mh wrote:
You can’t control a bird into a critical flight path, can you?
Precisely my point.
Who is in charge halting all traffic? This is costing millions…
Maybe those drones have dispersed a few milligrams of volcanic ash, and now the UK airspace will have to be closed for weeks.
Graham wrote:
Get up next to it in a helicopter, open the door and give it both barrels from a 12-bore.
You don’t even need to fire anything, the rotorwash forces the drone down. That said, a drone can easily outmaneuver a helo.
“Deliberate drone attack” who said this? Media!
I would be cautious reading journalistic reports about aviation incidents
part because of their general lack of knowledge and the tendency to overhype the stuff in order to capture public attention.
Gatwick website writes nothing about “attack” but “Drone sightings in and around airfield have caused the airfield to close for safety reasons”
However, don’t understand if the police traced the drone why it was not downed by whatever type of weapon?
It should be an angle where no harm will be produced, possible along the runway.
Alternately why they don’t jam the drone frequency around the airport so that the so-called “operator” industrial or not will lose his toy.
Hard to believe that those type of drones have transponders which are turned on all the time, so the chance to find the “operator” is close to “nil”.
Jamming drones frequency, IMHO, should be mandatory around all airports.
Thunderstorm18 wrote:
Jamming drones frequency, IMHO, should be mandatory around all airports.
In the malicious case (which is likely the case here), one could just carefully preprogram a GPS “circuit” and not use any radio.
I am also told that the frequency these use is ~the same as wifi.
Thunderstorm18 wrote:
Jamming drones frequency, IMHO, should be mandatory around all airports.
That would be a lot of collateral damage. Virtually all RC models and drones now use 2.4 GHz, meaning all residents near an airport would not be able to use WiFi or any other use of 2.4 GHz (it’s not just WiFi – that frequency band is an ISM band, ‘industrial, scientific, medical’).
This appears to be – if the press is to be believed – a well planned and deliberate exercise, given the drones have been flying for what will have taken many dozens of battery packs. Someone planning something like this would just use a different frequency or set the thing on a pre-planned flight path that doesn’t require radio control. They already don’t care about doing something illegal, so they aren’t going to care about what Ofcom might think of them.
I suspect any knee jerk reaction to this is just going to be another case of only affecting people who are sensible about the rules anyway. As has been said, they could easily pre program them and just let them rip. running purely off the gps with no instructions from outside.
If they were visible and sub 60 yards or so I don’t see why someone couldn’t have just had a go at them with a scattergun, this does seem to have the smell of management panic shutdown.
From CNN:
The drones used to disrupt flights at Gatwick are believed to be of an “industrial specification,” according to Sussex Police.
This means that a device is not an off-the-shelf consumer drone, but something bigger or more complex, or perhaps expertly home-made, explained Lewis Whyld, CNN’s drone operator and photojournalist.
He added that drones can have huge ranges, with some of the more powerful ones controlled from up to 10 miles (16 kilometers) away.
alioth wrote:
That would be a lot of collateral damage.
The jammer should be on the helicopter, short range.
Some other solutions below:
or even better
In July 2018 the new rules of drone flying were introduced by the CAA (CAP1687). This may be one of the most less-restrictive law about drone flying ever made. In summary what it says is that if a drone weights less than 7kg (and that’s a lot in drone terms) it can legally fly around an airport with an ATZ up to 1km from its boundary up to 400FT. Although the drone pilot can do this even on the finals, the law says that he should use common sense and not do anything stupid.
What I mean is that in the UK you can legally do stupid things very close to even the largest airport. And don’t forget that if you have a fly-away (I’ve seen it happen some times with RTF drones as well as amateur-built ones) the drone can fly over the airport and do who-knows-what (remember it may weigh 7kg).
Aviation has introduced ways to help minimize the effect of animals interfering with aircraft/airports: follow-me cars with special sirens, falcons, even guns can be used for that legally. Also animals don’t normally have “suicide” intentions and when they see danger they will go away. But let’s assume that an animal is stubborn, goes on a runway and stays there no matter what. Operations will cease until it is being brought away, right?
I don’t know where the drones were seen in the specific incident but, for example, if somebody programs (or hand-flies) a drone to fly over a runway at a small altitude wouldn’t the ATC/AO stop all operations?
Some institutions have studied the danger of a drone collision, but aviation has not adopted anything yet. The most common drone manufacturer (and I believe others as well) has also introduced drone no-fly-zones (NFZ) which follow common sense around airports (more restrictive than the UK law!), but everything can be possibly overridden.
