Gatwick drones: Two arrested over flight disruption | Hacker News Reader

Gatwick drones: Two arrested over flight disruption

bbc.com

188 pointslakis224 comments

Interesting bits...

One piece of equipment believed to have been deployed at the airport is the Israeli-developed Drone Dome system, which can detect drones using radar. It can also jam communications between the drone and its operator, enabling authorities to take control of and land the drone.

In a move known as "buzzing the tower", it emerged the perpetrator had taunted airport staff by circling the drone around the building and flashing its lights

A detailed description of the drone, provided by witnesses, meant experts were able to determine the make and model of the machine, which is only available from a handful of locations in the UK.

Police and military experts were deployed to search for the operators of the drones, which reappeared near the airport every time the authorities tried to reopen the runways.

TLDR; There are no sure fire way to track down offender and police mainly relied on informants and traditional detective work of identifying drone and who might have purchased it.

Better coverage is here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/22/gatwick-airport-...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/22/gatwick-dron...

You can probably triangulate the controller if you know which radio frequency it uses

Shouldn't it be fairly easy to thoroughly jam it, and then the drone does whatever the default is when it loses all radio and GPS data?

There are drones with 4G comms. Shutting off the entire local phone network may be less acceptable.

I recon for ~$300 in parts your "typical hardware hacker" could build a rig that would focus 600W of microwave energy into a parabolic dish with reasonably tight beam. That shouldn't really affect anything but the drone.

If I was building a drone to do sabotage, I'd build a comms link around modulated NIR lasers targeted with mirrors rotated by microsteppers.

Did you see the article about optical links for micro sats?

http://news.mit.edu/2018/laser-pointing-system-satellites-tr...

I wonder if you could communicate with a drone from orbit (obviously in clear conditions).

*reckon

I thought you were saying you do reconnaissance for $300 before finishing the sentence.

Can't you just jam it with a very directional antenna?

You need to find where it is first and be able to track it.

Finding it doesn't seem hard, it really seemed to try to get as much attention as possible.

And without being able to command it or GPS it shouldn't be hard to track it either.

In theory it could be following waypoints (no command frequency) and using ultrasonic "sonar" to avoid things like trees at low level. That's pretty difficult to track, especially if you're on the ground in an area with a lot of trees.

Sure, but extremely unlikely.

That's why radar was invented.

If it's being controlled with a controller, yes, although at 2.4 Ghz, they frequency-hop, and jamming the entire spectrum close to loads of aircraft (even if grounded) and a terminal with wifi etc is likely to cause some collateral disruption. Gatwick's also surrounded by loads of businesses (although at night they'd mostly be closed).

However, if it's not a commercial one or has been modified, it could be using waypoints so jamming the communications wouldn't do anything useful in that case.

Jamming GPS is more problematic, I'm not sure how localised that could be, if it can't be it's unlikely they can do this as so much stuff relies on it these days (even aircraft, although DME/VOR waypoints are still used).

Aircraft do not rely on GPS precisely because it’s so easy to jam. It’s only a convenience.

This is increasingly untrue. RNAV/PNAV approaches are increasingly being flown - which are exclusively satellite-based navigation, and, at smaller airports, “traditional” approaches based on ground instrumentation are being phased out due to cost and inflexibility... potentially leaving pilots stranded in bad weather conditions if GPS fails.

They're definitely less safe without it though.

Also, I don't know about the UK's laws, but any sort of radiofrequency jamming is illegal in the US except in extremely extenuating circumstances (like war) that I don't think a roving drone would fall under.

Wouldn't a directional antenna aimed at it minimize such collateral interference?

Yes.

I've seen a lot of suggestions floating around on jamming the signal. But that assumes that there is an active operator and not a drone that has been told to go between a pre set list of coordinates. Most high end should support gps navigation so I assuming that you have enough money and don't need to ever recover a drone after it's out of battery you can probably increase your chances of not getting caught.

Then you jam GPS

At an airport.

Which is fine because it’s not necessary for aviation.

GPS disruption is NOTAM'd or scheduled with Ofcom[1] from time-to-time, although not usually at the airport itself. Given that Gatwick was shut at the time, it wouldn't have affected the aircraft since they weren't able to go anywhere.

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/information/gps-jamming-ex...

I wonder how much of a problem that would actually cause? Surely they could announce the lack of GPS on ATC and the pilots could revert to ground based navaids. Of course it might be difficult to keep the effect localised considering how weak the competing signal from space is.

What about all of the other legitimate users of GPS?

They suffer a minor inconvenience as precision is lost. The US military frequently does selective jamming near bases and other ‘special’ areas.

The tricky bit here is that this is a civilian airport. Jamming GPS could reasonably be expected to cause significant difficulties for civilian planes and pilots. And thus passengers.

The airport was already disrupted because of the drones, disrupted to the point of shut down. thus the article.

As has been mentioned earlier, there are 5 airports in London.

There aren't five airports in London. There are quite a few airports with "London" in the name, but they aren't particularly close to London. London Luton Airport, for instance, is ~45km north of London, and London Gatwick is ~50km south of London. There's ~100km distance between Luton and the airport that was affected by the drones.

How do you think those planes get to those airports? There are planes flying all over the south east going to if from numerous airports. Then there’s the impact on GPS in cars, trucks, phones, police vehicles, ambulances, all sorts of emergency services. We’d have to be extremely careful about potential impact before considering such a drastic step that has a very small chance of actually being effective.

I think you might have misread my comment. What I said was that there aren't five airports in London. You seem to have understood that to mean something very different.

All flights were grounded anyway

Not really, whatever you are jamming you can just make sure it doesn't make it 10 km up in the air where most of the planes are (especially given the GPS patch antenna pointing up from the plane), and I don't believe they need GPS signal on takeoff/landing, they use older tech for that.

10km up? What about all the planes landing at the other airports of London?

Most of which are geographically distant enough to not be affected by localised jamming.

Never mind that Aircraft will be under ATC in UK airspace, and ATC uses Radar + transponder to localise aircraft.

