Analysis on News Helicopters
Los Angeles is a place of constant noise. I’m somebody who prefers some quiet where I live, but surprisingly after more than five years in LA, I really don’t mind it. Except the helicopters. Lately there has been an unfathomable amount of news helicopters circling the area where I live: multiple helicopters a week for hours at a time. In a moment of great annoyance, I asked myself why they couldn’t just use drones and realized that would be a interesting thing to analyze. Not only are the helicopters a huge noise nuisance, but they are also surely an unnecessary environmental pollutant when there are other options available, namely drones.
With that idea in mind, I decided to look into news helicopter usage and their impact on noise and emission levels.
Data Finding/Collection
Through ChatGPT I identified five of the most common types of helicopters used for news reporting. Those were: Bell 206 JetRanger, Robinson R44, Airbus H125 (also known as Eurocopter AS350), Agusta-Westland AW119, and MD500. Next, I started looking for data about these helicopters. Of course, I wanted to find out about their noise and emission levels, but I was also interested in other data such as range, cost, and max cruise speed so that I could compare them to drone counterparts.
I settled on six variables for each type of helicopter: price (dollars), flight range (nautical miles), operating costs (dollars per hour), max cruise speed (knots), noise level (decibels), and emissions (average kg of co2 per hour). I’ll break these down in more detail as needed.
Price, max cruise speed, and range were all easy to find, and I sourced them all from aerocorner.com to maintain consistency across helicopters. Operating costs were also simple to find, but a more complicated measurement. The per hour costs include the actual cost of flying per hour in things such as fuel, but it also needs to factor in general maintenance and average repair expenses that occur with each type of helicopter. In the end, I used data from aircraftcostcalculator.com which assumed 300 hours of flight time per year for each helicopter.
Sound levels were also slightly more complicated. EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency) publishes type-certificate data sheets for noise for each type of helicopter, but I had to decide what data to use. Since my complaint with helicopter noise occurs as they are flying overhead, I decided to use the decibel values given for “overflight” instead of take-offs or landings.
Data Cleaning/Manipulation/Initial Analysis
Emissions proved by far the most complicated to figure out. It was impossible to find a simply published measure of emissions from a type of helicopter in any form. To solve this problem, I downloaded a data set of all commercial aviation flight traffic for 2019 (which included total co2 emissions per logged flight). I used R to clean, manipulate, and analyze the data. The code I wrote is shown to the side with comments explaining each major step. After the processing in R, I ended up with emission values for the A119 and H125 helicopters in kilograms of co2 emitted per hour. (The data did not have data for the other three helicopter types).
Here is a link to the original aviation traffic data source: Open-source traffic and CO2 emission dataset for commercial aviation (zenodo.org)
Drone Data
The drone data was comparatively simple. I found five of the best drones for aerial video usage (completely disregarding price since none would even come close to the price of a helicopter). They were: DJI Inspire 3, Freefly Alta X, DJI Mavic 3 Pro Cine, Autel Robotics EVO II Pro 6k, and Yuneec H520E.
I decided to track the max flight time (in minutes), price (in dollars), the max speed (in knots), and the sound levels (in decibels) for these five drones. It’s worth noting that I didn’t track video quality because they all have 4k or above which is plenty good for news reporting, especially when the drones can fly closer to news sites than helicopters can.
This data all got put into excel where I also made a calculated column for max flight distance by just multiplying max speed by flight time divided by sixty (this will probably give a slightly generous estimate for max distance). The flight range here is in nautical miles since speed is in knots.
Sound levels were reported for reasonable news broadcasting altitudes. Importantly, these altitudes are much lower for the drones than for the helicopters. It would have been easy to say that drones are silent when flying at helicopter heights, but that would not have been a fair or realistic comparison.
Results Discussion
Noise Comparison
Let’s first look at noise levels. As mentioned before, I considered noise levels at appropriate altitudes for drone and helicopter reporting instead of comparing them at the same altitude. The other important idea is that the decibel scale is not linear, it is logarithmic. That means that the average helicopter noise level of 88.6 dB is mathematically almost 13,000 times louder than the average drone noise level of 47.5. While astonishing, that number is not terribly helpful for getting a sense of the difference. We can compare the decibel levels to similar sounds as is shown in the graph on the left.
Clearly, drones have the huge advantage in the noise category. The answer may seem obvious, but let’s also take a look at the emissions levels from helicopters and drones in the next section.
Emissions Discussion
The comparison here is almost not worth doing considering drones are electric and produce no emissions during flight. Drones easily win this category. A graph of the data would be laughable, but let’s compare helicopters to other CO2 emitting machines, namely cars, so we get a sense of their true impact.
I sourced data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics for average emissions by vehicle type. (Link to the data: Estimated U.S. Average Vehicle Emissions Rates per Vehicle by Vehicle Type Using Gasoline and Diesel | Bureau of Transportation Statistics (bts.gov) ).
The data included averages for each year from 2000 through estimates for 2030. For a fair comparison, I used the 2019 data since the flight data is from 2019. Before use, however, I had to do some light manipulation in Excel, creating a new calculated column for emissions in the right units. The original data provided grams of CO2 per mile, but I wanted Kg of CO2 per hour. For this conversion, I found that the average speed of American vehicles is 32mph, so I could just multiply by 32 and divide by 1000 for Kg CO2 per hour. Next, I brought the data into R for some data cleaning. The code is shown above on the right. With the data properly formatted, I went to Tableau and compared the emissions as shown on the right. Startlingly, the helicopter emissions are significantly higher than that of any driving vehicle, as shown by the size of the circles.
Cost Discussion
Another place where drones have a huge advantage is price. Clearly, the upkeep of drones and the buying cost is much less than that of helicopters. I’ll keep it simple for this section and just attach a table showing the prices involved (see left). Note that helicopters have a much higher initial price tag, and they have high running costs for both fuel and maintenance. Drones have a smaller price tag and little to no running costs.
Also keep in mind these prices aren’t including helicopter pilot salaries and other such expenses.
Range and Speed Discussion
Lastly, this brings us to the two categories helicopters are actually better at: range and speed. These categories are non-competition wins for helicopters over drones. The map on the right shows the average range of the five helicopters vs the average range of the five drones. The range is shown with the KTLA 5 building in Hollywood as a starting point (an arbitrarily chosen news building in LA).
In addition to a much, much larger range (which also means greater possible flight time in general), helicopters have a large speed advantage over the drones as well. The average helicopter max cruise speed is about 130 knots while the average drone max speed is 45 knots.
Conclusion
In the end, it’s hard to claim that news helicopters are obsolete noisemakers and pollutants. They still have their advantages over drone alternatives; Unfortunately, current widely-available drone tech probably isn’t bringing the high speed car chase footage you always see on the news. However, drones seem a perfectly suitable alternative in many common scenarios, especially ones where the action clearly is not going to be moving at extreme speeds. Some of the common problems with drones, such as shorter flight times, can even be solved just by getting more drones and cycling through them (still much more cost effective than a helicopter). News helicopters are not leaving the LA skies anytime soon, but maybe there’s hope that there only needs to be one or two each month instead of one or two each day. Whisper-quiet, environmentally-friendly drones would be a welcome sight in my apartment’s skies.