Gatwick Airport: Drone sightings cause delays | Hacker News Reader

Gatwick Airport: Drone sightings cause delays

bbc.co.uk

117 pointsgadders89 comments

I'm surprised this isn't higher on HN given the tech nature of the attack. Gatwick is one of the busiest airports in the UK and having flights suspended for 24 hours is major disruption.

A few quotes from the BBC's live incident page at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-england-sussex-46564814

"An airline source has told the BBC that flights are currently cancelled until at least 19:00 GMT"

"Police have made a formal request to the MoD for military assistance to deal with the Gatwick incident. A defence source would not go into any detail of what that support would entail."

"The Prime Minister's spokesman said a cross-Whitehall meeting of officials is taking place in response to the drone incident.

The meeting of officials, but not ministers, is taking place in the Cabinet Office and began at 15:00, the spokesman said.

Officials from the Department for Transport, Home Office, the police and the Civil Contingencies Secretariat are among those involved in the meeting."

Agreed, I’m surprised at the HN relative silence because there are so many other drone stories that warrant such HN attention.

In this case all flights from Gatwick (the next busiest London airport after Heathrow) have been cancelled for nearly 24 hours.

That’s 110k passengers on 760 flights during one of the busiest travel periods of the year!

It is apparent by now, that the army's inability to stop those drones means only one thing.. those are not drones. It is UFOs.

Maybe a major tech company messed up and no one wants to violate their NDA?

These big commercial drones have been easily available for, what, 5+ years? And people have been talking about an attack like this for at least as long. It's absolutely mind boggling that we don't have any way of dealing with this other than sending police officers out on the street to see if they can spot a dodgy-looking individual holding a drone controller. Flights have been cancelled for 15 hours and counting now.

I hear some prisons have electronic defences against drones, why not one of the busiest airports in the world?

Assuming the prison system uses signal blocking, my uninformed guess would be that there would be concerns about it interfering with flight systems.

I'm not sure what type of electronic defences you have in mind but if it's jammers I assume that it's a lot easier to deploy those in the relatively quiet, well bounded and controlled environment of a prison and much more difficult in a very large airport hosting thousands of people and companies using thousands of devices. I think people want their cell phones and wi-fi to work correctly within the airport. And of course you don't want to risk messing with the electronics inside the planes.

If you play the thought experiment of "how could somebody kill many people easily and without requiring a lot of money" unfortunately you'll find that it's pretty damn easy. You have to find a balance between avoiding attacks and preserving freedom.

> why not one of the busiest airports in the world?

Is it mandated by law? No, so they're not going to pay for it.

Does drone need back-to-home signal when flying on a pre-defined route? I guess it only needs GPS and that is what might need to be jammed to stop it from following the course.. but how you jam GPS in the sky? hmm..

I also wonder how many drones are actually there as one would only fly for, how long, less than 1 hour? before battery is dead? If it returns to the base, it shouldn't take 10 sherlock holmes to track it?

Some don't even need GPS, just an inertial measurement unit onboard.

I highly doubt there's a commercial drone out there capable of doing that for more than a few seconds. And if there's one, the cost of the IMU alone would be a pretty strong deterrent against what just happened.

It is perfectly fine to fly without GPS, it isn't part of the control loop. You can navigate with a compass and a clock, it just has increasing errors. Many systems for resetting drift using SLAM techniques, or star observation at night in country areas.

You can jam GPS, but then it'll probably mean planes can't fly, either...

Planes already can't fly if the drone is in the air...

Planes can fly without GPS.

If they can't shut this down in ~2 hours, MOD/IC signals services should be fired. You can go for kinetic kills against the drone (shotgun if low, something more expensive if it's larger/higher), but should be able to find/fix/finish the transmitter fairly easily with equipment I'd hope national-level police would have, but certainly could get from the military (along with operators) in something of this severity.

Plus the full range of commercial anti-drone companies, some of which are based in Europe (a couple in UK I think).

Unless, of course, the drone had a pre-programmed flight path. Then there is no signal to track. You'd need to find out where it landed, probably by scanning through every possible CCTV camera in the area(which no doubt the Police are doing).

Exactly. I seriously doubt there is some guy standing at the airport fence with a handheld controller. This thing has GPS coordinates programmed in advance.

Per other news reports, kinetic kills were ruled out because of unacceptable risk of bullets/shells hitting something they shouldn't — the whole of South-East England is populated at a density that Americans would call suburbia. (All of England is only one and a half times as large as Greater Los Angeles County: lots of small towns, villages, and homes in the vicinity of Gatwick.)