GPS is a navigational aid, not the primary navigation tool.

> (...) I don't believe they need GPS signal on takeoff/landing, they use older tech for that.

Much older. The basic "stack" uses radio beacons, not greatly different from early XX century tech. The more advanced Instrument Landing System is quite a bit more complex, but in very basic terms is a set of radio beacons that define a glide path. It is local, and requires no GPS.

I wonder, does that mean loss of precision or complete failure?

As always it depends. There was defcon talk[1] about messing with drones and one part of speekers research involved jamming gps signal.

[1] https://youtu.be/5CzURm7OpAA

It can still do dead reckoning using optical flow and the barometer.

That is not what dead reckoning is.

You’re idea is simply flying by other instrumentation.

Dead reckoning would be the accelerometer only, and estimating an assumed possible position based on known facts about the vehicle’s inertia and direction over time.

Using an accelerometer wouldn’t be dead reckoning either. Dead reckoning in an aircraft is measuring airspeed and heading and correcting for expected wind. Using an accelerometer is intertidal navigation.

> measuring airspeed

> accelerometer

What exactly would imagine an accelerometer meters? Something other than speed?

Accelerometers measure acceleration. This can be used to calculate the groundspeed of the aircraft. Groundspeed is different than airspeed. For example, if a drone was hovering in a 5mph wind, its groundspeed is 0 and its airspeed is 5mph.

I was a flight instructor for a few years, and have taught many students how to do dead reckoning. That doesn’t mean I’m right, but hopefully gives me enough credibility that you’ll consider my argument. Each of the Wikipedia articles for these topics is robust if you’d like more detail.

Anything without a global reference is dead reckoning. Optical flow sensors just give you a rotational velocity relative to ground. They don't globally locate you. If you combine it with an altitude sensor it gives the same as an odometer would in a car, or the number of steps you take while hiking.

Then the drones fly visually. ANY drone activity will shut down the airport. I think the crucial point to make here is the attacker is inherently in a better position then the defender.

There is a buffer zone around the airport anyway. I would aim to mercilessly shoot down detected drones in that buffer zone.

Visually? I have yet to hear of a drone that can fly by camera instead of GPS.

I assume most can fly without GPS. I can launch either of my Mavics without GPS and fly free, or it can try to use visuals to maintain location.

I've flown within a cave without GPS. The drone drifts and can't really hold position reliably, but it works:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BoayncJgAOO/

Sure, I’ve flown many times without GPS too, but if one is jamming 1575.42 MHz, it’s a simple matter to do the same for 2.4ghz and 5ghz that’s used for the drone to remote link.

Which is great, but the parent post was describing autonomous navigation and disposable drones as a way for a drone operator to evade capture.

But we were talking about not controlling it so they can't jam your controller signal. Sure you can fly manually...

I saw MIT opensourcing it 5 years ago. Flying through dense forests too.

https://github.com/andybarry/flight

It should totally be possible, I trust without clicking that they have an impressive proof of concept. But I've never seen it implemented in a commercial product. The only purpose would be when GPS is not available (indoors? Perhaps in a cave or on a space station? Not very common scenarios to not fly on auto pilot), so it makes sense that nobody bothered.

Yeah I'd be wary releasing that commercially, drones are easy enough already to crash, giving users an automated feature with the potential for monetary loss is asking for drama and bad press.

Military hardware (the Tomohawk cruise missile, in particular) has had optical-only navigation since the early 1980's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM#DSMAC

Huh? This is very common. For example, look at these capabilities from DJI, one of the most important drone manufacturers: https://www.dji.com/products/mavic?site=brandsite&from=nav

What knowledge/experience is your speculation that flying by camera doesn't exist based on?

There are two classes of drones. The ones which need C&C link from their pilot and the ones which fly autonomously. With the ones requiring C&C link the best bet of the authorities is to triangulate the transmitter and/or disrupt the link.

The ones which fly autonomously are more complicated. And the thread you were responding to was talking about this case. There are no commercially available drones which can fly autonomously by on-board visual navigation. The ones you linked can send a camera image back to the operator, but can't fly themselves based on that image.

what if they C&C via internet? (4g). Lantencies are low enough nowadays. Controller could be anywhere in the world.

Same issue as with a controller: jamming. Heck, they could detect the signal and just tell the carrier to shut the customer off. Would probably be unprecedented and therefore take some hours, but if the person persists, surely an option.

Oh right, the following mode! Hadn't thought of that, that surely counts as flying by camera. But it doesn't apply to the situation where you give the drone a preconfigured, uh, visual coordinates (a path, I guess that must be?) and it will try to follow it. So it still cannot wreak havoc at an airport without either you being there (follow mode), GPS being available (autopilot to coordinates), or flying manually using a remote control.

Ever watch drone racing? They're not using GPS. Here's an MIT video of a drone flying using computer vision through trees at 30mph. They've improved this quite a bit since the video was made. This stuff is getting pretty easy to do. https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/self-flying-drone-dips-darts-...

I have about a 6 mile range for video/control with my drone.

What sort of drone to you have?

It's a heavily modified 3D Robotics Solo that I picked up for $300.

The Register has an article discussing why shooting down wasn't a great idea either:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/20/gatwick_drone_non_s...

This is pure bs.

In the UK, they ram people of scooters. The biggest danger here is 'a drone may fall on someones home'. Clearly there is either a HUGE force imbalance, or a hidden situation. Shotguns, as posted ad nasuem here, are perfectly safe.

Not sure I agree entirely. A guy with a shotgun in a helicopter could of done it, both of which were available at Gatwick. The shot looses velocity quite rapidly so wouldn't do much damage on the ground. I guess you'd have to hope the drone didn't land on anything much.

Londoners mostly got though the Blitz ok with a million houses destroyed or damaged by bombs. We can handle the risk of a crappy drone crashing in someones garden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz#No_collapse_of_moral...

