Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Gatwick reported "67 sightings", but couldn't confirm if some (all?) were their own drones [1]. And now Parliament is tabling new powers for the police [2]. Was there ever any evidence presented that there was ever a drone present? Is there any evidence that this was actually a drone at Heathrow?
Are we sure this wasn't a plastic bag again [3]?
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/29/gatwick-drone-si...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/08/police-ha...
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/22/11486256/drone-collision-...
P.S: I'm insinuating terrible preparedness to verify drone sightings leading to wonky regulations, not a conspiratorial power grab
The responsibility on the police is to confirm sightings before arresting people for flying drones over the airport (the police arrested a couple for flying drones over Gatwick when there was no evidence of drones over Gatwick).
The lawmakers should support their power grab with evidence but they are more interested in grabbing power.
There's really no disadvantage to airport authorities acting like this and only positives for them in protecting themselves from financial risk in the case that there is a drone. Plus, perhaps new powers will be passed that prevent them having to actually invest in anti-drone technology. Double-win!
Even if their contracts with airlines don’t lead to penalties then an airport that gains a reputation for drone shutdowns will lose passenger and airline business over time.
Among the people reporting drone sightings before the police turned up at Gatwick were pilots
Considering that a passenger jet on final approach has a speed > 300 km/h and that a household drone is something like 30 cm wide you wonder how many of these drones were in fact hovering kestrels on the hunt for voles. How can you distinguish the two?
Edit: it was a kestrel for those of you who are ornithologically inclined.
I would say it’s less likely an intentional misinformation campaign to get new police powers, but even that is more likely than an intentional drone attack, again just my opinion.
It’s absolutely incumbent on the authorities to provide incontrovertible evidence of an illegal drone. The fact that they launched a bunch of their own drones in response is sheer lunacy.
The claim that they saw it hovering "for a while" actually makes this particular claim less believable. They witnessed it hovering by the control tower for an extended period of time but never bothered to get their phone out?
If a car is on fire in a normal street, half the people just stop to take photos or start live streaming it (this happened in Melbourne recently).
How did no one pull out their phone and take any pictures?
People takes photos of airports and planes all the time because it’s so different from day-to-day stuff.
It seems implausibly unlikely that both no one took photos and no one shared them online.
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/268495-rep...
But more to the point, the poster I was replying to did not claim that the witness was working in the control tower. Merely that they observed a drone hovering near the control tower. Of course, they might have been far enough away that they couldn't capture a photo. That would indicate that they likely were far enough away that they couldn't definitively ID a drone, too.
Also my comment was responding to how Britain is different in CCTVs. Standard airport monitoring is going to be similar, regardless of country.
It's really not.
It might be better if people aren't told about the drone in the first place. Of course they will demand to know why their flights are delayed, but they might be better off if the hysteria is prevented while the authorities go look for the drone.
It was the probably most stressful event in younger Munich history for both public and police/EMS.
Not really, or do you accuse the independent reviewers for the City of Munich government to be propagandists? https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/amoklauf-oez-muenchen-1...
Three external reviewers hired by the city government disagree: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/amoklauf-oez-muenchen-1...
The only one not agreeing is the Bavarian government because they do not want to admit that after the Oktoberfestattentat and the NSU there has been more right-wing terrorism in Bavaria.
In addition, dubbing terrorists and "school shooters" simply as having "gone postal" is about the most ignorant framing that's possible as it totally ignores the factors that led to the attack (be it mobbing, feeling "sexually underserved" or Nazi propaganda or Islamist propaganda).
It doesn't seem controversial to say that nothing has changed other than improved technology to further their power grabbing goals.
Jamming drones is a non starter for the most part. You can make a drone operate on just about any frequency you want and with modern equipment becoming more frequency agile, this will only get worse. A simple thought experiment would be a drone using GSM for video and control. Can you just jam all phones? Obviously not. Further, drones can fly without any command and control if they're configured correctly, just using GPS for guidance. Can you jam GPS at an airport where planes are breaking out of an overcast layer at 200ft AGL on a GPS approach? Nope.
Kinetic approaches: projectiles need to come back down. Even heavy bird shot could damage the super thin skin on an airliner when falling back to earth. Also, net guns and similar options are way shorter range than you think.
Birds of prey: stick your hand in a DJI rotor and report back. Now try an industrial drone. Come back when they re-attach all your fingers.
Drones catching drones: you'll need continuous line of sight to be able to chase the thing around. This also assumes it's a quad and not a 100mph+ fixed wing drone. Might be feasible if you have an automated way of detecting and following the drone (future mm band radar?).
Lasers: eye safety of the public and piloted aircraft.