I'm surprised they don't have specialist anti-drone transmitters, but as Police spending in England and Wales has been cut by over 30% since 2010, maybe it wasn't seen as a priority.

Tracking down the operators should be possible, but this looks like a well-planned attempt to shut down the airport: whoever is behind it probably planned to move around in order to evade the Airport Police.

> whoever is behind it probably planned to move around in order to evade the Airport Police.

If it were me and I wasn't using a preprogrammed route I'd just set up a transceiver that either replays or relays controls. Hide it in a bush and be on the other side of the country while everything is going off.

Welcome to MI5's watch list.

I hope they enjoy watching me commit atrocities in Rimworld.

Making hats is illegal in the UK?

Or use a cell phone radio and send data over the internet.

There's a lot of clay pigeon shooting in England. I think the shot looses too much velocity to do much damage on the way back down. It could work ok if the drones were below say 300 ft.

I'd be fairly comfortable using #7 or so birdshot in a suburban environment in limited quantity if people were evacuated or indoors (risking property damage is much better than injury or death). It won't break skin at 100-150 yards. I assume you'd either shoot from the ground or, if it's out of that range, from a helicopter.

Actually pretty curious about shotgun-vs-drone best practice, now. Most of the shotgun data I have is for horizontal ranges. This might be a good way to use up some cheap drones out in the desert next time. The other question is how much damage various kinds of shot with various levels of energy will do to different drones.

The rotors will bring a lot of energy into the equation on their own. It may be sufficient just to put some steel or lead in their path.

I'd be more concerned about the crashing drone than the shot. People are hit with falling shot fairly regularly when bird hunting and as far as I know it's not considered a serious problem.

> All of England is only one and a half times as large as Greater Los Angeles County

What? That's not even close to true by land area or population.

Greater Los Angeles - 87,490 km2 England - 130,279 km2

87,490 * 1.5 = 131,235

Pretty close if you ask me.

That's if you include all of San Bernadino and Riverside Counties, which stretch north and east up to Las Vegas and Arizona.

Which is complete nonsense.

The title feels like a big understatement. Huge damages done with an extremely easily accessible attack surface and cheap means of conducting an attack.

Good times ahead for anti-drone technology manufacturers.

And falconers, the far cheaper option.

Bigger drones are not that much more expensive though and probably won’t get attacked by a bird after a certain size.

And makers of falcon Armour (TM).

Trained falcons are probably not particularly cheap.

The Dutch police are training eagles. The article is some 3 years old but is now trending on the BBC News website, for some reason.

They have actually stopped that programme. https://www.ad.nl/binnenland/politie-stopt-met-inzetten-van-...

Thanks for the update. It did seem like a bit of an unlikely prospect.

Having seen what a Phantom 4 did to my thumb at idle, on the ground, I can tell you that it would absolutely fricasée a bird of prey while flying. The tips of the props are going >200kmh. The bird would have to take the drone all the way to the ground to prevent the drone recovering. You might get lucky once or twice, but pretty soon you would have your Harris hawk wrapped around one of the motors.

You could drop on it all kinds of light weight yet strong rope/nets that would mess the prop up. Regularly happens with boats.

In some ways it just shows how small the threat has been that we haven't seen a serious effort to take down a plane with a drone or similar.

The car park at Gatwick is right underneath the flightpath. I'm sure this is true of a lot of airports.

Attacking a railroad has been trivially easy for decades and yet so few people do it. It's shocking how non-destructive 99.999% of humans are.

Don't give the 0.001% any ideas.

Different types of damages and consequences, I'd argue.

Regularly happens in India. Google "naxal railway tracks".

Nobody has died at Gatwick today, attacking a railroad could have consequences that would be hard to live with.

There has to be motivation, who would benefit from attacking the railway?

In answer to that, the biggest danger is from suicidal people that don't care about the world. The worst train crash in the UK in recent memory was from such a person parking his car on the main line into London, to derail a 125 mph train killing many people.

Today's story is different. The authorities could have no idea who the perpetrator(s) are or this could be 'D-noticed' so that they are not given the oxygen of publicity.

Nothing points to an anti-climate-change group, even though they are starting to cause a stir in the UK. However, if such a group were to take action with drones then they would alienate all chances of support from the public. There would be no benefit for them to do this, plus they could be 'D-noticed'. Despite this we have had activist groups stopping planes before, I think 'Plane Stupid' closed Heathrow by getting onto the runway a few years ago. I don't think that this was an act of an agent provocateur wanting to discredit the Plane Stupid group, dissolving opposition to the third runway in the process.

