Disruption
Meanwhile the drones are taking over.
Tens of thousands of passengers have been disrupted by drones flying over one of the UK’s busiest airports.
Gatwick’s runway has been shut since Wednesday night, as devices have been repeatedly flying over the airfield.
Sussex Police said it was not terror-related but a “deliberate act” of disruption, using “industrial specification” drones.
About 110,000 passengers on 760 flights were due to fly on Thursday. Disruption could last “several days”.
There’s no end in sight.
Better try shooting them down anyways… Otherwise they’ll just keep coming. I do get that ricochets are a serious problem.
I think this is a serious threat and we should be thinking of serious action against it. Some thoughts. For drones above a certain size:
Require registration with an ID number and license plate.
Require the fitting of a transponder which will reply with the ID when commanded (like IFF in military planes)
and severe penalties for owning a drone which does not comply.
I do too; the whole thing makes me damn nervous. They are a threat to planes and any damn fool can have one; you do the math.
Certainly a potentially serious problem – but no footage of them?
BKiSA, only a shotgun would be a sure and relatively safe way to take out such a small and mobile target. Good luck getting close enough.
David Evans. Anyone with a bit of nous and time can build a drone. If someone wants to do something illegal, do you think they’re going to add a transponder and identity tags? Even if they bought a unit, don’t you think they would remove such or use a false identity to purchase, or just plain steal the drones?
ktron, even a commercial drone is a very small target, very hard to get footage of. By contrast, an airport and it’s surrounds make up a very large area.
This is certainly an emerging threat. Inevitably authorities are going to try and clamp down on drones with the usual result that most users who are lawful and responsible will have a good hobby ruined by a small number of idiots and criminals.
ktron, I saw some amateur footage of what was said to be one of the drones, but it wasn’t informative. One drone, distant, against a cloudy sky.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/12/20/first-footage-drone-evading-police-helicopters-gatwick-airport-8271026/
Thanks David – interesting to think what this says about the value of eight-figure helicopters for air defence
Rob, I recognise the problems with registering. I’m not sure I would know how to build the controlling circuitry and software.
I don’t see that requiring registration or IFF is going to ruin a hobby. It may add to the cost, but we accept it for cars, bikes and planes. Why not for this?
And frankly, if the choice is between annoying some hobbyists and keeping the use of our airports, I know which I will choose.
I know, the airports are contributing to climate change (I wonder if that’s the motive behind this) but I’m reluctant to lose them since all my descendants are over 10,000 miles from me.
Rob – sure, they are small targets – but there are a lot of cell phones out there, many of them capable of shooting 4k video. It’s sad to think that with all the spending on defence something this obvious hasn’t planned for.
David, you don’t need to build the boards, there is a huge industry providing all the components you’ll ever need and so many forums describing how to build what you want and need. No amount of effort will stop companies popping up and selling non-compliant boards even if you tried to regulate the market. Think DVD and Blue-ray regions, etc etc.
Ktron, there are not many cell phones in the airfield environs and the controlled airspace volume. Also, cell phones are really bad at telephoto with any resolution (let alone hand holding on an erratically moving object while hand holding on telephoto. Give it a go with a seagull at a distance of a kilometre sometime. That would be easy by comparison.
@Rob #10 – It’s also easy to take the license plates off your car, but that doesn’t make the laws requiring their use pointless. Also, people can make their own firearm receivers without serial numbers, which doesn’t make serial number laws pointless.
On the other hand, the DVD/BR region coding thing is not a law, per se. It’s a trade/contract issue that would be enforced as a civil suit between the manufacturer (licensee) and the MPAA (licensor). Whereas this kind of legislation would be criminal product liability law, similar to requirements regarding making things out of materials that don’t catch fire, or don’t leak RF noise, or won’t electrocute the owner. Sure, you can make stuff yourself in your garage that’s a complete hazard to you and the people around you, but again, that doesn’t make those product liability laws pointless.
Karellen
Licence plates on cars fulfil a function other than just identifying he car and linking them to an owner. If the only purpose of an identifying tag or transponder is to link a device to an owner – and that tag can be removed – then yes, it is pointless. If someone can make a device from scratch, thus bypassing the tag or transponder, then yes, useless.
Who cares if the DVD thing was a trade requirement (it did actually have backing through various copyright, licensing and other internationally enforceable agreements). The point I was making is that even with extensive effort, attempts to enforce compliance through mandating insertion of technology into consumer products is not going to deter anyone who is actually determined to make a nuisance or a danger of themselves as these bad actors have been.
We are not talking about product safety here. We are talking about people who are seeking to shut down an airport and/or endanger commercial passenger aircraft.