I've been duck shooting and felt shot from shooters on the opposite side of the lake pattering down onto me and around me. I can't imagine a shotgun itself would present any real risk to those below, compared to the enormous distortion these drones caused.

Jamming GPS at an around an airport is not that great idea given that the airliners rely on it for navigation.

Granted, they have other means of navigating when the GPS isn't available but in the extremely busy airspace around London this would be just asking for a big problem.

How big is the area of a GPS jammer? Gatwick is 10km further out than London's biggest ring road and 45km from the centre.

> How big is the area of a GPS jammer?

However big you want to make it. All a “GPS jammer” is is a radio transmitting on 1575.42 MHz. Modeling the signal propagation of a transmitting device (Aka radio / antenna combo in this case) is a very very well known field.

But the airport was closed anyway. And there's some work by yours truly into targeted GPS spoofing, allowing not only to jam but also to take control of the device using GPS.

There are like 5 airports in London. You want to be pretty confident your jamming will be very local.

There's actually only two "international" civilian airports in London.

London City, and London Heathrow.

Luton, Stansted, and Gatwick are "London" in name only. All about 30mins drive from the M25.

I can reach Gatwick in 30 mins from West London using an Oyster. That's faster than my commute into the City. So it's London, for all intents and purposes.

Isn't London City the only airport actually in London? See e.g. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/heathrow-and-gatwick...

Heathrow and Gatwick are about the same distance from London City Airport.

Yes, that sort of local. I'm not talking about kilometers, or even a whole airport. Something like 100m³ should be achievable without too much trouble.

I don't really want to link it to avoid linking this username to things, but I guess this should be okay: http:// rp dot delaat dot net/2017-2018/p95/report.pdf

I don’t know much about GPS jamming, but I know a fair bit about how airliners navigate. GPS is usually not used for final approach, which is typically either visual or ILS (a radio signal transmitted from the ground). This in contrast to the earlier stages of approach which may use GPS depending on the airport and the specific approach in use. If you can keep the jamming signal contained to the immediate airport vicinity and a few thousand feet above, there should be little or no impact on (non-drone) aircraft navigation.

Truck driver uses a GPS jammer so his boss can't track him, then drives by Newark airport, disrupting their "Smartpath" precision navigation system.

Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/truck-driver-has-gps-jammer-accide...

Smartpath: https://aerospace.honeywell.com/en/products/navigation-and-s...

There are many more airports that have an RNAV GPS/GNSS approach procedure, than ILS. ILS requires expensive ground equipment, and fairly low obstruction clearance for miles surrounding the airport. I expect RNAV GNSS is used with some frequency at even big airports like Gatwick, on days when conditions don't require ILS in particular when the ILS is out of service for planned maintenance.

Example RNAV GNSS for Gatwick: https://opennav.com/pdf/EGKK/EG_AD_2_EGKK_8-4_en_2010-07-29....

A drone capable of jamming GPS in any useful area should carry a huge load of batteries to develop enough jamming power, not the best requirement for something strapped to a light flying machine where every gram counts. Anyone can buy a GPS jammer at the usual online stores, but they draw watts to cover an area of tens of meters, that is, to jam a single airplane you must fly the drone very close to it, and lose all other planes in the process. A flock of pigeons is many times more dangerous than a drone, even if carries a functioning GPS jammer.

To me any concern about GPS jamming is plain bullshit added to the soup to justify further restrictions on drone flying. Drones with cameras are powerful weapons these days.

>A drone capable of jamming GPS in any useful area should carry a huge load of batteries to develop enough jamming power

GPS is extremely low power and relatively speaking easy to jam. The received signal strength is far below the noise floor to begin with and it's basically RF black magic that it works to begin with. Those cheap GPS jammers that only radiate white noise at like a watt cause huge problems in the surrounding area.

There was even one case that I know of that would pertain to this subject in particular. A truck driver wanted to prevent his company from snooping on his whereabouts while driving a truck with a tracking system on it so he bought and used one of those cheap chinese jammers. He delivered stuff to an airport and just sitting in the parking lot was enough to keep aircraft from maintaining a GPS fix. There was also the case at Newark airport where just a truck driving by regularly was enough to cause problems.

And really those GPS jammers are the bruteforce and pretty ineffective approach. White noise is essentially what GPS is designed to work in, it just raises the noise floor 20 - 30 dB. GPS uses a gold code to transfer information and it's essentially looking for statistical deviations to be able to get a lock on such a weak signal. If a jammer was designed to be biased and transmit with the intention of preventing a receiver from being able to lock onto a satellite instead of just overpowering the signal entirely it could jam more with less power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Coarse/acquisition...

https://gizmodo.com/jamming-gps-signals-is-illegal-dangerous...

https://www.cnet.com/news/truck-driver-has-gps-jammer-accide...

I've never seen noise generators used as GPS jammers, that would be hugely inefficient. All boards I've seen so far, although not emitting a single frequency, jammed the target using sweep generators operating on the desired GPS frequencies. Some even do that simultaneously, which is why they use multiple antennas; if they transmitted noise they could do that using a single noise generator and a wide band antenna.

Example: http://jammergroup.quality.chinacsw.com/pz66df87e-handheld-6...

And by the way, Boeing had jamming resistant GPS back in 1998.

https://boeing.mediaroom.com/1998-04-23-Boeing-Anti-Jam-GPS-...

n00b question: are the GPS signals used by drones and commercial airliners the same? I know the military have their own special class of GPS.

Yes, same signal. The military signal you mention is military-only.

It is very possible for a drone to fly in a GPS denied scenario.

All of them? My drone uses a uBlox M8N which uses 4 different GPS systems (US GPS/Galileo/Beidou/Glonass). It's nice because you can get a GPS lock in just a few seconds, and it's a lot more accurate if you're connected to 20 sats at the same time than just 5 or 6. You can pick them up for about $20 on Amazon. You can also use satellite imagery and machine learning/computer vision with no GPS at all. You just draw a boundary on the sat map that you want it to stay within and it uses its cameras to match. MIT developed some cool drones that can actually fly through a forest at 30MPH without hitting any trees. This stuff is becoming very easy to do. https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/self-flying-drone-dips-darts-...

