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London's Heathrow Airport Halts Departures Over Drone Sighting (cnbc.com)
London's Heathrow Airport halted departures on Tuesday after a report of a drone sighting, less than a month after a similar event crippled operations at a major U.K. airport. From a report: "We are currently responding to a drone sighting at Heathrow and are working closely with the Met Police to prevent any threat to operational safety," a spokesperson for the airport said. "As a precautionary measure, we have stopped departures while we investigate. We apologise to passengers for any inconvenience this may cause."
Could a few dozen drones, a few at each of major airports, with some nice shiny radar reflectors, clog the air traffic system? They could pop out of parked cars spook everyone, to hide after a minute or two, or be replaced by the next one in the queue. Can it be that easy? I would hope not.
Could it be another construction crane sighting?
Thanks Obama.
You don't even need the drones, just reports of people seeing them.
The previous incident the summary mentions? The police aren't sure there even was a drone, and so far there's been no proof that anyone was flying drones near the airport.
If flying a drone is all that it takes to bring Heathrow down to its knees, the Brits are even in more trouble than we thought.
You're new here, aren't you?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The only way to remove drones is to cease life services for the drone operators.
Call in the SAS.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Can it be that easy? I would hope not.
It is even easier than that. You don't even need your parked car. All you need is to convince someone at Heathrow that there is a drone in the area and they will voluntarily suspend all departures. This is actually happening right now. It also happened last month at Gatwick.
I saw an Arquillian Battle Cruiser near JFK!
Shut it down!
I'm looking at this as proof-of-concept. Next step are the protection payments. I mean ongoing invoices to be paid in bitcoin for keeping the place drone-free.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Keep Calm and Ca... Holy shit! Is that a flying piece of plastic?? Shut everything down now!!!!1!!!
Stage 2 involves deploying drones that somewhat resemble pigeons.
Stage 3 is where the relevant authorities discover they can't tell the drones from the pigeons, and all air traffic is halted, permanently. The pigeons win.
You don't even need the drones. Just claim you saw one. You can even phone it in anonymously.
The actual problem is that Heathrow is having problems with its supplier of lemon-soaked paper napkins.
They just don't want to unnecessarily alarm people with talk about the incipient collapse of civilization.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
of course! the enforcers for the 1% are dead set on making a big deal of anything drone related
You don't even need the drones. Just claim you saw one. You can even phone it in anonymously.
So, instead of bomb threats we're going to start having Drone-threats?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Welcome to the drone age.
1) They have military anti-drone devices deployed at UK airports. A persistent threat will be disabled.
2) Other parts of their government are monitoring radio broadcasts. If you make yourself into a persistent threat to air travel, they will track your transmissions.
So, yeah, you could disrupt things for an afternoon, but you'd spend decades in prison as a terrorist.
In the gatwick incident, the police admitted that there may not have been a drone originally, then the police flew their own drones which may have been reported as further drone sightings.
The technology cat is out of the bag. Anyone with a little smart and a little money can build a drone that ignores the rules.
Why not come to the UK aglider? We could do with your magic expertise of hitting a drone first shot in such a way that no debris gets left behind on runways/taxi-ways to be sucked up into engines.
Of course, with your shooting being so accurate we needn't worry about missed shots carrying a rifle bullet onto the two major motorways around the airport (the busiest roads in Europe according to some sources) or into a terminal full of people, or into hotels ....
Or maybe, just maybe, the UK authorities consider potential consequences beyond the trigger happy, knee jerk reaction and apply some thought to the situation.
If they catch you.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
A drone does not necessarily require a radio to be guided. It can steer itself via GPS+IMU, no need for the operator to communicate. So finding it, or it's operator, via any transmitted signals, isn't the most reliable method of deterrence. If your object is mischief, it's best not to be standing outside underneath it with a box and a big antenna looking up.
