Last time it was Gatwick south of London. Hopefully this shutdown doesn't get extended because the government drones get mistaken for continued sightings of the original drone (or copycats) like happened at Gatwick.
As the article says, it is surprising how easy and cheap it is to shut down a world-class airport and disrupt 100,000's of people. They haven't even caught the last person.
What counterpoint am I making? I thought that it was perfectly obvious - that they had caught the previous person(s). I had not heard that they released them - I kind of quit paying attention once they made the arrests.
Seems like this was a thing before drones too, though. Call in a fake bomb threat, leave an empty bag suspiciously lying around, etc. All things that could asymmetrically disrupt the airport.
Granted, the chance to get caught is smaller with drones, but it's still fairly risky. I guess the only defense here are publicized arrests to dissuade the "prankster" category of attacker and the fact that statistically only very few people are crazy enough in the first place to try such an attack.
> The airport said it had spent several million pounds to purchase the equipment.
I feel like this is a problem some smart people could solve quickly if they were asked, similar to the healthcare.gov situation. Ask some MIT students to come up with a solution over a weekend and I bet they would deliver.
Knocking a slow moving object out of the sky is literally not rocket science.
The tricky part I'm guessing is doing it safely without collateral damage, especially in a crowded area like an airport.
A bullet or other kinetic object could do damage if it falls back down to earth. A directed energy/RF weapon could possibly fry other electronics in aircraft nearby as well.
You might be interested to hear that anti-drone net guns are already on the market to address this.
This [1] is a handheld one, though automated permanent installations that use acoustic signatures to track drones have already been installed on embassies and such.
Pistols and rifles, not birdshot? RPGs? What a complete joke. If you put these morons in charge of hunting birds they'd probably conclude that shooting birds doesn't work either. Try hunting birds with pistols and rifles and you'll have the same result.
And for the unaware, birdshot solves the "what goes up must come down" problem; the shot is light enough that when it falls back down the air resistance has slowed it to a harmless speed. In other words, the terminal velocity is MUCH lower than the muzzle velocity. Getting hit by falling birdshot doesn't bruise, let alone kill. If somebody were serious about solving this problem, instead of just trying to justify impotent anti-drone legislation (that won't stop bad actors from throwing together rc quads from scratch) they'd ask gunsmiths to create for them a fully automatic shotgun tuned to cycle with birdshot, with a large magazine capacity, and create radar systems that can distinguish between birds and drones (probably with a human in the loop.) Anti-drone micro-CIWS.
Other promising solutions include anti-drone falcons (potentially hazardous to the bird, I've seen what those props can do to human fingers...) and hunter-killer drones piloted by superior pilots. A good defense would be a defense in depth, adopt as many of these systems as is economical. Considering the economic harm that shutting down a major airport can cause, the budget should be large.
I think you might be underestimating the problem. Airports are generally spread across huge areas (square miles/km i.e. one or more football fields) and birdshot from shotguns has an effective maximum range of about 250 meters (according to various websites and charts), therefore you'd need a ton (hundreds?) of these micro-CIWS devices scattered around the perimeter to have any fighting chance. Also you want to make sure you don't hit any airplanes or helicopters already in the air. I can imagine certification from various government agencies in any country would take several years at best.
Furthermore, imagine you have your dream-drone-killer... how do you even find them? Neither of these recent sightings were even verified to be drones, they just received reports of sightings, therefore initially they would need to deploy devices to find/verify them. Once spotted, it wouldn't be hard to send a couple trained shooters with shotguns loaded with birdshot, assuming knowing their location isn't already enough to find the pilots...
Drones could easily fly in above the effective ceiling for birdshot anyway. A drone at 500m will easily interfere with flight paths and is well above the range of shotguns.
I had in mind birdshot CIWS mounted on top of a truck that could tear ass around the airport. Even if you could only place one or two in a fixed location, putting them next to tempting targets for invading drones looking to taunt the airport, such as the control tower, would probably work pretty well. Consider that the invading drone will only succeed in shutting down the airport if somebody notices it; somebody trying to commit economic sabotage will be making the presence of their drone known. If the invading drone goes unnoticed, then it will fail to accomplish it's mission.
As for drones flying too high, that is a problem but one that could be addressed (not solved) by using interceptor drones to spook or bait the invading drone into flying lower. On a non-ballistic sidenote, you could also have race quads configured to rapidly triangulate the origin control signal and collect video evidence of the signal origin. Not fool-proof by any means, but I wager that would be enough to catch all but the most clever/dedicated attackers.