If you jam GPS these days, you also get confused ubers, delivery riders and tourists milling around.

There is a lot of discussion about how a drone might avoid jamming, which is worth considering with regard to going forward, but the fact is that jamming apparently did bring this incident to an end, so the delay suggests that the relevant authorities were caught woefully unprepared.

From media - police started with a commercial DJI anti-drone system. That did not work. Then "drone dome" was brought by the UK army. That apparently did work and the drone was grounded. This is in all likelihood the first time ever that system was used in a non-military context, so it's reasonable for the operation to take some time.

First priority in not getting caught is recovering the drone. Physical evidence is the bane of all crime. At least have it crash into a deep or fast-flowing river.

In the Gatwick case it appears the drone was remotely operated rather than autonomously visiting a series of GPS way points.

I figured the authorities could pretty quickly triangulate the signal to locate the operator. But Gatwick is a bucket of suck so maybe they're just unprepared?

Also, I understood that drones are geofenced out of restricted airspace such that they disobey commands to fly where they're not allowed.

Geofencing drones: https://www.heliguy.com/blog/2017/02/16/heliguys-guide-to-ge...

DJI drones are very geofenced. To the point where if you try to fly them inside an enclosure near an airport at an officially-sanctioned event like EAA Airventure, you won't be able to.

But many others are not. Drones without GPS for example cannot be geofenced.

It’s not that hard to build a drone as a hobbyist. Controls on commercially available drones are only going to deter the most casual operators.

That assumes it's running factory standard software.

If my memory of this talk is correct, he demonstrated how easy it was to un-geofence a drone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CzURm7OpAA

Radio direction finding is reasonably straight-forward in theory, but practice is a challenging art.

First, what frequency is the control transmitter on? (or frequency-band/freq-hopping in). If it is one of the usual R/C bands, then that is a limited search space. Or if the perp is not so concerned with observing frequency allocation treaties and regulations, well then now you have a big hunt.

Second, what other signals are in that band? Suppose it is in the 2.4GHz ISM band. Given a spectrum analyzer plot of 300 spread-spectrum signals hopping in the ISM band, which 299 are WiFi and Bluetooth and other, and which is the perp? The microwave ovens are easy to distinguish, but still add clutter.

So if you can pick on a single signal, then you can use Doppler techniques to get a rough bearing, and directional antennas to zero in.

I suspect they had some crews working the problem, but it is a challenge.

Anyone interested can look up Amateur Radio “fox hunting” in the US, and in Europe “radio orienteering” is popular. Since signal hunters are not transmitting, no license is required to participate in a hunt.

I know public reporting says US is behind Russia in EW. I don't know how good UK EW is, but if the UK can't locate commercial drones signals, than we are in trouble.

(Fun fact, UK was very good in EW during WWII

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams )

Military perspective on this:

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/25608/rogue-drones-have...

>pick on a single signal

You dont have to do it manually. Nowadays you can grab whole 2.4-2.5 range(most common drone remote frequency), process it in real time, at 3 locations simultaneously, and produce signal position map with every transmitter inside the triangle or interest. Even amateur fox hunts can be automated to the point of trivializing whole thing with couple of those https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kerberossdr-4x-coherent-r... . More professional hardware does exist, quick search gave me http://spectrafold.com/quadrus/product/dru-244a-1-4-pci/ so Im sure MIL already uses this instead of primitive manual techniques.

>TLDR; There are no sure fire way to track down offender and police mainly relied on informants and traditional detective work of identifying drone and who might have purchased it.

Like with almost any other crime.

> A detailed description of the drone, provided by witnesses, meant experts were able to determine the make and model of the machine, which is only available from a handful of locations in the UK.

I mean, if you've got a fairly unique drone, don't be stupid enough to give people a bloody good look at it. Be smarter.

The guy had just shut down the second biggest airport in the country for almost a day at that point, he was probably drunk on power.

>Israeli-developed Drone Dome

>TLDR; There are no sure fire way to track down offender

$200 https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/kerberossdr-4x-coherent-r...

Given the shockingly naive comments about drone disabling being proposed, I'm going to assume only a very tiny handful of people who visit this site has ever flown or seen a drone before. Let's cure some of this naivety:

- GPS jamming doesn't jam video feed.

- Wifi and radio jamming doesn't stop landmark-driven/return-to-home navigation.

- UK refusal to fire on the craft is absurd because rubber bullets, simunitions, and less-than-lethal rounds are more than capable of destabilizing the hull and structure of the craft... while inflicting no damage on distant landed craft or personnel. (I wouldn't expect HN to know this, tbh)

-Sending piles of off-the-shelf consumer drones up to ram into it would have been sufficient as well.

Because of those last two points, the bumbling incompetence of UK security forces suggests to me that this event is purely pretext for even more rigid anti-drone legislation in a country that already has extreme anti-drone legislation. If true, then the question is, "What has changed that has made Airstrip One suddenly paranoid about drones?"

The wild speculation happens for every subject area here. It's obvious in areas that I know anything about, and it also reminds me to take everything else outside of tech's core competencies with a huge grain of salt.

Yup. I posited this when I was a young pup, then found out some dude beat me to it <wink>: see,

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect?wprov...

What "extreme anti-drone legislation" is that?

Seems pretty common sense and light to me: https://dronesafe.uk

Registration is a year away.

>- UK refusal to fire on the craft is absurd because rubber bullets, simunitions, and less-than-lethal rounds are more than capable of destabilizing the hull and structure of the craft... while inflicting no damage on distant landed craft or personnel. (I wouldn't expect HN to know this, tbh)

I think the only naive person here is you.

Firstly rubber bullets like those used for crowd control are fired form either a special barrel break or from a 40mm underbarell attachment (grenade launcher).

These are disks made out of steel covered with a thick layer of rubber and they are inaccurate as fuck, you will not hit a man sized target even at 50 yards with them yet alone a drone.

