Munich Airport chaos after drone sightings spook air traffic control Munich Airport was temporarily closed last night following reports of drones buzzing around the area. According to the airport's press office, "German air traffic control (DFS) restricted flight operations at Munich Airport from 10:18 p.m. and later suspended them altogether due to several drone sightings." As a result, 17 …
Was about to say something similar as a reaction to the "After all, in the UK, operators of most drones and model aircraft are required to hold a license" part in the article.
The license is totally irrelevant, because either you simply fly one without a license, or you have a valid license and still break the law "for lolz" (assuming (probably rightly) that they won't catch you). Disabling/shooting down any rogue drones flying in places they're not supposed to be remains the only effective means to control this. Criminals will obviously still try, but the usual boneheads will probably fear for their expensive drones and refrain from doing it.
We went through this at Gatwick in 2018. The problem with shooting them down is, it's messy and downright dangerous. You're talking about discharging live ammunition - lots of it - over a heavily populated area.
The world in general, and NATO in particular, urgently needs a way of remotely disabling drones without the high risk of collateral damage.
People troubled by noise under flight paths now have a remedy to hand.
Send up cheap disposable drones. These shouldn't be at a height to hazard aircraft because that may result in nearby property being demolished. Ensure that drones are wiped of fingerprints and DNA. Also, their provenance via purchase must be occulted.
This should be on the agendas of Community Associations.
"Munich is on edge at the moment. The Oktoberfest beer festival is in full swing, to the point where the entrances had to be briefly closed due to overcrowding."
That, at least, has been "normal" for years and years now. To the point where the locals don't even go anymore and it's only mass-tourism and those who have the money for reserved boxes and tables.
It was already insane the last 2 times I was there - in 2011 and 2013! - and by all accounts from friends and family it's only gotten worse. Tents would be closed off due to overcrowding at 9am, hours before they even started serving beer.
"Drone sightings around the airport were enough to trigger a shutdown, although the machines had left by the time the Federal Police arrived with drone defense equipment."
.. indeed, if said drones were even present (Gatwick springs to mind)
A ban on drone activity will not achieve anything as
1. If someone has bad intent will launch anyway (last time I chatted with some UK drone user friends*, plenty of drones without built in geofencing, and on some that had it, was possible to disable it).
2. Who needs drones anyway, when you can coordinate a few "I saw a drone at the airport" reports (& fairly trivial to produce pre-faked "mobile phone photos" e.g. photograph drone elsewhere in similar light conditions (& with no obvious geographical ID features e.g. shoot "in the sky") to when you plan on reports being made. Ideally (proper planning) would do over a range of cloud conditions so pics had clouds appropriate for the day (e.g. pointless uploading pic with clouds if a clear sunny day**)
Then can just edit GPS coords & timestamp on photos
* they (AFAIK) use theirs in a legit way but frequently moan the UK drone laws are a joke as so easy to circumvent & so essentially pointless.
** yes, could easily do full on fake photos, but looks way more obviously legit if genuine photos*** and you then just edit minimum amount of metadata.
*** I'm enviously hoping for a bit of competence & careful analysis of any supposed drone evidence by authorities rather than a total panic instant reaction of "airport droooooones - shut down all the things" response. Given malicious fake reports are sadly popular in other areas (look at depressingly high frequency of "SWATTING" incidents in the US) you would hope there is some due care and attention in drone "incident" analysis.
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