This all seems a bit silly, but if you throw enough money at it I think you can make it work. The question is how much economic harm can a drone do by shutting down an international airport and how much money are you willing to spend to prevent this. My main point here is that the situation isn't nearly as hopeless as a bunch of soldiers taking potshots at the drones with their rifles (that's pretty much guaranteed to be not work and is exceptionally dangerous.)
"Ask some MIT students to come up with a solution over a weekend and I bet they would deliver. Knocking a slow moving object out of the sky is literally not rocket science."
It gets a little more complicated in the real world if you don't want to shoot down the wrong flying objects and also not kill people on the ground.
Part of me wonders if this is a long term problem with solving - causing so much annoyance with so little effort - or if this is just a fad. Time will tell. One thing is for sure, it's very easy to cause a lot of harm. Much of our society relies on assuming people are good. Sabotaging infrastructure is as easy as loosening or cutting bolts on a bridge.
> Sabotaging infrastructure is as easy as loosening or cutting bolts on a bridge.
The issue there is that someone has to walk up a bridge with tools and start loosening bolts. Drones are somewhat remote, in that they could hide in the bushes some distance away. And most of all, I can see drone operators thinking "it's fun" as they are not damaging or deliberately flying into planes. It's wrong of course, but in their minds they don't see it equivalent to cutting bolts on a bridge.
Thankfully a lot of more modern drones have no-fly maps implemented so you're forced to download it and you can't mess around there. But for years it's been pilot etiquette not to do dumb things to mess it up for everyone else, I guess that's slowly ending, unfortunately.
I hope most countries will still try and be sensible about their drone laws. Mine isn't: you're required to register your drone and tell them a month ahead (!!!) where you're going to fly, even if it's in the dead middle of nowhere, which is why people ignore all of it.
The other thing is that drones are exceedingly hard to regulate because the barrier of entry to just building your own is becoming lower and lower.
Anyhow, enough of my rambling. It's really sad to see things take such a negative turn for everyone involved (both drone pilots and regular people).
There's also the related observation, demonstrated in Eric Frank Russell's Wasp [1], that merely leaving behind the signs of tampering is enough to cause fear and panic.
In the novel, which is written as a deliciously dark satire in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a single agent causes havoc in a foreign country by subtly creating evidence of a mass sabotage by an underground guerilla force: Spreading rumours, distributing provocative stickers and posters, leaking assasination target lists, strategically leaving surveillance equipment to be discovered by the authorities, and so on. He doesn't actually perform any acts of sabotage.
If Wasp had been written in 2019, flying drones at airports would have fit right into the narrative.
Just as in Gatwick before this, the police and the airport are not able to produce even grainy footage of a drone that is supposedly "buzzing" the tower.
Gatwick reported "67 sightings", but couldn't confirm if some (all?) were their own drones [1]. And now Parliament is tabling new powers for the police [2]. Was there ever any evidence presented that there was ever a drone present? Is there any evidence that this was actually a drone at Heathrow?
Does Heathrow bear a resposibility to prove anything to you or any other random person on the internet? You seem to be insinuating some conspiracy by asking vague questions.
Isn't the responsibility on the law makers who are using the issue at the airport as justification, not the airport itself? Heathrow isn't somehow trying to pass laws themselves are they? (Caveat: Maybe I just don't understand how British law works?)
The responsibility is on the airport to confirm sightings.
The responsibility on the police is to confirm sightings before arresting people for flying drones over the airport (the police arrested a couple for flying drones over Gatwick when there was no evidence of drones over Gatwick).
The lawmakers should support their power grab with evidence but they are more interested in grabbing power.
This happened today. Can we not even wait for the incident to conclude and for them to get some planes off the ground before we start blowing the conspiracy whistle?
They do have a responsibility to intending passengers who are being inconvenienced and put out of pocket solely on the basis of a corporation being over-reactive.
There's really no disadvantage to airport authorities acting like this and only positives for them in protecting themselves from financial risk in the case that there is a drone. Plus, perhaps new powers will be passed that prevent them having to actually invest in anti-drone technology. Double-win!
Even if their contracts with airlines don’t lead to penalties then an airport that gains a reputation for drone shutdowns will lose passenger and airline business over time.
Remember when a pilot at Heathrow said a drone crashed into his plane a few years ago? After an investigation and lack of any evidence, I think the consensus was that it was probably a plastic bag.
* the people reporting drone sightings before the police turned up at Gatwick were pilots*
Considering that a passenger jet on final approach has a speed > 300 km/h and that a household drone is something like 30 cm wide you wonder how many of these drones were in fact hovering kestrels on the hunt for voles. How can you distinguish the two?
