Hacker News Reader

Comment by SmellyGeekBoy | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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.

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.

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

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com