The other option is various shotgun polymer slugs which have a slightly better accuracy but still hitting a drone size target is nearly impossible.

You’re best bet is birdshot it then again you are limited with range.

However you still have the issue that the police isn’t trained nor equipped to fire at drones and until they can be achieved they have no option.

And even if you train those policemen to effectively hit drones those drones aren’t easily accessible and fly out of reach.

The previous incident last week which also shutdown the airport had a drone at 10,000 feet, but even a few 100’s of feet would put the drone outside of the range of anything that you could plausibly use at an airport.

That said since these drones only have a short loitering time and even if they are shot down the police still needs to investigate and clear the area to ensure that there are not other drones and to collect any evidence and statements you don’t gain anything by shooting them down the airspace would still be locked down for just as long.

So when your decision is to try to shoot drones you likely can’t hit to cut their loitering time by 5-10 min at best while potentially endangering the field or people or to wait for them to fly back to their owner in the hopes of catching them it’s not a hard decision at all and doesn’t show any level of incompetence on the behalf of the British police.

P.S. in every case effectively the shutdown came after the drones have left the area already, they are only there for a few minutes the airport is huge by the time the police can even get close they are gone but then order is then issued to ensure that there are no more drones in the area.

Unless we will start putting on phalanx installations every couple of 100’s or yards around the perimeter of the airport there is no kinetic way to shoot these things down.

I don't really wanna call this a "solved problem" because it's certainly not, but there /are/ off the shelf anti-drone munitions and have been for a while:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG7hUE2BZZo&feature=youtu.be...

I too think it's very weird that the UK government apparently doesn't have /any/ specialized antidrone munitions around and refused to attempt to fire anything at these drones.

These munitions are more or less a joke they only work in ideal conditions and have a range shorter than normal kinetic projectiles.

By the time the police arrives the drones are gone and nothing can shoot down a drone at 10,000 feet short of a man portable surface to air missile.

Even at the maximum altitude allowed for these drones which is 400 feet you wouldn’t be able to hit it reliably with anything that isn’t terminally guided and man protable with maybe the exception of a high powered scoped rifle and a very good marksman.

But again the problem is that these drones don’t stick around for hours they are gone in minutes, by the time anyone can get in range they would be long gone.

Edit: looks like they are deploying or have deployed (since this if from the Daily Fail) a military grade drone detection system with some soft and hard kill capabilities that the British armed forces purchased for troop defense in Syria and Iraq:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6519211/The-...

The back up batteries at Fukushima power plant were capable of being recharged, thereby avoiding a meltdown. However, the connectors hadn't been manufactured for years and nobody could jury rig something up in time to avert disaster. Humans make really stupid oversights on things that happen rarely. In hindsight it's really stupidly obvious that something should have been prepared ahead of time. But when looking forward, it's easy to overlook obvious things because the potential number of future problems is infinite. "Are we prepared for a drone attack?" The first question is, "What does a drone attack look like?" That they didn't get that far doesn't actually surprise me.

It seems to me that yourself miss a couple of points:

- the drones were flying high. Show me any sharpshooter that can shot down a highly agile and impredictible target at 200m high. Clay pigeons are shot at 60m on a very predictable trajectory, and even that requires a lot of skill and training.

- drones flying on preprogrammed path are impossible to intercept electronically, with the exception of GPS spoofing. Even that is difficult, never mind deploying GPS spoofers around the airport

- it would make the airplane operations impossible, so can't fly while the GPS spoofers are running, and when they're not running, there is drone flying

- the complexity of keeping drones in the air for long times (replacing batteries, field repairs, having spare parts) is not to be underestimated. This suggests a planned operation

I wonder if it is possible to disable a drone with a barrage of powerful air vortices. This would solve the GPS/camera navigation problem without disabling aircraft systems, and it would prevent any collateral damage caused by launching projectiles in the air.

https://youtu.be/IN_N_J1yx-U?t=331

It would need to be vehicle mounted and automated to fire rapidly, but would be interesting to see in action. (And probably a lot of fun to operate)

> - UK refusal to fire on the craft is absurd because rubber bullets, simunitions, and less-than-lethal rounds are more than capable of destabilizing the hull and structure of the craft... while inflicting no damage on distant landed craft or personnel. (I wouldn't expect HN to know this, tbh)

What do you think the effective range of less-than-lethal rounds are? Now, how are you going get that close to the drone? (Without doing something truly insane like firing out of a helicopter that's trying to fly close to a drone of course)

> -Sending piles of off-the-shelf consumer drones up to ram into it would have been sufficient as well.

You're going to have piles of consumer drone pilots on call?

Illegal drone operations are similar to running a charity to commit fraud. The primary mode of operation is the honor system, not having a bunch of agents ready to stop criminal activity the instant it happens. But now that it's happening, the central motivation is to capture the perpetrator. That's a necessity to show there isn't some government conspiracy to expand power, that someone really did urinate in the swimming pool, and show the seriousness of the consequences.

This isn't a case of larceny, it's wholesale asset and trust destruction. There's millions of pounds of costs associated with this event that cannot be recovered from the perpetrators. So throwing the book at them, however overcriminalized it might end up being, is going to be the main means of deterring future events. And that's because we don't have a drone police force, yet, to nearly instantly apprehend drones coming into an airport's perimeter. What are we going to do, deploy such things for thousands of airports? You really want people to be incentivized to adhere to the honor system, even if it's a coercive disincentive that you're going to lose your freedom if you decide to piss in the pool in this manner.

Seems to be a very cheap (and relatively safe) way to cause a lot of financial damage. I wonder if we will see more of such events coming from activist or foreign agents trying to destabilize a system.

The biggest reaction of friends and colleagues seems to be one of surprise that drones can cause such disruption for so long. It is a little concerning - what if the operators had had more malicious intent?

Friends and colleagues are right to be surprised. If the official story is true two people with a couple of drones outclassed the entire British security establishment for a couple of days.

