Japanese police are reportedly deploying a larger drone with a net trailing below to scoop up/capture illegally flown drones. The link shows a video of it in action.
American airports may equip “radio guns” (for want of a better word) which block transmissions and therefore likely make them descend/land where they are.
Can we expect this to become standard equipment at every ATC tower, alongside the signal lamps and other equipment?
I haven’t seen/heard of any technical measures like this being taken in Europe yet.
Most airport fire services have a very pistol (for light signals) that as an sleeve to to fire 12 gauge bird scaring cartridges , I would suggest using this with standard bird cartridges.
That’s not a bad idea but it’s not going to help if the drone is hovering on the glideslope a mile outside the airport boundary. Unless you can find and shoot the pilot, perhaps.
Why not just use a shotgun?
Cobalt wrote:
Why not just use a shotgun?
Because if it’s more than about 100 feet away from the gun a shotgun won’t be effective?
Neil, if I could not hit a pheasant on the wing at more than 100 feet I dont think I would go on many shoots!
DavidC wrote:
Can we expect this to become standard equipment at every ATC tower, alongside the signal lamps and other equipment?
The idea is just dumb. Instead one one drone to worry about, there will be two or more.
At least we will know that the one is handled by a qualified person. Which ought to remove all issues.
Jan_Olieslagers wrote:
At least we will know that the one is handled by a qualified person
None of those persons are inside the drones, which is the essence of the problem (real or not) with drones.
Well the one in the video gets caught in the net. But how likely is that? More likely that it gets temporarily caught and stops flying then falls freely. After which it either regains control, or continue to fall. So you’d need to be very careful about what is under it at the time of interception. The surrounds of city airports is usually built up.