Idiots with drones have shut down the UK’s second largest airport | Hacker News Reader

Idiots with drones have shut down the UK’s second largest airport

theverge.com

32 pointsx43b23 comments

They have created hundreds of millions in damage with a few thousand in drones, and have yet to be caught. While you may be angry with them, the facts hardly paint the suspects as 'idiots' just yet. Embarassing a first world nations military ability to find and disable a drone and its operator with a remote control heli is almost halarious if it wasn't indicitive of a gastly level of incompetince in drone warfare. Its hardly new.

My thoughts exactly. For a very small amount of money, they have inflicted huge costs in terms of money and time. I'd expect these situations to continue to crop up ... easy to carry out; cheap; very hard to defend against and effective at gaining media attention.

Shouldn’t it be possible to track the radio control back to the source?

If there is one.

10 WAIT 3600

20 FLY UP +200

30 FLY WEST +1000

40 FLY NORTH +1000

50 FLY WEST -1000

60 FLY NORTH -1000

70 GOTO 30

In other words, set your drone on the ground, drive off, and have it follow a preprogrammed route until batteries die. Never any radio traffic.

It practice you would have a GPS on board and give absolute waypoints to take wind into account. So maybe GPS jammer in this case ? Not very practical.

Now the aircraft don't have GPS either.

It would be imprecise, but if you only need to sow chaos, you don't care where precisely the drone goes. Plus you've dragged in a host of external dependencies, all hungry and some of them networked: GPS and left_pad and bcmath, oh my!

So what’s the best way to take these things out if we’re not comfortable firing bullets (reasonable). I would think other drones casting wide nets might work?

I'm guessing the problem is that making the drone fall out of the sky is not safe either, in the general case. So either a bird that will grab a drone and return to the handler, or some kind of way of scooping up the drone in a net held by multiple drones seem like the best options. It's an asymmetric situation.

The story of weapons vs. countermeasures is for the most part, a history of just such assymmetries in favor of weapons. With few exceptions, weapons are generations ahead of countermeasures. It is still much much easier to shoot someone than to defend against being shot. It’s easier to drop nuclear warheads than intercept them, to lay mines than sweep for them, and so on.

I think it’s just the usual wages of entropy, in the same way that it’s easier to spread falsehoods than recitfy them.

Rubber bullets would almost certainly work. They are apparently safe enough to fire into live crowds of protestors, so should be fine here.

t-cell drones

I recall some airport was using trained hawks to hunt down drones. I wonder what happened with that approach.

Since this is a '£5k' drone, I wonder if it is too big for the hawks?

I was thinking a kind of chaff, long wires coated in a thin film of plastic to slow their decent, fire a load of these into the air around the drone and it will come down by tieing up its propellers. I also considered rubber bullets would work too.

I wonder if an air vortex cannon could be built powerful enough to take one of these down

I thought by now all airports should have some kind of anti drone weapon to handle cases like this.

Something like DroneShield? Anyone know whether those things are effective or just a gimmick?

Active radar? GPS+comm radio jammer? If that works as promised, not something you would like to deploy at an airport.

Drone disabling Kalashinikv gun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mlfHzg-p38

Yeah. A jammer. Seems to work great for tens of meters...how does it cope with inverse square law, I wonder?

I was thinking of the gun. Good point though, not sure how targeted it is and you wouldn't want to miss.

Polly wanna drone? https://youtu.be/kAYVyj6vf3Y

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