Kestrels tend to not be lit up after sunset. Also note this was not a household drone, police believe it was to "industrial specification" based on visual description from ATC staff who saw it. (That's also likely as a lot of drones e.g. DJI have geofencing around airports)
I flew out of Gatwick a few days after the supposed drone sighting(s). I saw a hawk hovering over a runway, which made me wonder whether someone who can't tell a hawk from a drone raised the alarm and all other sightings were of subsequent police drone activity.
Edit: it was a kestrel for those of you who are ornithologically inclined.
IMO the odds of this being a mass hysteria event are at least 3:1 versus an actual drone being intentionally flown to disrupt air traffic.
I would say it’s less likely an intentional misinformation campaign to get new police powers, but even that is more likely than an intentional drone attack, again just my opinion.
It’s absolutely incumbent on the authorities to provide incontrovertible evidence of an illegal drone. The fact that they launched a bunch of their own drones in response is sheer lunacy.
I have a first hand report from someone who works at gatwick that there was a drone hovering near the control tower for a while but I'll admit there seems a shortage of photos.
The question posed is not whether anyone reported seeing drones, but whether the reports are accurate. The fact that you got a first-hand report personally doesn't mean it's any more reliable than the first-hand reports the police received.
The claim that they saw it hovering "for a while" actually makes this particular claim less believable. They witnessed it hovering by the control tower for an extended period of time but never bothered to get their phone out?
But more to the point, the poster I was replying to did not claim that the witness was working in the control tower. Merely that they observed a drone hovering near the control tower. Of course, they might have been far enough away that they couldn't capture a photo. That would indicate that they likely were far enough away that they couldn't definitively ID a drone, too.
Fences, entrances, etc. and pointing at ground level - sure. Middle of the field, pointing high enough to get lots of sky, and with resolution high enough to tell a bird and a drone apart? - unlikely. But I'm happy to be proven wrong. Quick searches show even the external, globe cameras pointing primarily down and with the mount limiting any sky view.
Also my comment was responding to how Britain is different in CCTVs. Standard airport monitoring is going to be similar, regardless of country.
We used to have better name for this sightings, "UFO", now it's "drone" ;) I'm curious of near ground UFO signting numbers, they must have dropped down to zero, even if they're controlled by little green/gray things from other planets.
The problem is that once people are told there is a drone they will look for one, and some of them will see drones that aren't there. This could easily be triggered by one genuine drone sighting.
It might be better if people aren't told about the drone in the first place. Of course they will demand to know why their flights are delayed, but they might be better off if the hysteria is prevented while the authorities go look for the drone.
The same phenomenon could be witnessed during the right wing terror attack at Munich OEZ. There was only one shooter active in a rather distant part of Munich, but there were a LOT of reports of shooting sounds from all over the city. One panicked dude jumped through a glass bar window for safety and injured himself, and cops had basically the city on lockdown as they had to verify and clear ever more locations.
It was the probably most stressful event in younger Munich history for both public and police/EMS.
The only one not agreeing is the Bavarian government because they do not want to admit that after the Oktoberfestattentat and the NSU there has been more right-wing terrorism in Bavaria.
In addition, dubbing terrorists and "school shooters" simply as having "gone postal" is about the most ignorant framing that's possible as it totally ignores the factors that led to the attack (be it mobbing, feeling "sexually underserved" or Nazi propaganda or Islamist propaganda).
Given the authoritarianism of the current Prime Minister, as well as her history as Home Secretary, I'm not sure an accusation of conspiratorial power grab would be particularly controversial.
Since I began to become aware of politics as a late teenager in the mid 80's, there was conspiracies of power grabs that mostly all came true in hindsight.
It doesn't seem controversial to say that nothing has changed other than improved technology to further their power grabbing goals.
I kind of struggle to understand how there isn't enough equipment and electrical engineering expertise on site at a modern airport to pinpoint these drones really quickly - especially at Heathrow.
Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
Yes, but not at well defined frequencies, and it's competing with every other laptop fan, vacuum cleaner, refrigerator, sliding door, and electric stove as a source of RF noise.
It really would not take long for the airport to launch a drone to look for the other one. Maybe a minute? They could have a experienced pilot on staff at the tower. Costs a lot less than shutting down the airport for hours.
I would even say a skilled pilot with a trackable drone in communication with the tower could safely fly to investiage without a shutdown of the airport.
How would launching a drone help you look for another one if you don't know where it is? At least when you're looking from ground level you can be sure the drone is above you.
> Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
Brush motors sure, brush sparks are nasty EM interference sources. Brushless motors by design don't emit this kind of RF noises, only the motor controllers.
But in any case the power levels are hovering on the undetectable given all the noise from the airplanes, the radar systems, computers, cellphones, ...