I have several wings that are fully autonomous, they navigate a pre-determined flight path, take actions at certain gps co-ords and then fly back to me. The total radio connection time is arming the flight controller at launch and then radio control to land. Even then I could let them land auto if I wanted but that would probably break them.
The only way to shut them down is to shoot them down or spoof local GPS enough to put them into the ground / solid object.
The drone hysteria, and not drones, has armed mischief makers. It now looks like the Gatwick incident didn't actually involve any drones at all. There isn't much evidence that there was any wrong-doing at all in the Gatwick incident. I wonder if there will be at Heathrow.
I have a DJI Mavic Air for photography and a couple of self-built racing/acro drones for fun. The Air's electronics make it a cinch to fly, but it won't allow it to anywhere near an airport. Even if it could, it's so docile that it would be hard to hit moving aircraft. Steering into an engine of a moving passenger jet would be quite a challenge. Even a stationary plane's engine would be difficult to hit because the Air has sensors that won't let it crash into anything unless you ascend into it from below or fly into it side-ways, in which case you can't see where you are headed.
My racing/acro drones would be better for causing mischief, but not much. They do as I tell them, and are both tough and nimble, but it was a major effort to develop the skill to fly without fear of accidentally crashing. I've spent a lot of time practising on a simulator and flying through hula-hoop sized gates in wide open spaces, but still have trouble finishing a lap around a 10-gate track without crashing, even when that is my sole aim (ie. I take as much time as I like). I'd have a very hard time hitting a moving passenger plane at all, let alone in a way that could cause damage. The skill required makes these sorts of drones horrible tools to damage passenger planes.
Luckily for mischief makers, they don't have to be. All the hysteria means that one can shut down an airport with an 80-gram toy that is nearly incapable of causing damage to a plane, even in very skilled hands. Heck, who needs a drone. Just show up near an airport with a mock transmitter and goggles. Someone will call it in.
And they don't even have to be real, flying, drones either. Forget about terrorism. Drones are where it's at.
Nothing I've seen so far has led me to believe there ever was any drone at Gatwick, nor have I seen any proof of a drone in this instance either. Can't prove a negative of course--there could maybe have have been an idiot flying nearby. It's a tough call to make. What I wouldn't stand for is police acting the way they did in the Gatwick case. What a disaster. I hope that couple gets some good compensation for the damage done.
Expect widespread government overreaction to this phantom (no pun intended) drone.
It is a very light and fast aircraft. Not a 100 ton airliner. You could dent a moneys wing with your fist (it would hurt). The leading edge of an airliner is much, much thicker. It is like comparing a rowing boat to an ocean liner.
And that drone in the experiment was not a 500g consumer drone but something weighing over 1kg. Shot out of a cannon. And it still failed to destroy the wing -- the pilot would probably have limped home.
In all of this, NOBODY had questioned the size of the drones spotted. Sure, a well aimed 500kg military drone could do some real damage, but not the 500g drones that people are talking about.
It is bizzare. Just look at a tiny consumer drone, and an airliner, and it is completely obvious that no serious damage could done.
And even if a drone managed to knock out an engine (extremely unlikely), the plane will fly quite happily on one.
The likelihood of a 500g consumer drone destroying a 100 ton airliner is as close zero as makes no difference. Just look at an airliner. It is big, and solid. And it has two engines, and even losing both of them is unlikely to result in a fatal crash.
NOBODY in the media has picked up on this. Actually thought for a minute about how ridiculous the assertion is.
Sure, a 500kg military drone might do some damage if well aimed. But nobody is talking about one of those. There was an experiment in which somebody fired a fairly large drone out of a cannon at a very light aircraft wing and did major damage (but still did not destroy it), hardly relevant.
Where is the risk assessment? There is about 0.6 fatal accidents for every million airline flights. So a 1 in 100 million additional risk is something to be avoided, but you do not close an airport because of it.
Why use GPS? Dead reckoning will get you close enough.
