophic. The incidents are from a Jet Blue flight arriving at LaGuardia airport earlier this month to close calls at Norfolk, Virginia and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Moreover, last month a drone came within 25m of a passenger plane landing at London's Southend Airport.
The dangers posed by drones in the air cannot be overlooked because companies like Amazon want to use drones to deliver goods and this unique unmanned aircraft industry is set to boom. FAA has estimated that in the US alone there could be as many as 7500 commercial drones in the skies within five years.
Google has entered the business of using drones for making supplies - in Australia, it made delivery of packages including chocolate bars, dog treats and cattle vaccines to two farmers in Queensland. The deliveries were made by a 1.5m-wide (5ft) single-wing drone prototype that has four propellers that move into different positions for different stages of flight and the goods fit into a gap in the middle of the wing. It made use of a fishing line like apparatus to lower the payload to customers from about 150 feet above the ground.
Other applications of drones in civilian life are in Bhutan, where these are used to deliver medical supplies to remote clinics and in Namibia the World Wildlife Fund is trying to spot wildlife poachers.