Once the idea of alien UFOs became widespread, the number of reported cases rose. Once everybody has the idea that drones may be flying around airports, will people start misidentifying and reporting other phenomena as drones (causing chaos)?
Unfortunately no. According to the BBC [0] the Civil Aviation Authority considers a drone interference accident as an extraordinary circumstance. Therefore, the EU rules for compensation do not apply.
However, it makes me wonder if and when third party insurance companies will start offering this as a service.
To those wondering why we can't just take down the drones, it's not as simple as a jammer or a shotgun.
Jamming drones is a non starter for the most part. You can make a drone operate on just about any frequency you want and with modern equipment becoming more frequency agile, this will only get worse. A simple thought experiment would be a drone using GSM for video and control. Can you just jam all phones? Obviously not. Further, drones can fly without any command and control if they're configured correctly, just using GPS for guidance. Can you jam GPS at an airport where planes are breaking out of an overcast layer at 200ft AGL on a GPS approach? Nope.
Kinetic approaches: projectiles need to come back down. Even heavy bird shot could damage the super thin skin on an airliner when falling back to earth. Also, net guns and similar options are way shorter range than you think.
Birds of prey: stick your hand in a DJI rotor and report back. Now try an industrial drone. Come back when they re-attach all your fingers.
Drones catching drones: you'll need continuous line of sight to be able to chase the thing around. This also assumes it's a quad and not a 100mph+ fixed wing drone. Might be feasible if you have an automated way of detecting and following the drone (future mm band radar?).
Lasers: eye safety of the public and piloted aircraft.
Smaller scale SAMs with close range burst capabilities seem like they might avoid all of these issues, but tracking would be critical. Ideally the blast would at worst minorly damage but not crash an airliner and at best leave some small dents in aircraft skin but take down a smaller-scale drone.
If you take your "reasons why not" logic too far, however, you end up asking "how do we take down an enemy jet" which, I mean, the air force has probably figured out by now.
Why are drones more of a threat than large scale model jet aircraft? If we can't really avoid this then at some point we're going to need to react in a more measured way instead of flipping out and shutting down the airport.
I think the important difference is in the case of a drone, you're dealing with the possibility that it's going to get sucked into a jet engine (which by multi-engine standards should still be "safe"). Therefore the solution can't be worse than the problem and firing off missiles (which may fail and not self destruct correctly) or guns is a bit of an over-reaction. In the case of a military SAM engagement, you go into the scenario with the assumption that the aircraft you're shooting down is going to do far more damage than it could if it crashes in an uncontrolled manner so it's ok if a SAM misfires and blows up an apartment or the target crashes into a school building because that's a better outcome than a nuclear weapon being released, a strategic target being struck or another 9/11 happening.
Now, that's not to say that the equation wouldn't change if there was a realistic threat that someone would mount explosives on a drone and deliberately try to bring an airliner down but for once we can be thankful for the nature of reactionary policy; we can get away with being reactionary here.
Edit: to go on a bit of a tangent, I think the best path forward at this point is to have a system that can detect and locate fast moving radio emitters within the perimeter of an airport that don't correspond with an ADS-B target. Such a system might allow you to track the target and attempt to figure out where it came from.
Agreed and monitoring is definitely the first step. Without knowledge you're not really going to be able to use any sort of weaponry anyway. I'm hoping that this ends up getting handled similarly to birds and we don't have to react at the "enemy aircraft" scale of ballistics.
> the possibility that it's going to get sucked into a jet engine
I've often wondered why the turbine intakes don't have some sort of "filter" in front to prevent larger objects from entering? Birds have been a problem forever. Why isn't there a simple solution? Even a grid in front like a common 4"x4" chainlink fence would provide. Is there some reason why they're all just wide open?
Jet engines have unbelievably powerful suction on their intake side. A fence wouldn't stop anything; a bird or drone would just get broken up into smaller pieces as it's sucked through the filter.
Have a look at videos of jets blowing vans off the runway and you get an idea of how powerful the sucking is. A bird would get sucked through a chainlink fence in front of the engine.
Also you'd be reducing the efficiency of the engine all the time, which would add up over hundreds of trips.
The actual answer is aerodynamics. Having a structure in front of the turbine blades disrupts airflow, creating turbulent flow over the blades which causes the blades to lose efficiency. It's much easier to design the engine to be able to run for a little while after ingesting soft FOD than it is to create a good debris cover that doesn't destroy efficiency.
Drone chasing drone is probably the most realistic, especially if they could use radar similar to a guided missile. You'd want to be able to recover the drone for evidence, so using a missile, while possible, probably isn't the best.
