Gulls and most other birds are predictable when they encounter helicopters. Lone birds tend to continue to fly in a straight path or dive when they are near the helicopter. Birds in flocks tend to continue to fly in a straight path. The helicopter simply needs to climb and it will almost always avoid the birds.
A drone is much less predictable. It can accelerate in any direction without warning, the helicopter pilot is unable to predict where it will go and how to take effective avoiding action.
Someone should have told Captain Sully that 
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Mainly by blowing a vast amount of air downwards with their rotor. Vortex technology is relatively new. It is a question of altitude. Above 2000ft, there is no need for any filtration.
I don’t think that his A320 could hop up to avoid them like a helicopter might.
Oh yes, the rotor. Which revolves at high speed, as does the tail rotor. Their performance can only be enhanced by hitting a pretty solid drone, and that eventuality is of course impossible anyway.
Especially if you are responding to an emergency and have a number of other things on your mind than simply avoiding numpties.
No excuse. None.
Have a long look at the thread and see if you can find an example of anyone making excuses for the drone pilot, in any way. Nobody has. It was a stupid thing to do.
The question is whether grounding all helicopter activity to avoid the potentially serious but vanishingly unlikey event of a drone/cab collision is justifiable. If it IS justifiable, an explanation of why they don’t ground helicopters when they see one or more gulls of comparable size and mass would be appreciated. With citations, preferably, because the best we’ve had is that drones are less predictable than shitewawks, of which I’ll take some convincing.
The issue here seems to be, should an additional question of safety be imposed on a pilot whose attention is already 100% engaged, in an emergency situation, or would it be better to have all-embracing rules which prevent (we hope) the situation arising and err (perhaps) on the side of safety?
Also, we might remember that some drones are bigger, more solid, and/or fly faster than shitehawks. Though if the CAA wants to ban shitehawks - and pigeons - I will happily help.
A sub-250g drone is smaller and the same mass as a (small) New Zealand red-billed gull.
It’s all about balance. You can’t pass legislation prohibiting gulls from flying near helicopters (well, you can, but they’ll all ignore it). You can pass such legislation for drone, and they have. That’s fine. They don’t stop flying for gulls, but they do for drones - so they’re increasing the (real) danger to life from the fire for a completely irrational concern about drones.
I’m generally very supportive of H&S regulations, but this just seems barking mad to me.
You are, and I quote “assuming” that the drone in question was sub-250gm. Are you proposing that helicopter operations needn’t be disturbed by a sub-250 gm drone in flight, regardless of (a) the impossibility of weighing it and (b) what it’s doing?
https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2019/july/emi-assessing-the-danger-of-drone-strike.html
Relevant:
" Experts are of the opinion that a collision with a drone would cause more damage to the aircraft than the impact of a bird strike. Before being certified for use, aircraft must undergo a standard test to assess their tolerance to bird strike. In the case of drones, however, there are no such regulations. Researchers from Fraunhofer EMI in Freiburg are keen to see changes here. “From a mechanical point of view, drones behave differently to birds and also weigh considerably more,” explains Dr. Sebastian Schopferer, one of the scientists working on this project. “It is therefore uncertain, whether an aircraft that has been successfully tested against bird strike, would also survive a collision with a drone.”"
Go on, tell me that a 3Kg drone weighs less than a greylag goose…make my day. 
And remember those rapidly-spinning rotors - lose or bend a foot or two of the main one, and you’re in bother.
What I said was that it was that statistically it was likely to be sub-250g. That there are bigger drones is not a counter-argument. There are bigger birds, too. I specifically chose the red-billed gull because it’s close (but up to 50% bigger) and very common.
I love that abstract. They fired drone components heavier than the vast majority of drones, with no deformable structures, at speeds that ranged from quite a bit faster than the maximum possible closing speed of a helicopter and a drone to ludicrously faster (more than the maximum closing speed of the world’s fastest helicopter and the drone that raced Max Verstappen’s F1 car) and the aircraft skin suffered “substantial deformation and indentation” and the drone parts were destroyed… Maybe we should ban drones altogether, given that doing something dramatically unlike a drone stroke causes so little damage…
remember those rapidly-spinning rotors - lose or bend a foot or two of the main one, and you’re in bother.
You are, but it’s vanishingly unlikely. Any drone under a helicopter is going to be slammed into the ground with the downwash. Head on it’s overwhelmingly more likely to miss the rotor disk than to hit it. Reading EASA’s docs on helicopters and bird strikes they seem almost exclusively focused on strikes on canopies. And not particularly bothered about that.
Yes, it’s possible that a helicopter could climb through the path of a 3kg drone with horrific results. I suspect the odds of the helicopter being hit by a de-orbiting satellite are a similar level of risk. The pilots far more likely to be run over crossing the road to the helipad. And, more importantly, the helicopter is much, much more likely to hit a bird than a drone.
I remain of the view that grounding helicopters because there’s a drone around is irrationally over cautious, but I don’t think we’re going to get close to agreeing on this, so I’m out.
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