“Last week’s near-collision between a hobby drone and a passenger aircraft portends what could happen as the sky gets a lot more crowded. And the nightmare scenario that has people concerned about drones is that one of them flies too close to a passenger jet and gets sucked into an engine,” Defense One reports.  

“Pilots deal with similar collisions with some frequency already—except they involve birds. And the outcome can be for the affected engine to die in midair.”  

Watch this video which shows a test scenario where an engine tears itself apart after a foreign object is thrown into it: