Gatwick Airport: Drones ground flights

While it seems quite easy to deal with the issue at first glance, I can see why this would be difficult to deal with. A drone strike at takeoff could be pretty catastrophic, so there is rightly an attitude of erring on the side of safety; flights are unlikely to resume until the authorities are fairly certain the drone is gone. But they are pretty small, so it doesn’t seem like it would be terribly easy to track them. The operator may be using multiple drones, and could potentially be quite far away from Gatwick - I’m no drone expert, but I understand 6-7km range with a 30min flight time is feasible. That’s quite a wide area to search.

Honestly I’m surprised that we haven’t seen this happen before now; it seems like such an easy attack. I would guess that we might even see a rash of copycat attacks.

Best option would be to send up another drone and fly into it / follow it if it tries to escape. I'm sure the police or army must have their own drones for other purposes which would be usable, and if not, its inconceivable that it wouldn't be possible to get hold of a drone in a few hours.

Currently they seem to be assuming someone is actively flying it... That might be the case, but it could equally well be flying by GPS and controlled from anywhere in the world over a mobile data connection, in which case the police are wasting their time.

It is (at least it was this morning) being billed as being an "industrial specification" drone, which implied that made it more difficult somehow.

Would love to hear others opinions on the options.

Amazing its going to remain closed going into Friday.

The UK government must have anti-drone measures, surely?

It also seems possible that opposing forces could organise this to flush out details of drone responses, you can't exactly hide your countermeasures when they're in the open at Gatwick.

https://news.sky.com/video/gatwick-drone-caught-on-camera-in...