Seems like it might be time to call in the falconers…
(I know the Dutch were having some trouble training eagles to take out drones, and falcons are generally smaller, so I’m not actually sure of the practicalities of that. No ricochets, at least, though…)
Drones are certainly a threat (both to safety and privacy) but we need to be careful about the laws we make – and the technological solutions we employ – to control them. I’m not *at all* saying we shouldn’t do so, but we need to be careful.
For example, there’s a great benefit (and no obvious downside) to having technology to prevent drones flying in the area around airports. But if police can set up technologically enforced no-fly zones wherever and whenever they like, we’ve lost a valuable means of observing their behaviour. I wouldn’t want to ban drones flying over protest sites, for example (which the Met has certainly tried to do, I’m not sure whether they were successful). The same goes for technology to identify the owner: that would be fine as long as there aren’t legal repercussions for or intimidatory tactics against people using them safely to police the authorities.
As usual, nations will have to decide where they stand on this line. I think it’s a difficult problem.
@Rob #12 – If we allow law enforcement to bring down (via whatever means – shooting, via trained eagle, some targeted electromagnetic disabling device) and sumarily destroy any drone which does not have a registered transponder – even if they’re not near an airport, and with the possibility of charging the owner if they can be found also – then I don’t think a law requiring them would be useless. If it allows us to identify bad actors – due to a lack of registered transponder – quickly and reliably, that’s a win.
BTW, I saw a couple posts talking about ‘ricochets’ being the danger of shooting down a drone. Actually, those would be the least worrisome issue–a bullet that hits a drone, even if it bounces off, is going to lose most of its momentum in the collision, and become more akin to a thrown coin.
But a bullet that misses the target entirely is another matter. Every year in large cities, you have an issue around the Fourth of July and other ‘get drunk and be stupid’ holidays, where people shoot their guns into the air and then someone, somewhere, gets struck by a falling bullet. Shooting at an airborne target usually means you’re going to end up lobbing the bullet well outside the grounds of the airport proper, into the surrounding neighborhood. That’s a recipe for disaster.
I expect this will force the authorities to develop tracking technology that can quickly home in on an errant signal. And yes, that will then be abused by authorities in many jurisdictions, because that’s what the authorities do with new toys.
The important thing is that the solution to this problem is not technological, or at least not solely so. Technological solutions are crying out for surveillance creep by the authorities unless we take steps to prevent that. Which we won’t, because the solutions will be offered when we are scared.
Rob is right that people with criminal intent won’t worry about flying a drone without a transponder and they’re easy enough to build or otherwise source. It’s much the same as the argument for back-doored encryption. If you put in a back door you really only inconvenience and endanger legit users. Criminals and spies will just use unbroken encryption.
Registration of drones will surely help with idiots flying recklessly, but not with criminal activities (other than for especially stupid and unresourceful criminals).
We have to be sure that the cost is worth it.
This is actually a thoroughly bizarre story – so much so that even quite sane people, who generally laugh at conspiracy theories, are starting to question whether what we’re being told is the truth, or even part of it.
There are a limited number of plausible explanations for flying a drone near an airport like this.
1. Dumb kids or (even dumber adults) who are doing it for the lulz.
For 24 hrs? Repeatedly? Continuing even after the incident hits the news and police are out in force? With either one guy/drone with a large supply of batteries or a team of people with a drone each? And the drones seem to be seriously modded – or are industrial/military models.
Surely anyone short sighted enough to have thought this was a fun idea would have packed off and slunk away once Police With Guns were seen (not an everyday sight in the UK). Or, more likely would have got bored very quickly.
2. Terrorism
Except… nobody’s scared. Pissed off as hell, yes, but not scared. Police have stated it’s not a terrorist act, which I presume means it can’t be traced to any of the Islamist or NeoNazi groups on their watch list. And nobody has claimed responsibility.
3. Industrial Sabotage
This has been hinted at in police statements. But who benefits financially from shutting Gatwick for 24 hours? It’s a risky strategy for very little reward that I can see.
4. Disgruntled ex-Gatwick airport employee
Nobody has suggested this – it’s just one option I wondered about. When you see an organisation targetted for no good reason, pissed off ex-employees are a likely suspect. It falls down for the same reasons as the “dumb hobbyist” argument. One ex employee with a LOT of batteries, or who has roped in a bunch of friends, got hold of one, or several, seriously modded drones and kept going for 24 hours? I mean, it’s possible… but still not very likely.
5. Environmental protest
An unnamed Whitehall source has been quoted by several papers with this suggestion. It sounds more like someone airing their pet theory – there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. And that falls down for the same reasons as terrorism – nobody has claimed responsibility. A protest is pretty pointless if people don’t know a) that it is a protest and b) why you are protesting.
