Gatwick drones

[AB|W]

You beat me to it.

As I wrote above Gatwick does seem to lack coherent disaster planning strategies together with methodologies to enable it to keep its traffic flowing.

If the story is true it is quite astounding, and shaming.

 

Alan

 

[mattius]

Its an interesting subject, the proper drones work either via WIFI or via bespoke 2.4/5.4ghz (same radio bands as wifi) communications, but then the proper drones have geofencing meaning you literally cannot fly them near restricted areas unless you have an access code (i live on a flight path, if i try and go near the ceiling limit, it stops dead like hitting a brick wall). The cheap knockoffs don't have this and if you are willing enough you can hack the firmware to disable it so ultimately it can be defeated.

They should just create a ring fence around the airport, but this is quite problematic  around where people live and with things that rely on radio communications (i.e. planes), you effectively jam the whole band which would mean neighbours have problems with WIFI, planes all need tested to ensure it doesn't affect them.

We are going through these problems at work at the moment, modern radio waves can have some interesting affects on older electronic/environmental gauges, heck some of the sensors we have go mental with just an electromagnetic pulse caused by a camera flash going off.

[JohnD]

Gatwick is not alone - I don't think any other UK airport has a drone strategy, except possibly Heathrow and RAF Northolt.    And even if their managements had thought to raise that as a problem, Brexit has driven all and any other policy decisions into the long grass these last two years.      Even the deplorable state of the NHS, Tax Credit, and channel crossing immigrants, let alone global climate change.

Mattius, just my tablet tells me that there are four wifi sources in range now (this PC, my Router, my Printer and one other), and dozens of others that it has heard from in the past.   It can and will link me to any of them that come in range, if I want.  Can't more sensitive appuratus pick up the drone's signal and link to that, sending spurious signals that will disable it?   

John 

[DeTRacted]

John I think we have already covered this before. Yes it can be done with the right kit but don't forget you can't link to any wi-fi with the wrong login credentials, and that only deals with the smaller consumer-type drones.  I believe its necessary to think beyond a simple nuisance from a 'toy' machine - a real threat probably won't ID itself in the same way as a wi-fi link and won't use the same protocols nor even the same frequency band. To find its control frequency would need some sort of spectrum analyser and specialised decoder.

As a countermeasure you can just overload the drone's receiver so it can't hear the control signal, as the SkyFence system does, but to do that at any distance needs a powerful transmitter which might need to transmit over a wide frequency band.  I understand that some of the larger and cleverer commercial machines can use frequency-hopping techniques to avoid interference so unless you know the hopping sequence that would cause considerable difficulty, hence why the interference may need to be wide-band as Mattius says. Of course that will overload any receiver within range possibly including those working on different frequencies if their front-ends aren't too selective (which is common for many of the cheap domestic radio-controlled items in wide use. The neighbours wouldn't be too pleased when their wi-fi stopped working, they couldn't make phone calls, unlock the car or the garage door and the doorbell keeps ringing etc etc.)

Some of the more advanced drones will just return to base by themselves when control is lost. That sort of disablement will probably only be temporary while the interfering signals are stronger than its own controllers'.   Of course If you know the access code and the control coding system being used you could possibly take over the thing and fly it into the ground but a more determined attacker is not likely to use a well-known protocol, and picking the right one to use in the short time available would be the trick.

None of this is any use for drones which are not under active control but which are just following a pre-programmed  route using GPS.  Again - you could interfere with GPS but.........

It would all be a lot easier to do if airfields were in the middle of nowhere and the use of RF systems was not so ubiquitous.  There is bound to be a solution which would avoid inconvenience to lots of people in the vicinity but I bet it won't be cheap and easy. 

[Nick Jones]

Saw a rather confusing report yesterday which seemed to be suggesting that quite a bit of the evidence for the existence of drones was sightings by the public. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, except that it now seems that very many of these may have been sightings of the police drones sent up to look for the bandit(s) on the basis of relatively few initial sightings........

Oh dear. Any chance of a drink in the brewery? Not much one suspects......