If you take your "reasons why not" logic too far, however, you end up asking "how do we take down an enemy jet" which, I mean, the air force has probably figured out by now.
Why are drones more of a threat than large scale model jet aircraft? If we can't really avoid this then at some point we're going to need to react in a more measured way instead of flipping out and shutting down the airport.
Now, that's not to say that the equation wouldn't change if there was a realistic threat that someone would mount explosives on a drone and deliberately try to bring an airliner down but for once we can be thankful for the nature of reactionary policy; we can get away with being reactionary here.
Edit: to go on a bit of a tangent, I think the best path forward at this point is to have a system that can detect and locate fast moving radio emitters within the perimeter of an airport that don't correspond with an ADS-B target. Such a system might allow you to track the target and attempt to figure out where it came from.
I've often wondered why the turbine intakes don't have some sort of "filter" in front to prevent larger objects from entering? Birds have been a problem forever. Why isn't there a simple solution? Even a grid in front like a common 4"x4" chainlink fence would provide. Is there some reason why they're all just wide open?
Similarly there's no fence that could keep this crab out: https://youtu.be/AMHwri8TtNE
Also you'd be reducing the efficiency of the engine all the time, which would add up over hundreds of trips.
Airplane wing vs DJI Phantom Drone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH0V7kp-xg0
"While the test done is plausible the speed involved in the test is unlikely especially for the type of aircraft involved."
The brick of meat (bird strike simulation) caused approximately the same amount of damage as the drone.
https://www.rt.com/news/415454-drone-attack-syria-turkey/
https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2018/08/16/drone-attacks-ru...
Russian military jamming equipment is pretty powerful though, and these systems are also supposedly deployed there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir_missile_system (the key in this case is the 30mm radar guided autocannon).
I think the laser based systems like the ones that US Navy have deployed recently (https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/17/politics/us-navy-drone-laser-...) would be the future here - those military lasers are supposedly using something like adaptive autofocus on the target, so it seems to be pretty easy for such a radar guided system to make sure that only target gets the focus and only when the line-of-sight is clear of anything else.
Lasers will probably be part of the solution at some point but it's worth noting some of the drawbacks. You need the target to be above the horizon for safety obviously, so that means you need to be fairly close to it in a semi-urban environment which negates some of the nice range advantages. The other big one is any shiny flat parts of the drone could potentially reflect energy back to the ground briefly, resulting in possible eye damage to anyone within line of sight. The laser would likely be infrared so any aluminum, even unpolished, could become an effective reflector. This could be particularly problematic as people tend to instinctively look at things that burst into bright balls of flame...
That being the case, a SAM with a net warhead, some kind of rapidly setting foam, or a load of tangling wires seems like it would be most reliable without having to worry about UXO. You could even try to mitigate falling risk by ensuring the interceptor remains attached to the target, and then deploys a series of parachutes.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/23/gatwick-drone-ar...
What counterpoint are you making here?
Although not before the press had smeared their names and faces across the whole country.
DoS attack doesn't necessarily mean high request volume.
Granted, the chance to get caught is smaller with drones, but it's still fairly risky. I guess the only defense here are publicized arrests to dissuade the "prankster" category of attacker and the fact that statistically only very few people are crazy enough in the first place to try such an attack.
Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
I would even say a skilled pilot with a trackable drone in communication with the tower could safely fly to investiage without a shutdown of the airport.
>Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
So once you have an effective and objective mechanism (this or other) for detecting and tracking drones, you can disregard the peanut gallery.
[1] https://www.aaronia.com/products/solutions/Aaronia-Drone-Det...
Brush motors sure, brush sparks are nasty EM interference sources. Brushless motors by design don't emit this kind of RF noises, only the motor controllers.
But in any case the power levels are hovering on the undetectable given all the noise from the airplanes, the radar systems, computers, cellphones, ...
However, it makes me wonder if and when third party insurance companies will start offering this as a service.
http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/airbus-technology-disrupt-dron...
The poster here who claimed drones operate on "any frequency" is incorrect. Like any other radio device, radios in the drones and their controllers can only operate on limited frequencies which are known in advance.
Another Israeli company has an anti drone technology called Drone Dome that was supposedly deployed by the army at Gatwick during the incident.
2) While there will be lot's of electrical motors throughout the airport, perhaps the airport and its infrastructure could be designed to support a 10 minute silence (causing delays etc).
3) Focussing on the electromotor driven propellers, the sound can be expected to have twice the frequency of the magnetic field (both the permanent magnet, and the applied electromagnet fields) since the propeller has 2 blades. It should be possible to use this correlation to filter out electromotor noise without blades. (So fan's will still contribute noise, but known fan noise, and electromotor fan noise of authorized equipment could be filtered out, or canceled)
4) A grid of microphones and magnetic field detectors would probably be necessary.