#7 or bird shot would not even scratch the paint if falling under gravity. It is approximately 0.1 gram. If you ever see what it looks like in real life, it is tiny and soft. The only reason it does damage is because the charge gets it going at a fair speed (which is loses very quickly).
Since you seem to have experience here, what do you think the lightest shot that would damage a midsize drone (ie DJI phantom) at a useful range would be?
It depends on the gauge of shot. It also bears mentioning that having metal shards raining down at an airport presents a substantial FOD risk to engines and could also be kicked up by tires and strike the wing and body.
Until a rotor strikes the drone and everyone dies in a fiery crash? That was a pretty stupid stunt on both the part of the pilot and the drone operator
Russian military jamming equipment is pretty powerful though, and these systems are also supposedly deployed there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir_missile_system (the key in this case is the 30mm radar guided autocannon).
I think the laser based systems like the ones that US Navy have deployed recently (https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/17/politics/us-navy-drone-laser-...) would be the future here - those military lasers are supposedly using something like adaptive autofocus on the target, so it seems to be pretty easy for such a radar guided system to make sure that only target gets the focus and only when the line-of-sight is clear of anything else.
I think this is an interesting case. The force response here is a bit different than in non-war-zones but it's still a useful anecdote.
Lasers will probably be part of the solution at some point but it's worth noting some of the drawbacks. You need the target to be above the horizon for safety obviously, so that means you need to be fairly close to it in a semi-urban environment which negates some of the nice range advantages. The other big one is any shiny flat parts of the drone could potentially reflect energy back to the ground briefly, resulting in possible eye damage to anyone within line of sight. The laser would likely be infrared so any aluminum, even unpolished, could become an effective reflector. This could be particularly problematic as people tend to instinctively look at things that burst into bright balls of flame...
Supposedly the Gatwick drone was a larger, possibly industrial type. I made the point to illustrate the bounds of the problem. It's easy to assume it'll always be quads but it's very likely we'll see a variety of different configurations in the future and any solution should be flexible.
I agree and think OP's comments about industrial drones are probably a bit of overkill. The majority of cases will be some consumer level drone, probably a lower-mid range one because it's nearly guaranteed to be lost.
Highly directional EMP or something similar seems like it could work, if it existed and didn’t represent an insane proliferation and terrorism threat... which it would. Nor does it solve the problem of the drone falling out of the sky. Truth be told, nothing is going to reliably mitigate the drone or its wreckage crashing, so any interception should ignore the contribution of the drone itself to the safety environment. If a countermeasure is deployed, it’s going to present a risk to the public.
That being the case, a SAM with a net warhead, some kind of rapidly setting foam, or a load of tangling wires seems like it would be most reliable without having to worry about UXO. You could even try to mitigate falling risk by ensuring the interceptor remains attached to the target, and then deploys a series of parachutes.
I thought I covered that in the kinetic section but if you have specific questions I might be able to help? Basically "shooting" something down requires a projectile so you need something that can damage a drone but won't present a risk to aircraft or nearby communities when it falls back to earth and it also can't present a FOD (get thrown by tires/sucked into an engine) risk if it were to land on a runway.
Why not just build one yourself when you really feel you want? Won't it be twice (or more) the fun? Isn't a previously bought one going to be equally illegal after such a "bright idea"? Be careful and have fun anyway.
The poster here who claimed drones operate on "any frequency" is incorrect. Like any other radio device, radios in the drones and their controllers can only operate on limited frequencies which are known in advance.
There's also an Israeli company that sells a drone defense device. It's like a portable gun and it grounds the drone safely. I'm not sure how safe it is to use it near an ATC tower though.
Another Israeli company has an anti drone technology called Drone Dome that was supposedly deployed by the army at Gatwick during the incident.
1) If we could accurately detect and track drones, we can disregard the reports, or check with the detection system if there was a related near-detection at the reported location/line-of-sight
2) While there will be lot's of electrical motors throughout the airport, perhaps the airport and its infrastructure could be designed to support a 10 minute silence (causing delays etc).
3) Focussing on the electromotor driven propellers, the sound can be expected to have twice the frequency of the magnetic field (both the permanent magnet, and the applied electromagnet fields) since the propeller has 2 blades. It should be possible to use this correlation to filter out electromotor noise without blades. (So fan's will still contribute noise, but known fan noise, and electromotor fan noise of authorized equipment could be filtered out, or canceled)
4) A grid of microphones and magnetic field detectors would probably be necessary.
5) The system should probably be combined with other technologies like LIDAR etc
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] thread[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/23/gatwick-drone-ar...
What counterpoint are you making here?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-46709353
Although not before the press had smeared their names and faces across the whole country.