It's not that drones hadn't been considered a threat, or that there weren't similar events in the past. Threat assessment studies were done because similar events did happen in the past - although not on this scale.

But there seems to have been absolutely no contingency planning, and no clear demarcation of responsibility between the police, the military, the civil aviation authority, and the rest of the government.

The reality is that a lot of infrastructure of all kinds is ridiculously exposed and vulnerable. But the government hands out corporate welfare to trophy projects like a pointless aircraft carrier while making almost no preparations for even the most obvious and predictable technological threats.

Could it be that with security services under such financial pressure they decided to ignore the drone threat? Now the government will probably give police extra cash just to combat drones. 1-nil to the police administrators.

Call me cynical, but I had thought exactly the same thing.

More malicious than shutting down a major airport? The only example I can think of is bombing a crowd but fortunately nobody has tried that yet.

Surely there's a vast gap between inconveniencing/causing financial loss and injuring/killing people? I can imagine one being considered a reasonable act of protest by some whilst the other puts one beyond the pale.

How about flying a drone into a plane engine.

Cheap? Just wait until they make an example out of those two. It definitely won't be a cheap event for them.

Right before Christmas... oh boy. I bet the terrorism charges will be thrown at those two. Anyone can come up with similar case from the recent past ?

Law was passed sometime ago - it's up to five years in prison:

https://www.techradar.com/news/new-uk-drone-laws-come-into-f...

Just 5 years?

I suppose it’s good from a rehabilitation perspective but it’s kind of weak as a deterrent - where 10 years might be more appropriate.

Why even five years?

Let the airport,airlines and insurera sue any culprits for losses. Why should I pay for their incarceration? No harm was done to persons or property.

in an ideal world, all non-physical harm would be handled this way. unfortunately, such attackers can cause multi-million dollar (or pound, in this case) losses in a short period of time and probably have minimal assets. you might get a few grand out of them if you're lucky.

It's called indentured servitude [1] and it's still practiced in the US [2], but only to benefit the state and its cronies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_servitude_in_the_Am...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-...

If five years won’t deter you I doubt ten would.

The perception of 5 or 10 years as a deterrent doesn't make a difference to the average person.

Citation needed.

A decade in prison is twice 5 years. That’s a lot of time to waste.

Edit: Guess downvotes are abused here too ...

Edit2: Would be interesting to see how low this post will go. Guess some people don’t like their abusing of the moderation system called out.

Citation needed that longer sentences work as a deterrent.

The reason you don't steal from your coworkers has little to do with the sentence that would be imposed and a lot to do with your personal values: you know theft is wrong.

Edit: talking about downvoyes will always attract downvotes. HN's voting culture may not even what you're used to. People can down item for any, or for no, reason. A few people can down vote, but most people with an account can upvote. Corrective upvote will often be provided - there are people on HN who look for unfairly downvoted posts to supply corrective upvote.

If your post is downvoted and remains downvoted it means that someone downvoted it, and no-one else who read it thought it deserved different.

Phrases like [citation needed] are often going to get downvoted. Downvotes are likely because you're claiming prison is a deterrent and that longer sentences are a stronger deterrent with nothing to support that claim, while asking someone else to support their claim that longer sentences aren't a deterrent.

Actually the only psychological profile that wouldn't be deterred by 10 vs 5 years would be the psychopath (who is largely immune to punishment, and often regards it with complete serenity). An "average person" would make tremendous sacrifices to get 5 instead of 10. Plea bargain justice makes this clear.

A plea bargain is after the event though. If you have been caught and are likely to be convicted then 5 years sounds a lot better than 10. That has nothing at all to do with deterrent effects.

The thing is, an 'average person' has no real idea or mental model of what five years in prison actually entails. They haven't been locked up ever, even for shorter stretches, and most likely neither have their friends. Basically they know its bad, but with no frame of reference it gets left at that and filed away as irrelevant anyway since prison happens to other, bad people. So there's no way to make a risk calculation about e.g 6mo vs 5y sentences, they are both just vague bad things. Monetary fines work because people understand money and what losing a sum of money means because they deal with money all the time. I assume corporal punishment works too, since everyone has experience with pain?

I'm sure they can find lots more to charge these two with. I fully expect they'll be put away for a very long time.

I suspect they won't get a prison sentence, or if they do it'll be months not years.

15 activists were just convicted under the 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act for obstructing a deportation flight:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/stansted-15-depo...

The 1990 Aviation and Maritime Security Act says:

"It is also... an offence for any person by means of any device, substance or weapon unlawfully and intentionally to disrupt the services of such an aerodrome in such a way as to endanger or be likely to endanger the safe operation of the aerodrome or the safety of persons at the aerodrome." and provides that "A person who commits an offence under this section is liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for life."

Perhaps for these two it won't be so cheap, but they just PoC'd a drone DOS rather effectively.

For example, if the control system can be adapted to be driven very remotely (think US military drones -- operator sits in an office building in the US, drone is flying around the middle east) then there's no reason this couldn't be perpetrated by someone very far away, potentially outside of the jurisdiction of the country they're unleashing their drones on. They could go and set up the base stations months in advance of an attack in relatively remote areas, as little drone sleeper cells. When the attack happens, the perpetrators are far away, and much harder to stop.

I expect we'll see more of these, but I hope that this attack made it very clear that there needs to be more effective ways to track and disable rogue drones. I do wonder how they finally found these two (and if they are even the actual perpetrators) but I think they're gonna want to keep those cards close to their chest.

I'm kinda surprised that after three days of disruption, the British authorities still haven't found a way to shoot down the drones. It was just a DoS this time, but there could very well be an explosive payload the next time. Drones could enter secure facilities, take pictures, infiltrate or exfiltrate various objects, and even press buttons using 3D-printed appendages. Criminals of the future won't even need to be on the same continent to get past physical security.

Heard on the news that they did not want to shoot it down to avoid collateral damage from bullets falling around.