I made the kids watch this recently. Must have been a different country named Britain that the one we know today.
(Most Australian kids are taught zero 20th century history at school. Zero. Due to a National Curriculum.)
Because it's cheap, allows more complex flight paths and the ability to accurately position hold.
Once you are in the air it is very difficult to measure how far you have traveled without GPS. Dead reckoning is fine if you want to just fly-by, but to know you are at a particular location you need gps.
It could be worse - you could be flying through Canada and get detained because the US president wants a pi55ing contest with China.
As it happens, I do know Heathrow very well. I live nearby and have used it many times. It's in an area of relatively high population density (apart from the reservoirs and lakes a few miles to the west).
The airport is bounded on two sides by major motorways with another major road to the east and it has terminal buildings in the middle. Aircraft are parked between the runways and along the side of the airport.
It would be difficult to draw a shot line that didn't run any danger of collateral damage.
Even a lower powered cartridge (which would mean dashing around on the ground to get closer to the drone, with all of the implications on safe movement airside of aircraft and vehicles) would pose a problem with debris.
If we took it to extremes and assumed that your shot was practically out of energy at the airport fence, a slow moving bullet hitting a car going at 70mph would still cause damage and may shock/distract a driver into swerving into other lanes [people in the UK not being accustomed to gun violence].
You may know Heathrow, but you don't know a thing about firearms, and not much about aircraft operations. Firearms: Why use a rifle/pistol? A shotgun has a maximum range of about 300 yards. It was *designed* to hit flying targets. In terms of the risks of collateral damage, how about looking at the number of casualties on the ground from the Battle of Britain? Ya know, the one where there was massive air combat over a large urban area (London). Aircraft: so, you have to clean up the debris. You have to do that on a regular basis, due to ground accidents (you didn't think that there would be no collisions between all those trucks that run around the field, did you?), animals (it's a *grassy field*), and wind blown debris. What you're looking for is a zero-risk, zero side effect solution. 'Taint no such thing.
Yeah, if somebody with advanced technical skills is doing it, it might actually make them easier to catch.
It is a really stupid type of thing to do, it is on the level of a prank, but a prank that can send you to prison as a terrorist. Any smart person who is insane enough to do that already is on the list of people who make online threats. They probably got onto the list with stupid jokes that they didn't realize would be taken as threats!
And did they do it without having to do an internet search on it first? Only if they're an engineer. If an engineer decides to become a terrorist and this is what they went for, they'll probably be pretty easy to round up. And also, "Oh, good, they didn't hurt anybody."
The total radio connection time is arming the flight controller at launch and then radio control to land.
OK, but you've already done this in public. The military monitors radio traffic. Operational information about your control system is already stored in databases, but it isn't parsed out or cross-referenced or anything. Yet.
If you turn into a terrorist trying to disrupt air traffic, you'll be even easier to catch that the guy using an off-the-shelf system.
Being more clever doesn't actually help the terrorist in this case; it simply shows a lot more planning and increases the prison sentence they'll get. It also helps them to stand out from all the morons who are obviously not clever enough to have done it.
GPS is receive-only, you don't transmit anything, so that much is reasonable.
Dead reckoning takes a long time to program, and has to be tuned for each device. GPS you only have to do standard GIS transformations, and the rest of the hardware is irrelevant.
Dead reckoning you give up the first time you try to operate it outdoors in a slight wind.
All of this stuff is off the shelf components. It is the absolute standard stuff that anybody that plays with RC gear uses.
All the flight control and way point planning is done via iNav - https://github.com/iNavFlight/...
Flight controllers are ~$20-$50 off ebay
The radio receivers are generic, $20 items.
GPS module is $20
It is all done in the 2.4g band. There isn't anything to detect, parse or cross reference. It's all consumable crap made for peanuts in china. There is nothing special about anything I'm using. The radio I use is an FrSky taranis which has millions of sold units and is the number 1 most popular radio in the hobby.