Severity assessment of aircraft engine fan blades under airborne collision of unmanned aerial vehicles comparable to bird strike certification standards

Airborne drone collision on commercial manned aircraft has received extensive awareness due to the increasing drone operations in the restricted airspace. In addition, the bird strike certification for aircraft engines is likely to be inadequate for a drone collision with identical kinetic energy due to the difference in damage levels. Thus, it is important to understand and compare the risk between drones and bird strikes. This study aims to understand the damage severity from bird and drone strikes on the manned commercial aircraft engine. The finite element method (FEM) simulation is adopted to obtain the damage of engine fan blades under the drone collision and bird strikes at different collision positions. The Lagrangian and smoothed-particle hydrodynamics approaches are employed for the drone and bird simulations, respectively. In addition, three different drone and bird weight categories were considered in this study, namely, small, medium, and large, to investigate the effect of kinetic energy on the damage of fan blades. Results from the FEM simulation demonstrated that the damage of the engine fan blades due to drone collisions were more severe when comparing bird strikes of the same weight category. The damage severity level was proposed based on the damage of engine fan blades. In the event of a drone ingestion, the damage severity level assists in the identification of potential damage to engine fan blades and its performance.

Crystal Clear: Investigating Databases for Research, the Case of Drone Strikes

The availability of numerous online databases offers new and tremendous opportunities for social science research. Furthermore, databases based on news reports often allow scholars to investigate issues otherwise hard to tackle, such as, for example, the impact and consequences of drone strikes. Crucial to the campaign against terrorism, official data on drone strikes are classified, but news reports permit a certain degree of independent scrutiny. The quality of such research may be improved if scholars can rely on two (or more) databases independently reporting on the same issue (a solution akin to ‘data triangulation’). Given these conditions, such databases should be as reliable and valid as possible. This paper aimed to discuss the ‘validity and reliability’ of two such databases, as well as open up a debate on the evaluation of the quality, reliability and validity of research data on ‘problematic’ topics that have recently become more accessible thanks to online sources.

The enduring problem of ‘grey’ drone violence

This article addresses the problem of drone violence that is ‘grey’ in the sense of being hard to categorise. It focuses on circumstances, such as arose in Pakistan, in which a foreign government's armed drones are a constant presence. A lesson from US experience there is that the persistent threat of drone strikes is intended to suppress activities that endanger the drone-using state's security. However, this threat inevitably affects innocent people living within potential strike zones. To judge such drone use by reference to military ethics principles is to assume that ‘war’ is going on, but indefinite drone deployments are difficult to conceptualise as war, so traditional Just War thinking does not suffice as a basis for moral judgement. In assessing the US government's commitment to drone-based containment of risks emerging along its ‘terror frontier’, the article considers three alternative conceptualisations of drone violence arising in non-war contexts: vim (‘force short of war’), terrorism, and imperialism. It then rejects all three and proposes that such violence is better conceptualised as being merely ‘quasi-imperialistic’. On this basis, however, the sustaining of a drone strike campaign against a series of suspected terrorists can still be condemned as violating the right to life.

War on Terror and Pak-Afghan Borderland

The US-led war on terror against Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda network has brought gigantic socio-political and economic impacts on the overall population of Pashtuns of FATA and KP. The US drone strikes largely targeted the Pashtuns population in the tribal belt of Pakistan while the Pakistani security forces particularly conducted various operations in the Pashtuns areas, being a partner/ally of the get praise. In the war, thousands of innocent civilians, including children and women of the Pashtuns population, have been killed, injured and millions remained displaced. Infrastructure, including roads, public and private buildings, bridges, educational institutions, tourism, etc, in the Pashtuns' land, has been destroyed. This paper is an attempt to analyze the so-called war on terror and how it turned against the Pashtuns of FATA and KP. The suffering of the Pashtuns population as targeted by the US drone strikes, Pakistan security forces, and terrorists attacks have been examined in this paper.

Biden Administration Relies on Constitutional Authority and Unwilling or Unable Theory of Self-Defense for Airstrikes in Syria

On February 25, 2021, the United States conducted a strike targeting Iranian-backed militia group facilities in Syria. The strike, which came in response to a February 15, 2021 attack on U.S. interests in Iraq, marked the Biden administration's first known exercise of executive war powers. As domestic authority for the strike, President Joseph Biden, Jr. cited his authority under Article II of the U.S. Constitution and did not rely on the 2001 or 2002 Authorizations for the Use of Military Force (AUMFs). For international legal authority, Biden relied on individual self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter, stating that Syria was “unwilling or unable” to prevent further attacks on the United States by these non-state actors within its territory. The strikes garnered mixed reactions from Congress, where efforts are underway to repeal or reform extant AUMFs as well as the War Powers Resolution (WPR). The Biden administration is also undertaking a review of current U.S. military policy on the use of force, and during this process, it has prohibited drone strikes outside of conventional battlefields, absent presidential approval.

The effect of drone strikes on civilian communication: evidence from Yemen

Although covert warfare does not readily lend itself to scientific inquiry, new technologies are increasingly providing scholars with tools that enable such research. In this note, we examine the effects of drone strikes on patterns of communication in Yemen using big data and anomaly detection methods. The combination of these analytic tools allows us to not only quantify some of the effects of drone strikes, but also to compare them to other shocks. We find that on average drone strikes leave a footprint in their aftermath, spurring significant but localized spikes in communication. This suggests that drone strikes are not a purely surgical intervention, but rather have a disruptive impact on the local population.

Who Said What to Whom

It is important to distinguish between two kinds of transparency. The government can be transparent about its “inputs”: about who, within government, said what to whom, and when, and why. The government can also be transparent about its “outputs”: its regulations and its policies, its findings about air and water quality, or its analysis of the costs and benefits of drone strikes. The argument for output transparency is often very strong, because members of the public can receive information that can help them in their daily lives and because output transparency can improve the performance of both public and private institutions. The argument for input transparency is different and often weaker, because the benefits of disclosure can be low and the costs can be high. It is challenging to make general pronouncements about input transparency and the appropriate evaluation of leaks and leakers without making a contestable judgment about whether a particular government is well-functioning and capable of self-correction.

Programming Precision? Requiring Robust Transparency for AWS

The possibility of allowing a machine agency over killing human beings is a justifiably concerning development, particularly when we consider the challenge of accountability in the case of illegal or unethical employment of lethal force. We have already seen how key information can be hidden or contested by deploying authorities, in the case of lethal drone strikes, for example. Therefore, this chapter argues that any effective response to autonomous weapons systems (AWS) must be underpinned by a comprehensive transparency regime that is fed by robust and reliable reporting mechanisms. This chapter offers a three-part argument in favor of a robust transparency regime. Firstly, there is a preexisting transparency gap in the deployment of core weapon systems that would be automated (such as currently remote-operated UCAVs). Second, while the Pentagon has made initial plans for addressing moral, ethical, and legal issues raised against AWS, there remains a need for effective transparency measures. Third, transparency is vital to ensure that AWS are only used with traceable lines of accountability and within established parameters. Overall this chapter argues that there is an overwhelming interest and duty for actors to ensure robust, comprehensive transparency, and accountability mechanisms. The more aggressively AWS are used, the more rigorous these mechanisms should be.