Dark conspiracies do happen in the UK though. It would be trivial for an evil defence contractor wanting to militarise commercial airspace to do this drone stunt at a politically convenient time, to follow up with expensive solutions to stop these sorts of things happening in the future. They would just need a patsy to make sure they didn't get caught, maybe telling the patsy that they were 'taking action against climate change'. Such a conspiracy is not beyond the possibilities of craziness in UK politics even if it did involve a large amount of people in different agencies.

Then there is the lone guy who has spent far too much time alone with a soldering iron, not heard, with no friends, frustrated. If anything being in a group would hamper such an individual. When it comes to motivation, they would get a power trip from ruining the lives of so many.

We saw the other day a lone guy go viral with some over clever gadget designed to catch parcel thieves with his glitter bomb packed with mobile phones and a stink bomb. It had GPS, custom code and all the things to make it work. Half the people on HN could make such a gadget if they had six months, a workshop and the cash to make it possible.

A lone coder type could put together all the bits needed for what we have today at Gatwick and make sure they didn't get caught. A glorified RSS reader could be built to program the drone to hop into the air as soon as a live departure board had a flight on it. The authorities wouldn't know if the drone is programmed to home in on a plane so they can't just risk it. The 'lone coder' can therefore have a relatively dumb algorithm that just puts the drone into some pre-programmed random position with no comms needed.

If random lone coder happens to live on the flight path they may know precisely where the planes go each and every time, probably right over their house. The only hard problem for them is getting a drone to fly more than a few minutes, batteries being what they are. More than one drone solves that problem, then there is no need for the perp to get caught traipsing across a field to collect his toy. As per glitter bomb guy the other day, if a person has skills they can think through all the 'getting caught' scenarios. They don't even have to get themselves famous or notoriety for some cause, most people flying drones near airports have no such ambitions, they are just 'kids', even if adult.

A workmate just suggested water cannon (the police are reluctant to fire rounds at the drones in case a stray bullet hurts someone). I do believe London have some water cannons they bought but couldn't use (PM decided they were unsafe).

They sold off Boris' water cannon at a loss - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/19/boris-johnso...

The airport has fire trucks, same thing really. Not sure you'd accurately reach a drone from the ground though, since it could be > 1000ft AGL and they'd still have to close the airport.

How about (modified) flares, fireworks?

Counter-drones? With nets? Shotguns? Polymer filament glue? Drones on CAP around airports? (I'm thinking cyborg titanium falcons, à la the Rat-Things in Snow Crash.)

Given the cost of delaying operations at a major airport for even an hour, it can't be too long before some legislation promising violent penalties, and allowing drone takedown.

(What happens at Ben Gurion International? They also had to shut down all flight ops. http://www.thedrive.com/aerial/17918/israels-ben-gurion-airp... )

So far, up to 3 days of interruption, 650/720 flights cancelled.

Even assuming smaller planes with ~200 passengers, a modest cost per day of $300 (nonrefundable hotel bookings, accom for stuck passengers, taxi fees, etc):

200×650×900 = 117,000,000

And I think this is an underestimate, because those passengers still have to fly eventually, possibly on other carriers. By the time it's done, could be $500M.

I wonder if they have been asked to pay a ransom?

This drone operator has probably created good in the long run, as much as I wouldn't want to be stuck in Gatwick right now. This is going to lead to actual action being taken by the airport operators, one would think.

Almost worth a false-flag operation by MI5 given that (presumably) nobody is going to get hurt this time, and it will almost certainly lead to better defenses.

MPs trying to pass a law requiring mandatory backdoors for police control of drones in 3.. 2..

Then crims won’t buy those drones. But they’ll appreciate the backdoors in other people’s drones. But yes I can see such a law passing. Aussies can help UK draft it.

Or the criminals are caught via Facebook/ISP/smartphone and mandatory backdoors will make future incidents resolvable within seconds ... could be a Five Eyes win to get encryption backdoors.

#tinfoil

I wonder how they reliably identify something as a drone and not some birds?

Edit: I wouldn't have thought you'd be able to hear a drone (airports being somewhat noisy) and at night it must be pretty tricky to reliably identity one and I haven't seen any pictures or videos?

All birds file flight plans with the FAA after the Sully mishap.

That doesn’t help much at Gatwick though.

Binoculars.

In this case they quite simply saw the drones...

It seems to be the most common way of identifying them.

It's probably good to note that this was at 9pm, at night, coming up on the shortest day of the year.

So while it's possible they were seen, it's not going to be as cut and dry as during the day.

Presumably the drones had lights on, since it seems like the drone-operator was actually trying to cause disruption.

