Actually some years they were very proudly showing birds of prey that they had trained to do just that. Whatever happened to that?
After 9/11 there was a huge worldwide shift in e.g. airplane security due to the threat of terrorism, but now there's drones out there they can fly into planes or that can drop bombs they're doing... what? Mentioning it in the news?
This isn't allowed in most countries, so they usually also have no equipment for this. Some countries seem to have changed the laws recently for this case and building up on defence more openly now. Which also leaves space for speculations if this wasn't maybe also sometimes a false-flag-operation.
> Actually some years they were very proudly showing birds of prey that they had trained to do just that. Whatever happened to that?
They are trained for small slow commercial drones, those which are around the same size as the bird, or smaller. Military long-range-drones are usually a bit bigger and faster, meaning the bird could probably for simply reason of physic not doing much.
This probably is also a main problem here, that most drone-defences in the last years were developed against private actors, not military threats.
> but now there's drones out there they can fly into planes or that can drop bombs they're doing... what? Mentioning it in the news?
It's never been a real threat so far, so nobody really was working on it seriously. There is an endless amount of theoretical threats, you can't protect everything against all of them, you have to go case by case. But reacting takes time. This is going for just some months(?), and still not even a real threat, as nobody knows anything for real (as far as we know). But many things seem happening in secret, outside the public view.
But of course, electronic countermeasures / jamming should be attempted first, so they can be recovered intact and traced.
The same is true for jamming, which sounds like a bad idea at an active airport, although targetted jamming will probably work. Not sure how quickly such a system can be deployed however.
So that means you need to wait until operations have paused at which point the drone has already disappeared.
I fell like tracking the drone to identify the operator with strong zoom cameras mounted on the airport might work though. At least some commercial systems seem to use this approach: https://www.dedrone.com/industry/airports
I would have expected this to be table stakes at running large busy airports.
On publics airports? Where planes have to land all the time? Can they be pinpointed exactly on one specific target without disturbing the others? And this is assuming there even is a remote-control to jam.
What you can certainly double down on is tracking and close to the ground monitoring. And it would be surprising if this did not give results (over hundreds of sightings) as to who is launching them and recovering some hardware. Drones fall off pretty easily and it might be hard to repeatedly recover drones without getting caught if there is a surge of police around.
But yes detection is key and surprising airports don’t already have this. This is not an exactly new phenomenon.
The bigger issue I assume is probably that even if you react very quickly the drone might be already gone already anyway.
In Paris they developed an electronic barrier wall for drones. Yes maybe these are autonomous enough that when the link is cut they continue on their mission but I think something is better than nothing.
These tools are widely available.
Tracking them is a need first and foremost. How about a down-facing radar on top of the Aviation Control Tower?
Once a drone has been spotted notifying the correct person and getting the drone started would take a few minutes I assume.
Furthermore you can't really deploy a drone at an airport while it is still active, which is the reason they are banned from operating there in the first place.
a couple of RPG sized rounds dropped from 10000 ft up could easily close runways and shutdown an airport for hours. hell just being there and being UFO could lead to all sorts of flight re-routing and chaos
[0]: https://www.bmi.bund.de/SharedDocs/gesetzgebungsverfahren/DE...