DoS attack doesn't necessarily mean high request volume.
Granted, the chance to get caught is smaller with drones, but it's still fairly risky. I guess the only defense here are publicized arrests to dissuade the "prankster" category of attacker and the fact that statistically only very few people are crazy enough in the first place to try such an attack.
I feel like this is a problem some smart people could solve quickly if they were asked, similar to the healthcare.gov situation. Ask some MIT students to come up with a solution over a weekend and I bet they would deliver.
Knocking a slow moving object out of the sky is literally not rocket science.
But perhaps doing it in a way that doesn't shower the runway with dangerous debris, is?
Met a guy while he was on the clock doing that, in fact.
A bullet or other kinetic object could do damage if it falls back down to earth. A directed energy/RF weapon could possibly fry other electronics in aircraft nearby as well.
This [1] is a handheld one, though automated permanent installations that use acoustic signatures to track drones have already been installed on embassies and such.
[1]: https://www.dronedefence.co.uk/products/netgun-x1/
No, but it's not a matter of some yahoos with a gun shooting them: https://twitter.com/sommervilletv/status/1080724993238069249
Meanwhile in Kentucky: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/judge-rules-in-f...
Meanwhile in Virginia: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/65-year-old-woma...
Meanwhile in Tennessee: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/man-takes-drone-...
And for the unaware, birdshot solves the "what goes up must come down" problem; the shot is light enough that when it falls back down the air resistance has slowed it to a harmless speed. In other words, the terminal velocity is MUCH lower than the muzzle velocity. Getting hit by falling birdshot doesn't bruise, let alone kill. If somebody were serious about solving this problem, instead of just trying to justify impotent anti-drone legislation (that won't stop bad actors from throwing together rc quads from scratch) they'd ask gunsmiths to create for them a fully automatic shotgun tuned to cycle with birdshot, with a large magazine capacity, and create radar systems that can distinguish between birds and drones (probably with a human in the loop.) Anti-drone micro-CIWS.
Other promising solutions include anti-drone falcons (potentially hazardous to the bird, I've seen what those props can do to human fingers...) and hunter-killer drones piloted by superior pilots. A good defense would be a defense in depth, adopt as many of these systems as is economical. Considering the economic harm that shutting down a major airport can cause, the budget should be large.
Furthermore, imagine you have your dream-drone-killer... how do you even find them? Neither of these recent sightings were even verified to be drones, they just received reports of sightings, therefore initially they would need to deploy devices to find/verify them. Once spotted, it wouldn't be hard to send a couple trained shooters with shotguns loaded with birdshot, assuming knowing their location isn't already enough to find the pilots...
As for drones flying too high, that is a problem but one that could be addressed (not solved) by using interceptor drones to spook or bait the invading drone into flying lower. On a non-ballistic sidenote, you could also have race quads configured to rapidly triangulate the origin control signal and collect video evidence of the signal origin. Not fool-proof by any means, but I wager that would be enough to catch all but the most clever/dedicated attackers.
This all seems a bit silly, but if you throw enough money at it I think you can make it work. The question is how much economic harm can a drone do by shutting down an international airport and how much money are you willing to spend to prevent this. My main point here is that the situation isn't nearly as hopeless as a bunch of soldiers taking potshots at the drones with their rifles (that's pretty much guaranteed to be not work and is exceptionally dangerous.)
It gets a little more complicated in the real world if you don't want to shoot down the wrong flying objects and also not kill people on the ground.
The issue there is that someone has to walk up a bridge with tools and start loosening bolts. Drones are somewhat remote, in that they could hide in the bushes some distance away. And most of all, I can see drone operators thinking "it's fun" as they are not damaging or deliberately flying into planes. It's wrong of course, but in their minds they don't see it equivalent to cutting bolts on a bridge.
I hope most countries will still try and be sensible about their drone laws. Mine isn't: you're required to register your drone and tell them a month ahead (!!!) where you're going to fly, even if it's in the dead middle of nowhere, which is why people ignore all of it.
The other thing is that drones are exceedingly hard to regulate because the barrier of entry to just building your own is becoming lower and lower.
Anyhow, enough of my rambling. It's really sad to see things take such a negative turn for everyone involved (both drone pilots and regular people).
In the novel, which is written as a deliciously dark satire in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a single agent causes havoc in a foreign country by subtly creating evidence of a mass sabotage by an underground guerilla force: Spreading rumours, distributing provocative stickers and posters, leaking assasination target lists, strategically leaving surveillance equipment to be discovered by the authorities, and so on. He doesn't actually perform any acts of sabotage.
