Just as in Gatwick before this, the police and the airport are not able to produce even grainy footage of a drone that is supposedly "buzzing" the tower.
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?
I flew out of Gatwick a few days after the supposed drone sighting(s). I saw a hawk hovering over a runway, which made me wonder whether someone who can't tell a hawk from a drone raised the alarm and all other sightings were of subsequent police drone activity.
Edit: it was a kestrel for those of you who are ornithologically inclined.
Given the authoritarianism of the current Prime Minister, as well as her history as Home Secretary, I'm not sure an accusation of conspiratorial power grab would be particularly controversial.
IMO the odds of this being a mass hysteria event are at least 3:1 versus an actual drone being intentionally flown to disrupt air traffic.
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 problem is that once people are told there is a drone they will look for one, and some of them will see drones that aren't there. This could easily be triggered by one genuine drone sighting.
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.
We used to have better name for this sightings, "UFO", now it's "drone" ;) I'm curious of near ground UFO signting numbers, they must have dropped down to zero, even if they're controlled by little green/gray things from other planets.
Does Heathrow bear a resposibility to prove anything to you or any other random person on the internet? You seem to be insinuating some conspiracy by asking vague questions.
To those wondering why we can't just take down the drones, it's not as simple as a jammer or a shotgun.
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.
Smaller scale SAMs with close range burst capabilities seem like they might avoid all of these issues, but tracking would be critical. Ideally the blast would at worst minorly damage but not crash an airliner and at best leave some small dents in aircraft skin but take down a smaller-scale drone.
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.
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.
Drone chasing drone is probably the most realistic, especially if they could use radar similar to a guided missile. You'd want to be able to recover the drone for evidence, so using a missile, while possible, probably isn't the best.
Highly directional EMP or something similar seems like it could work, if it existed and didn’t represent an insane proliferation and terrorism threat... which it would. Nor does it solve the problem of the drone falling out of the sky. Truth be told, nothing is going to reliably mitigate the drone or its wreckage crashing, so any interception should ignore the contribution of the drone itself to the safety environment. If a countermeasure is deployed, it’s going to present a risk to the public.
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.
Once the idea of alien UFOs became widespread, the number of reported cases rose. Once everybody has the idea that drones may be flying around airports, will people start misidentifying and reporting other phenomena as drones (causing chaos)?
As the article says, it is surprising how easy and cheap it is to shut down a world-class airport and disrupt 100,000's of people. They haven't even caught the last person.
I kind of struggle to understand how there isn't enough equipment and electrical engineering expertise on site at a modern airport to pinpoint these drones really quickly - especially at Heathrow.
Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
> Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
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, ...
It really would not take long for the airport to launch a drone to look for the other one. Maybe a minute? They could have a experienced pilot on staff at the tower. Costs a lot less than shutting down the airport for hours.
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.
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.
1) If we could accurately detect and track drones, we can disregard the reports, or check with the detection system if there was a related near-detection at the reported location/line-of-sight
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
> The airport said it had spent several million pounds to purchase the equipment.
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.
"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."
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 tricky part I'm guessing is doing it safely without collateral damage, especially in a crowded area like an airport.
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.
Part of me wonders if this is a long term problem with solving - causing so much annoyance with so little effort - or if this is just a fad. Time will tell. One thing is for sure, it's very easy to cause a lot of harm. Much of our society relies on assuming people are good. Sabotaging infrastructure is as easy as loosening or cutting bolts on a bridge.
Last time it was Gatwick south of London. Hopefully this shutdown doesn't get extended because the government drones get mistaken for continued sightings of the original drone (or copycats) like happened at Gatwick.
[+] [-] pj_mukh|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] frereubu|7 years ago|reply
Edit: it was a kestrel for those of you who are ornithologically inclined.
[+] [-] jen20|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaroth|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] twblalock|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mirekrusin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackweirdy|7 years ago|reply
Among the people reporting drone sightings before the police turned up at Gatwick were pilots
[+] [-] fitzroy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] porphyrogene|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AWildC182|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sailfast|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] trhway|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] EamonnMR|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steko|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mianos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toufiqbarhamov|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 2Ccltvcm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpark|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lighttower|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ckdarby|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjg007|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bump-ladel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwaivers|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eponeponepon|7 years ago|reply
Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
[+] [-] mschuster91|7 years ago|reply
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, ...
[+] [-] sschueller|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] venantius|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mimixco|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DoctorOetker|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] testplzignore|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JStanton617|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxxxxx|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] isostatic|7 years ago|reply
No, but it's not a matter of some yahoos with a gun shooting them: https://twitter.com/sommervilletv/status/1080724993238069249
[+] [-] hardlianotion|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] growlist|7 years ago|reply
But perhaps doing it in a way that doesn't shower the runway with dangerous debris, is?
[+] [-] United857|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djohnston|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roywiggins|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] red_admiral|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randyrand|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pnw_hazor|7 years ago|reply
note: will be buying my drone today before the US FAA gets any brights ideas.
[+] [-] ohiovr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] xabaras|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwaivers|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] esotericn|7 years ago|reply