The UK is much more gun-averse than anywhere else I’ve been. Even the police are not routinely armed with only a few exceptions (airports being one, but the point is about the attitude).

I think over the course of three days, they could have someone drive down to the station and pick up the guns.

As pointed out by others, there's concern about the bullets causing FOD, or potentially hitting people.

Shotgun shot has none of those issues. Has no one on HN been around firearms?

Someone above suggested the drones were at 10,000 ft. That is way out of shotgun effective range.

Possibly did not want the risk of littering bullets on the runway as well; it’s actually impressive the amount of effort that goes into keeping a runway free of small metal objects: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage

That's a good point. We haven't actually seen what a full response from the authorities would be. I would imagine if there was actual imminent danger they would not hesitate to begin shooting down the drones and using more disruptive countermeasures.

I actually kinda wonder if you can train any birds of prey to go after drones. Airports already use some so keep birds away from runways, but that's still mostly the birds doing what birds do.

This has already been shown to be possible. Example from the Netherlands police:

https://youtu.be/b5DEg2qZzkU

In the meantime it's been found to be impractical https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/12/16767000/police-netherla...

Seems dangerous for the birds.

Maybe attack drones that can shoot string - since practically every drone uses rotors.

Dragging a net has been tried:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/01/21/tokyo-poli...

Unless the drone is really large, you don't need to shoot actual bullets at it. Strings, fishing nets, plastic bags, water cannons, or anything else that can mess up the propellers for a few seconds would be enough to crash them.

ISIS has been using drones a lot, for filming propaganda, reconnaissance, dropping grenades, and even drone suicide bombing.

I think this future is already here, it's just you only see them used in-theater because ISIS has terrible force projection ability and don't have any way of getting their drones and weapons into Europe to commit attacks there.

It reminds me some of driving trucks into crowds to terrorize. Not sophisticated or expensive but effective.

Only effective because of overreaction.

I think this was very sophisticated. They planned. They hid. They monitored media and adapted plans. They minimized thier efforts to obtain a result. This was leagues ahead of any recent terror attack. It would be no shock to learn that they had some military, officer, training.

It occured to me, that once the military became involved, the perpetrator would have the sense to cease his/her activities.

The fact this didn't happen leaves me to believe they were not so clever after all?

They expected and were ready to be caught.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

We've asked you before particularly to avoid religious flamewar on this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Unless the goal was to make the military look the fool. We dont know what they were thinking just yet.

Were there any drone reports after the army was deployed?

There was a 'suspected drone sighting' around 17:00 on Friday but flights resumed.

The oddity about the whole event was that there was no evidence presented at all other than phone-videos showing a variety of lights.

Tower controllers and reports from other airport staff are always sufficient evidence for anything related to flight safety.

Rubbish. It's just fundamentally difficult to track down a drone. There was nothing clever about this.

That's what the French authorities are pretending to make it look like a foreign aggression and not home grown terrorism. But the planning required for an operation like that is pretty trivial.

There's an infinite number of ways to asymmetrically attack a system. A single person in Australia caused millions of dollars of damage by just sticking needles into strawberries in supermarkets. People have rented and driven light vehicles into crowds. People have deliberately poisoned food at restaurants. The attack surface is limited only by the imagination, while defending against each scenario carries immense financial and personal freedom cost.

The whole point of asymmetric attacks is that they use the size of the target against it. It's impossible to stop these kinds of attacks without completely taking away personal freedoms and instituting some kind of pre-crime surveillance state.

And a pre-crime surveillance state is exactly what most governments seem to want to build today. The historical scales are rapidly tipping towards tyranny in the name of illusionary safety. As Franklin aptly put it, "They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety".

As far as drones go, it's comparatively simple to build what's effectively a supersonic missile for about 10K usd worth of easily obtainable hobbyist parts. It's been possible for the better part of the decade. The fact that no one has done it suggests that maybe there aren't that many bad actors out there after all.

This, our systems that power the modern world are incredibly fragile.

Plus terrorism isn't a numbers game, it's about shocking people. Torture a single victim live on youtube and you will get more coverage than a 20 victims rampage. The 24h news cycle "everything is breaking news", "this incredibly rare thing could happen to you" is incredibly helpful to terrorists.

> It's impossible to stop these kinds of attacks without completely taking away personal freedoms and instituting some kind of pre-crime surveillance state.

It's likely impossible in that kind of state as well.

Well if you ignore the commission of crimes by government officials charged with that power, it might mostly work. If only because those bad actors will just work for the government.

I remember one of those huge DDOS attacks a few years ago, where the online speculation of who the perpetrator was centered mostly on Russia, the Mossad, or a guy with a botnet on 4Chan who claimed it was him.

Since then we're living in the future, as far as I'm concerned.

Are you thinking of the one that turned out to be some idiots running minecraft server renting business?

https://www.wired.com/story/mirai-botnet-minecraft-scam-brou...

The Future of Violence [0] explores this further. Its TLDR is something like: technology enables distributed offensive capabilities leading to many-to-many threats. Technology also creates distributed vulnerabilities by increasing attack surface. Finally, technology also enables distributed defensive capabilities.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Future-Violence-Robots-Hackers-Confro...

Hello from Gatwick airport. Arrived Wednesday evening. About to board my third scheduled flight. I hope it doesn't get cancelled again!

As an American, the British response to this seems very restrained. If this incident happened in the USA, I would have expected tight, armed security everywhere in the airport. Gatwick just seems like business as usual.

That seems about right. There doesn’t appear to be an armed threat against the airport. Lots more guns would seem like security theatre. (Not that that doesn’t happen ever).

As an American, I wouldn't expect heavily armed security everywhere in response to a drone. It wouldn't make sense.

Now if I saw police with trap/skeet shotguns aiming to take down the drone, that would make sense.

I wonder if Gatwick used their Aeyreon Skyranger drones to track the drones http://www.guildford-dragon.com/2016/04/08/49799/ Odd that there has been no news footage of the offending drones, you'd think they would be very visible...