[DeTRacted]

"Oh dear. Any chance of a drink in the brewery? Not much one suspects......"

So what would you have done Nick if you were the one on the ground tasked with dealing with a very confused situation ?   Perhaps sometimes its better to overreact rather than have to explain, to someone counting the bodies, exactly why no action was taken on the reports.....

[Nick Jones]

I have no idea what I would have done, but as I’m neither an airport manager or air- safety specialist, it’s not really my area. I also have only a small part of the facts, as reported by not-necessarily unbiased sources, so I shouldn’t be making decisions on that basis either. I do wonder about the risk assessment and decision making process and whose responsibility it ultimately is.  Could it be a bit like the insurance situation after a medical procedure where the medics say you mustn’t drive because the insurance companies forbid it, whereas the insurance companies actually say it is for the medics to determine.

Police marksman armed with shotguns/birdshot to shoot them down perhaps - but what really concerns me is the question raised as to whether there really was a threat , and even if there was initially, how long it actually persisted against the time that the airport was kept locked down.

Suspect it will be a while before we know what really happened, if ever, as no one will be very keen to admit that even part of the lockdown was the result of tail-chasing.

Not completely convinced that the real risks to commercial aircraft from drones is as large as is made out. That is to say that if contact is made there will obviously be damage, but comparable to say bird strike with a Canada goose.  That too is obviously bad news (yes I remember the crash landing in the Hudson), but even bird strikes are rare and birds much more numerous than drones.

[DeTRacted]

Having been involved peripherally with exercises tackling rather smaller 'emergencies' I imagine situations like this one are very difficult to assess and control - one can expect that all sorts of reports were being received throughout but you can't discount any until they have been investigated and that takes time and manpower.  You also would need specialist equipment and other expertise that would take some time to assemble.  Given the political and financial pressures which were also undoubtedly being applied as well, the Gold Commander deserves a lot of sympathy.  As for risk assessment - that has to be a dynamic process revised as the circumstances change.

This was after all a type of first-time event , which may not have figured largely in plans since those may well concentrate on the worst-case incidents, so the response will have been very much reactive. No doubt by next time some lessons will have been learned.

The police structure for dealing with emergencies is described here.  It makes interesting reading.

https://www.app.college.police.uk/app-content/operations/command-and-control/definitions-and-procedures/

https://www.app.college.police.uk/app-content/operations/command-and-control/command-structures/

As for the extent of a drone strike for potential damage to aircraft, that is a moot point as it only takes one unlucky event hitting a vulnerable spot for a tragedy to ensue.  They use bird-scarers to try to keep airfields clear. What we seem to need now are drone-scarers.

 

[mattius]

5 hours ago, JohnD said:

Mattius, just my tablet tells me that there are four wifi sources in range now (this PC, my Router, my Printer and one other), and dozens of others that it has heard from in the past.   It can and will link me to any of them that come in range, if I want.  Can't more sensitive appuratus pick up the drone's signal and link to that, sending spurious signals that will disable it?   

John 

Be nice wouldn't it, i run some pretty high end high power WIFI gear in our house, in the last hour my kit spotted 27 different Wireless networks, dashcams, cars (Mercedes and BMWs seem to have WIFI these days), buses, people with 4G hotspots. Try finding the right one, locking onto that and then spending the bare minimum of 3-4 mins if a simple password is used to crack it and gain access to the network, its just not feasible and like DeTracted says the drone just returns to base and you have no evidence.

Being a drone flyer myself i hate to admit it, but there needs to be some legislation requiring the devices to have a unique ID or signal emitter to identify them, and this needs to be registered to buy a drone, its not going to stop the determined threat (not much will to be honest) but it will stop the amateurs and daft idiots. You can walk into a shop and buy one with no ID, no registration, no nothing.

Either that or laser tracking and high power laser to shoot it down (kill one motor and the majority of these things will fall from the sky).

Does remind me of a story i heard about in Afghan though, where they used these drone shields, the insurgents just went low tech with old school radio controlled planes.

Edited December 30, 2018 by mattius