5) The system should probably be combined with other technologies like LIDAR etc
I feel like this is a problem some smart people could solve quickly if they were asked, similar to the healthcare.gov situation. Ask some MIT students to come up with a solution over a weekend and I bet they would deliver.
Knocking a slow moving object out of the sky is literally not rocket science.
But perhaps doing it in a way that doesn't shower the runway with dangerous debris, is?
Met a guy while he was on the clock doing that, in fact.
A bullet or other kinetic object could do damage if it falls back down to earth. A directed energy/RF weapon could possibly fry other electronics in aircraft nearby as well.
This [1] is a handheld one, though automated permanent installations that use acoustic signatures to track drones have already been installed on embassies and such.
No, but it's not a matter of some yahoos with a gun shooting them: https://twitter.com/sommervilletv/status/1080724993238069249
Meanwhile in Kentucky: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/judge-rules-in-f...
Meanwhile in Virginia: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/65-year-old-woma...
Meanwhile in Tennessee: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/man-takes-drone-...
And for the unaware, birdshot solves the "what goes up must come down" problem; the shot is light enough that when it falls back down the air resistance has slowed it to a harmless speed. In other words, the terminal velocity is MUCH lower than the muzzle velocity. Getting hit by falling birdshot doesn't bruise, let alone kill. If somebody were serious about solving this problem, instead of just trying to justify impotent anti-drone legislation (that won't stop bad actors from throwing together rc quads from scratch) they'd ask gunsmiths to create for them a fully automatic shotgun tuned to cycle with birdshot, with a large magazine capacity, and create radar systems that can distinguish between birds and drones (probably with a human in the loop.) Anti-drone micro-CIWS.
Other promising solutions include anti-drone falcons (potentially hazardous to the bird, I've seen what those props can do to human fingers...) and hunter-killer drones piloted by superior pilots. A good defense would be a defense in depth, adopt as many of these systems as is economical. Considering the economic harm that shutting down a major airport can cause, the budget should be large.
Furthermore, imagine you have your dream-drone-killer... how do you even find them? Neither of these recent sightings were even verified to be drones, they just received reports of sightings, therefore initially they would need to deploy devices to find/verify them. Once spotted, it wouldn't be hard to send a couple trained shooters with shotguns loaded with birdshot, assuming knowing their location isn't already enough to find the pilots...
As for drones flying too high, that is a problem but one that could be addressed (not solved) by using interceptor drones to spook or bait the invading drone into flying lower. On a non-ballistic sidenote, you could also have race quads configured to rapidly triangulate the origin control signal and collect video evidence of the signal origin. Not fool-proof by any means, but I wager that would be enough to catch all but the most clever/dedicated attackers.
This all seems a bit silly, but if you throw enough money at it I think you can make it work. The question is how much economic harm can a drone do by shutting down an international airport and how much money are you willing to spend to prevent this. My main point here is that the situation isn't nearly as hopeless as a bunch of soldiers taking potshots at the drones with their rifles (that's pretty much guaranteed to be not work and is exceptionally dangerous.)
It gets a little more complicated in the real world if you don't want to shoot down the wrong flying objects and also not kill people on the ground.
The issue there is that someone has to walk up a bridge with tools and start loosening bolts. Drones are somewhat remote, in that they could hide in the bushes some distance away. And most of all, I can see drone operators thinking "it's fun" as they are not damaging or deliberately flying into planes. It's wrong of course, but in their minds they don't see it equivalent to cutting bolts on a bridge.
I hope most countries will still try and be sensible about their drone laws. Mine isn't: you're required to register your drone and tell them a month ahead (!!!) where you're going to fly, even if it's in the dead middle of nowhere, which is why people ignore all of it.
The other thing is that drones are exceedingly hard to regulate because the barrier of entry to just building your own is becoming lower and lower.
Anyhow, enough of my rambling. It's really sad to see things take such a negative turn for everyone involved (both drone pilots and regular people).
In the novel, which is written as a deliciously dark satire in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a single agent causes havoc in a foreign country by subtly creating evidence of a mass sabotage by an underground guerilla force: Spreading rumours, distributing provocative stickers and posters, leaking assasination target lists, strategically leaving surveillance equipment to be discovered by the authorities, and so on. He doesn't actually perform any acts of sabotage.
If Wasp had been written in 2019, flying drones at airports would have fit right into the narrative.
note: will be buying my drone today before the US FAA gets any brights ideas.