Best I’ve seen was https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-46649704

exactly...

https://www.aeryon.com/skyranger/r60/ 'tracks objects up to 3 miles away...'

Vector Target Tracking

Aeryon’s Vector Target Tracking software automatically targets and tracks moving objects up to 3 miles away. The tracking algorithm adapts in real-time to changes in target shape and maintains a hold on the target even when its position changes or another object obstructs the view.

Moving Target Indication of up to 10 Objects In Both EO and IR Calculate Target Heading and Speed

Given that it apparently buzzed past the tower that does seem strange. Conspiracy theorists are already out in full force lol

Can't help but wonder, what was the goal? What were they hoping to achieve with it, and how did they expect to get away?

Maybe somebody was fired and got pissed off. Similar to a sysadm that changes all passwords on his way out of the door

Rumour is that they were emviromental activists.

The key word being rumour.

Pentesting.

According to The Telegraph, government officials suspect an "eco terrorist." No additional details were provided.

I wouldn't much too much trust in what the telegraph says

I’m skeptical it’s a group because no one has claimed responsibility- what’s the point causing all this chaos if you won’t at least do an anonymous post claiming it’s due to <xyz> issues.

My money is on disgruntled locals (individuals, not group) fed up with the noise, or an individual that feels hard done by / aggrieved by either the airport or an airline.

Recent plans to expand capacity may explain this?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/18/gatwick-plan...

My money's on this. No one wants to live next to a major airport what with all the flight noise and reduction in property values.

There's a discussion about what is protest and direct action in the environmental movement for decades.

Is the point publicity and media attention, Or is it something different? One argument against publicity is that it's all about playing the media game. It's similar to how people say you shouldn't put terrorist actions on the news as it only encourages them. If you don't play the media game you don't need to create a media spectacle and can focus on actual effects.

For example, what is a successful action in this case? How much co2 was prevented, sound and air pollution? How many people were effected. Might a media action simply stop when it made the news?

To cause disruption, show how fragile the infrastructure is to asymmetric attacks. Possibly also with an eco activist motivation, to ground hundreds of planes. Possibly also to make an anti-capitalist statement.

I think it's extremely fascinating, and I bet this won't be the last we've seen of this sort of thing happening. The impact is so huge for a relatively small cost and effort.

It depends if five years in prison will be considered a small cost by them. If they do get convicted and serve that long or longer they may not consider it a small cost. Yes the initial cost to launch the attack is small.

On the other hand, the cost of a couple of drones, and only two people in prison, does seem like a rather low cost for the sheer amount of chaos they caused.

100,000+ people kept from traveling, an entire airport basically shut down, military response, the whole lot, by just two people with a drone. That's rather impressive.

If this starts happening frequently, I think the response will become more reasonable. Birds pose a similar risk and the response there is to try to keep them away, and build aircraft to withstand most hits.

Could be as trivial as they don't like all the noise from planes, which has gotten worse over the years as Gatwick has gotten more flights. Living near an airport sucks.

it would probably take too long to fly in the drone catching eagle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5DEg2qZzkU

https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/01/watch-this-trained-eagle-t...

I'm not saying this would have worked at Gatwick because I was not on the ground there, but GPS can be "spoofed" locally for specific vehicles.

http://www.engr.utexas.edu/features/humphreysspoofing

I wonder if you could train kamakazi birds with a tangling net trailing behind them.

There are some videos of hawks being trained to hit drones.

So which drone was it? 3D Robotics?

Either a hacked off the shelf drone or a custom built one

Surprised they didn't bust out the Eagle Anti-Drone system: https://www.popsci.com/dutch-anti-drone-police-eagles-ready-...

Yes ... Eagles as in the bird.w

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1842/

couldn't they just shoot them down?

Yes, but guns are loud and scary.

Its all pretty wacky. It seems they wanted it to continue or something. Even the british military isn't this inept. They themselves demoed a drone weapon just months ago, but where was it? This has to be a huge black eye to everyone involved.

it would make sense to delay nuking it for 1-2 hours, but an entire day is rather unacceptable.

how would they track who flew the drones? I guess UK camera network is paying off?

Yeah because there are loads of CCTV cameras pointing at the sky...

The "UK camera network" is a bit of a myth by the way. Yes there are cameras, but not a gazillion per person as normally claimed, and the vast majority of them a privately owned cameras that the police do not have easy access to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Uni...

>Yeah because there are loads of CCTV cameras pointing at the sky...

At an airport? I'd hope so...

Really? I think the vast majority of crime around airports is from people arriving and leaving via the normal land based access.

thanks for clearing that up!

Reminds me on the current Icelandic movie "Woman at war", out now in the cinemas. Maybe it's related.

Was this the guy that posted the image on Reddit ?

I’m pretty sure that was a joke post in reference to the incident.

I’m pretty sure that you replied to a joke referencing that joke.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2018/623/made

In UK, nobody can legally fly an RC plane without a permission of nobody other than a Chief of Defence Staff himself...

Yet, all and everybody who fly drones recreationally don'y even know of the regulation.

> Prior to apply for operation approval via Form CAA/AS/017, you are required to obtain the Security Clearance from the Office of the Chief of Defence Staff (OCDS) for the Operation of the Drone using below Fax or e-mail.

Hardly surprising no one in the UK knows of this when you quote from CAA Sri Lanka regulations.

https://www.caa.lk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article...

Facepalm, that's the wrong quote. But I am sure there is a similar regulation in UK that effectively bars all RC toys from flying without a license that was introduced around seventies.

I did a number of drone projects, and legals were quite sure that UK had a mandatory drone registration.

Nope.

RC aircraft are fine and have very clear laws https://www.caa.co.uk/Consumers/Unmanned-aircraft/Model-airc...

As do drones, which have been updated fairly recently and only require a license (for now at least…) for large drones or commercial usage https://www.caa.co.uk/Consumers/Unmanned-aircraft-and-drones...

Well, thanks for correcting me on that if that's the case. If you work within the field, you surely have a more up to date idea how that works.

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