If Wasp had been written in 2019, flying drones at airports would have fit right into the narrative.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasp_(novel)
Gatwick reported "67 sightings", but couldn't confirm if some (all?) were their own drones [1]. And now Parliament is tabling new powers for the police [2]. Was there ever any evidence presented that there was ever a drone present? Is there any evidence that this was actually a drone at Heathrow?
Are we sure this wasn't a plastic bag again [3]?
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/29/gatwick-drone-si...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/08/police-ha...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/22/11486256/drone-collision-...
P.S: I'm insinuating terrible preparedness to verify drone sightings leading to wonky regulations, not a conspiratorial power grab
The responsibility on the police is to confirm sightings before arresting people for flying drones over the airport (the police arrested a couple for flying drones over Gatwick when there was no evidence of drones over Gatwick).
The lawmakers should support their power grab with evidence but they are more interested in grabbing power.
There's really no disadvantage to airport authorities acting like this and only positives for them in protecting themselves from financial risk in the case that there is a drone. Plus, perhaps new powers will be passed that prevent them having to actually invest in anti-drone technology. Double-win!
Even if their contracts with airlines don’t lead to penalties then an airport that gains a reputation for drone shutdowns will lose passenger and airline business over time.
Among the people reporting drone sightings before the police turned up at Gatwick were pilots
Considering that a passenger jet on final approach has a speed > 300 km/h and that a household drone is something like 30 cm wide you wonder how many of these drones were in fact hovering kestrels on the hunt for voles. How can you distinguish the two?
Edit: it was a kestrel for those of you who are ornithologically inclined.
I would say it’s less likely an intentional misinformation campaign to get new police powers, but even that is more likely than an intentional drone attack, again just my opinion.
It’s absolutely incumbent on the authorities to provide incontrovertible evidence of an illegal drone. The fact that they launched a bunch of their own drones in response is sheer lunacy.
The claim that they saw it hovering "for a while" actually makes this particular claim less believable. They witnessed it hovering by the control tower for an extended period of time but never bothered to get their phone out?
If a car is on fire in a normal street, half the people just stop to take photos or start live streaming it (this happened in Melbourne recently).
How did no one pull out their phone and take any pictures?
People takes photos of airports and planes all the time because it’s so different from day-to-day stuff.
It seems implausibly unlikely that both no one took photos and no one shared them online.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/268495-rep...
But more to the point, the poster I was replying to did not claim that the witness was working in the control tower. Merely that they observed a drone hovering near the control tower. Of course, they might have been far enough away that they couldn't capture a photo. That would indicate that they likely were far enough away that they couldn't definitively ID a drone, too.
Also my comment was responding to how Britain is different in CCTVs. Standard airport monitoring is going to be similar, regardless of country.
It's really not.
It might be better if people aren't told about the drone in the first place. Of course they will demand to know why their flights are delayed, but they might be better off if the hysteria is prevented while the authorities go look for the drone.
It was the probably most stressful event in younger Munich history for both public and police/EMS.
Not really, or do you accuse the independent reviewers for the City of Munich government to be propagandists? https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/amoklauf-oez-muenchen-1...
Three external reviewers hired by the city government disagree: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/amoklauf-oez-muenchen-1...
The only one not agreeing is the Bavarian government because they do not want to admit that after the Oktoberfestattentat and the NSU there has been more right-wing terrorism in Bavaria.
In addition, dubbing terrorists and "school shooters" simply as having "gone postal" is about the most ignorant framing that's possible as it totally ignores the factors that led to the attack (be it mobbing, feeling "sexually underserved" or Nazi propaganda or Islamist propaganda).
It doesn't seem controversial to say that nothing has changed other than improved technology to further their power grabbing goals.
Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
I would even say a skilled pilot with a trackable drone in communication with the tower could safely fly to investiage without a shutdown of the airport.
>Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
So once you have an effective and objective mechanism (this or other) for detecting and tracking drones, you can disregard the peanut gallery.
[1] https://www.aaronia.com/products/solutions/Aaronia-Drone-Det...
Brush motors sure, brush sparks are nasty EM interference sources. Brushless motors by design don't emit this kind of RF noises, only the motor controllers.
But in any case the power levels are hovering on the undetectable given all the noise from the airplanes, the radar systems, computers, cellphones, ...
However, it makes me wonder if and when third party insurance companies will start offering this as a service.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46632302
Jamming drones is a non starter for the most part. You can make a drone operate on just about any frequency you want and with modern equipment becoming more frequency agile, this will only get worse. A simple thought experiment would be a drone using GSM for video and control. Can you just jam all phones? Obviously not. Further, drones can fly without any command and control if they're configured correctly, just using GPS for guidance. Can you jam GPS at an airport where planes are breaking out of an overcast layer at 200ft AGL on a GPS approach? Nope.