I have read the article, which mentions that the drones were "seen" and "spotted flying over the perimeter fence", that the runways were closed due to "further sightings".

So...

But people get that kind of thing wrong all the time - what it particularly reminded me of was this incident with a bear being reported as an "intruder" at a US airfield during the Cuban Missile crisis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volk_Field_Air_National_Guard_...

NB I'm not saying they weren't drones - just curious how reliable the reports are likely to be.

We're talking about pilots, airport personel, and police, who have been reporting several drone sightings over a long period, and are continuing to report drone sightings (the runway is still closed because drones are still being seen despite the area now teeming with police).

Seems to me to be as reliable as can be.

There have been many previous incidents and the occurrence is increasing. This seems to be the major one that is going to shake things up.

I mean they confuse plastic bags for drones [1]. I don't have as much blind faith as you.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/22/11486256/drone-collision-...

Radar. Various companies are already marketing counter-drone radar systems. Drone propellers are particularly non-stealthy, and also help discriminate drones from large birds.

You'd think someone could just hop in a Cessna 150 or similar and take the drones out by bashing into them. I learnt to fly in one of those and it would be great fun as long as someone else fixed the dents in the propeller. The minimum speed is about 45mph so it wouldn't do the sort of damage you'd get with a large jet hitting. I guess really you'd want to bash them with the landing gear for minimum plane damage. Or even tow a net.

I'd be more inclined to go for something twin-engined, but I guess I must be less of a thrill seeker than you ;)

Guess I was thinking of the cost. At a quick glance a C150 is about £99/hr and a twin £350 which is quite a lot to take out a stupid drone. Though I see the police seem to be mucking about in fancy helicopters at the moment.

Compared to the amount of cash being lost every hour that all of Gatwick stays nonfunctional these don't seem like significant sums.

Even a modest hobby drone is much more manoeuverable than the Air Force's most nimble fighter. I really don't fancy your chances of piloting a Cessna 150 into one.

If it's GPS programmed then its flight should be predictable; if it's locally controlled (line of sight) the control signal should be easy to triangulate; if it's distally controlled, eg video feed, then the feed should be traceable?

Only thing that'll stop a bad guy with a drone is a good guy with a drone.

I can understand they're wary of flying any manned aircraft near them to take them out, but I can't understand why they haven't yet deployed a fleet of suicide drones to knock them out of the sky? Is there something we're all missing here?

Actually, thinking about this, I'd assumed the drones must be autonomous or controlled via cellular networks, to make them harder to trace or jam.

But now I'm thinking they're being controlled via more standard remote frequencies, and they're being left there while the authorities home in on them. That's the only explanation I can come up with for not having taken them out by now.

For an idea of some of the damage that can be caused to an aircraft hitting a drone, this [0] was just a few days ago.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fts9u5ND24

Maybe deploy a very fast drone that's purpose built to hunt down other drones. It could 'lock' on to the target drone via some combination of image recognition and operator input, and then deploy some kind of netting/arresting functionality when within close range. Sounds like a fun project.

There should be at least 2 escort drones just in case the illegal drones attacks back.

I wonder if there will be drone hunter jobs in the future. Or are already? Also how do you even shoot down a drone? Netguns? Laser? Frequency jamming?

If I'd be asked to develop technology for this, I'd look at a building a directional EMP gun.

Frequency jamming won't work if the drone is flying autonomously (waypoint following is trivial). Netguns have limited range (how do you shoot something up 200m in the air?). Laser is not powerful enough, or, it it is, it's very dangerous to those in vicinity.

Directional EMP pulse that disables the electronics seems the best bet.

The police don't want to fire bullets. Even directional EMP sounds a bit on the dodgy side at an airport.

Or radar. Wouldn't a military-grade radar be able to essentially fry a drone if focused at close range?

At least in amateur radio, antennas too close can damage a radio if they're on the same band. I've heard the F-18's radar can kill animals.

AFAIK, most drones use 2.4Ghz radios, or just pure wifi.

If I would be asked to develop technology for this I would buy an Iron Beam [1] system and call it a day.

Iron Beam is basically a laser weapon for destroying short range rockets with 4-second laser bursts. It would make short work of any drones and I can skip the research and development skip.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam

Hah you are right and the a smaller version against drones also exist

https://www.israeldefense.co.il/he/node/33796

And the British Army already using it!

https://www.janes.com/article/82347/uk-signs-for-drone-dome-...

How has this gone on for so long? AFAIK most drones can’t fly for long periods without recharging/refuelling. Makes no sense.

I'm imagining a "catch the pidgeon" / keystone cops scenario here.

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