I’m also slightly surprised there isn’t more footage of the drone. When most of us are walking round with 13 megapixel cameras in our pockets, I would have expected more people to have footage.
I agree that it’s odd. It could also, ironically, be an anti-drone protest. “Look at how disruptive these things are!”
I’m not surprised there’s so little footage, though. You’d have to be fairly close to get any useful footage with a phone camera and you’d have to be able to spot it in the first place. The airport is a big place, people aren’t allowed anywhere near where the drone is flying and it’s not always flying over the actual airport in the first place.
The BBC news at midday said that Gatwick is now open but no suspect has been identified despite the best efforts of the police and the army. Still lots of delays and cancelled flights, so whoever is responsible has caused a very expensive and on-going incident.
Yeah, that seems odd too but I’ll be surprised if they don’t have a suspect within a day or so.
The problem seems to be that nobody expected this sort of weird attack (I didn’t, and some of the work I’ve done has been about predicting weird attacks). The army presumably has expertise in spotting and tracking drones but from the perspective of their doing things like exploding or shooting things or spying rather than floating about causing a serious nuisance. The police have serious expertise in pinning down escape routes but there seems to be a lack of consensus on the kind of drone or drones that were used, which would factor into that. Could it have been one person on foot with a backpack full of batteries or did it have to be someone on a quadbike with a trailer? More than one person? A couple of kids being idiots or professionals, for some reason?
There’s no response that could optimise the search for all possibilities, of course.
Whatever, it seems fairly likely that there will be a vehicle or vehicles found to have been hanging or driving around. Hopefully this activity can be traced.
I’m wondering how close to the airport the drone operator had to be. I have no idea about the effective operating range of the remote control system, but presumably an on-board camera negates the need for an experienced operator to be able to see the drone. There’s plenty of buildings, both residential and business around Gatwick, so with enough range I don’t see why somebody couldn’t cause so much chaos whilst sat out of view at home.
Various news sites are saying that police have identified ‘persons of interest’ (why not ‘people?) and that they have a ‘drone killer’ in place.
@Steamshovelmama #19 – One option that occurs to me is that it could be a terrorist organisation or hostile state probing the reaction and response, in preparation for future, more hostile, acts. If the question they wanted answering was “how long do we have carry out our drone-based plan before they take the step of shooting it down”, they now know the answer is “more than 24 hours”. That’s really useful information, and affects the types of plan its worth even trying to execute.
AoS:
The question is how close the operator would have to be to the drone, not how close to the airport. We don’t have much information about how close the drone was to the airport, after all. Either way, I’d say probably not very far away. Line of sight, of course, unless it was done with the mobile network or the drone was autonomous.
But someone was there to either swap the drones or change the batteries. That’s the limiting factor.
@Karellen: That’s possible. If I were going to try that, though, I don’t think I’d start with Gatwick. There’s one runway and as disruptive as it clearly was, it is going to trigger the authorities to work out better responses before I’d have been able to try it in more complicated places like Heathrow.
There are many small rural airports around the UK that might have served as better tests. But they wouldn’t have taught me much because the security, the local police forces and the capacity to deploy the army differs in every one.
Such an attack would require the element of surprise and that’s now not on the table because every airport is now terrified of drones. You’re definitely right that someone might have learned a lot about Gatwick’s response to drones, but I’m not sure how useful that will be for even more malicious people.
AoS,
I don’t have any expertise in drones, but there’s a good discussion of “people” vs. “persons” here.
How about this as a conspiracy theory:
A firm wishing to sell anti-drone security services to airports by upping the ante?
@Maroon:
People vs Persons came up in the gingerbread thing. I haven’t read your link yet but I have noticed that “persons” is often used to ridicule what is seen by idiots to be politically correct.
Will read soon.
@Maroon: the link is broken, I think.
Why would the operator need to be close?
I thought they sit in a cushy place across the globe when piloting drones?
latsot,
Odd, it works for me. But here it is again:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/people.htm
If they have specialist planes flying over the area, sure. I’m not sure that is likely in this case.
@Maroon, I’ve got it now but it took me pretending to connect from some weird places.
Must be the drones.
A regional newspaper called me to ask about the drones!!!!!
I can’t say it was an interview, though. They didn’t listen to a word I said. I’ll probably be quoted saying something even more stupid than I actually said.
You were droning.
Definitely.
Local and regional press do occasionally call me to comment on random things. It has nothing to do with any expertise I have, I’m just right next to someone else more media friendly in their address books and they call me when he doesn’t answer.
I’m not aware of anything I’ve ever told them ever making it into the news. I should have made up some dire warning about the curse of drones. I’d have been on BBC Breakfast tomorrow morning for sure.