Kinetic approaches: projectiles need to come back down. Even heavy bird shot could damage the super thin skin on an airliner when falling back to earth. Also, net guns and similar options are way shorter range than you think.
Birds of prey: stick your hand in a DJI rotor and report back. Now try an industrial drone. Come back when they re-attach all your fingers.
Drones catching drones: you'll need continuous line of sight to be able to chase the thing around. This also assumes it's a quad and not a 100mph+ fixed wing drone. Might be feasible if you have an automated way of detecting and following the drone (future mm band radar?).
Lasers: eye safety of the public and piloted aircraft.
If you take your "reasons why not" logic too far, however, you end up asking "how do we take down an enemy jet" which, I mean, the air force has probably figured out by now.
Why are drones more of a threat than large scale model jet aircraft? If we can't really avoid this then at some point we're going to need to react in a more measured way instead of flipping out and shutting down the airport.
Now, that's not to say that the equation wouldn't change if there was a realistic threat that someone would mount explosives on a drone and deliberately try to bring an airliner down but for once we can be thankful for the nature of reactionary policy; we can get away with being reactionary here.
Edit: to go on a bit of a tangent, I think the best path forward at this point is to have a system that can detect and locate fast moving radio emitters within the perimeter of an airport that don't correspond with an ADS-B target. Such a system might allow you to track the target and attempt to figure out where it came from.
I've often wondered why the turbine intakes don't have some sort of "filter" in front to prevent larger objects from entering? Birds have been a problem forever. Why isn't there a simple solution? Even a grid in front like a common 4"x4" chainlink fence would provide. Is there some reason why they're all just wide open?
Similarly there's no fence that could keep this crab out: https://youtu.be/AMHwri8TtNE
Also you'd be reducing the efficiency of the engine all the time, which would add up over hundreds of trips.
Airplane wing vs DJI Phantom Drone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH0V7kp-xg0
"While the test done is plausible the speed involved in the test is unlikely especially for the type of aircraft involved."
The brick of meat (bird strike simulation) caused approximately the same amount of damage as the drone.
https://www.rt.com/news/415454-drone-attack-syria-turkey/
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2018/08/16/drone-attacks-ru...
Russian military jamming equipment is pretty powerful though, and these systems are also supposedly deployed there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir_missile_system (the key in this case is the 30mm radar guided autocannon).
I think the laser based systems like the ones that US Navy have deployed recently (https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/17/politics/us-navy-drone-laser-...) would be the future here - those military lasers are supposedly using something like adaptive autofocus on the target, so it seems to be pretty easy for such a radar guided system to make sure that only target gets the focus and only when the line-of-sight is clear of anything else.
Lasers will probably be part of the solution at some point but it's worth noting some of the drawbacks. You need the target to be above the horizon for safety obviously, so that means you need to be fairly close to it in a semi-urban environment which negates some of the nice range advantages. The other big one is any shiny flat parts of the drone could potentially reflect energy back to the ground briefly, resulting in possible eye damage to anyone within line of sight. The laser would likely be infrared so any aluminum, even unpolished, could become an effective reflector. This could be particularly problematic as people tend to instinctively look at things that burst into bright balls of flame...
That being the case, a SAM with a net warhead, some kind of rapidly setting foam, or a load of tangling wires seems like it would be most reliable without having to worry about UXO. You could even try to mitigate falling risk by ensuring the interceptor remains attached to the target, and then deploys a series of parachutes.
note: will be buying my drone today before the US FAA gets any brights ideas.
http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/airbus-technology-disrupt-dron...
The poster here who claimed drones operate on "any frequency" is incorrect. Like any other radio device, radios in the drones and their controllers can only operate on limited frequencies which are known in advance.
Another Israeli company has an anti drone technology called Drone Dome that was supposedly deployed by the army at Gatwick during the incident.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_Dome
2) While there will be lot's of electrical motors throughout the airport, perhaps the airport and its infrastructure could be designed to support a 10 minute silence (causing delays etc).
3) Focussing on the electromotor driven propellers, the sound can be expected to have twice the frequency of the magnetic field (both the permanent magnet, and the applied electromagnet fields) since the propeller has 2 blades. It should be possible to use this correlation to filter out electromotor noise without blades. (So fan's will still contribute noise, but known fan noise, and electromotor fan noise of authorized equipment could be filtered out, or canceled)
4) A grid of microphones and magnetic field detectors would probably be necessary.
5) The system should probably be combined with other technologies like LIDAR etc