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."

Comments

DDOS: Drone Denial of Service

[MDMurphy]

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.

Fake Drone?

[nobleclem]

Could it be another construction crane sighting?

Re:DDOS: Drone Denial of Service

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Is that all that it takes?

[OneHundredAndTen]

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.

Re:Is that all that it takes?

[ShanghaiBill]

If flying a drone is all that it takes to bring Heathrow down to its knees ...

It doesn't even take that. There is no physical or photographic evidence that there was actually a drone. It was just a reported "sighting".

Re:Is that all that it takes?

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

I'm thinking they need to invest in the technology to quickly and safely shoot these out of the sky and resume operations. I'm also thinking most of them would cause less damage to a jet than a goose strike would.

Some tests have been made with drone and aircraft collisions https://www.aerospacetestingin...
“The bird did more apparent damage to the leading edge of the wing, but the Phantom penetrated deeper into the wing and damaged the main spar, which the bird did not do,”

Re:Is that all that it takes?

[Drethon]

A drone sucked into a jet engine is no small problem.

So is multiple 15 pound fleshy objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I see a bunch of geese eating on the lawn of our airport right now, should we shut down the airport? I guess they are making the assumption that a drone flown near an airport is done with malice, whereas a goose probably doesn't have any malice toward a typical airliner. Still, is the risk really any different?

Just my bent $0.02.

Re:Is that all that it takes?

[Drethon]

Geese tend to fly away from the big noisy machine. Drone pilots (and I use that term loosely) tend to think "Oh, this'll be a great view!"

While I think you are likely correct (never attribute toward malice what can be attributed toward sheer stupidity and the average goose may be smarter than the average drone operator), historical record does show more airline damage by birds than drones. True drones are a pretty new thing and will just get worse.

"There have been about 194,000 wildlife strikes with civil aircraft in USA between 1990 and 2017 (about 14,400 strikes at 700 U.S. airports in 2017). An additional 4,000 strikes have been reported by U.S. Air Carriers at foreign airports, 1990-2017.
From 1988 to 2017, there were 287 human fatalities attributed to wildlife strikes globally."

Re:Is that all that it takes?

[buffcleb]

that test was at 238mph while most take-off and approach speeds are around 150-180mph (based on google - I'm not a pilot)... wouldn't the test have made more sense at 180mph?

Re:Is that all that it takes?

[Harlequin80]

If you were really trying to take out a planes engines you would use a swarm of drones that would launch at once to a predetermined altitude. Then let the plane fly into the cloud. One should hit an engine.

Getting a single drone into a planes engine on purpose would be hellishly hard. I race drones and a standard race gate is 1.52m x 1.52m. People hit those stationary gates every race and get taken out. Trying to hit one moving at 180mph even on a known path would be down to pure fluke.

This is just stage 1:

[sheramil]

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.

Re: DDOS: Drone Denial of Service

[ShanghaiBill]

You don't even need the drones. Just claim you saw one. You can even phone it in anonymously.

news from inside the shoe event horizon

[Thud457]

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.