Aviation watchdog says organized drone attacks will shut UK airports ‘sooner or later’ Britain's aviation watchdog has warned it's only a matter of time before organized drone attacks bring UK airports to a standstill. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) boss Rob Bishton told the Airlines UK conference on Monday that it was "entirely unrealistic" to think drone incursions "won't cause disruption" in the future, days …
Possibly because those whose job it is to defend against them aren't trying very hard?
If it's an arms race, then the relevant authorities need to join in, instead of people like Bishton being paid £370k a year for giving speeches, wringing his hands saying "we can't keep up".
The problem is that while one can detect small planes, shooting them down is dangerous to the public on the ground, due to falling debris and shrapnel. It doesn’t even have to be planes or drones - weather balloons used for smuggling drugs or cigarettes can also cause havoc.
That may not be a good idea due to scattering of reflections, giving rise to a risk to civilians if high powered lasers are used near civil airports. Then of course there's the risk of bits of drone falling on the surrounding area. (One of the better scenarios would be bits of drone falling on the long stay car park....)
Assuming you do not want the potential PR disaster of using live fire defences against drones at commercial airports, why not go the obvious route? A small team available 24x7 on airport equipped with drones that have a capture/shred system fitted. They should be able to launch and intercept in just a few minutes by using trained spotters to search for the intruding drone.
While there is a cost to this, it would be a lot less than the cost of shutdowns and it would only need a few intercepts to take the fun out of it for the 'black-hats'. Each captured drone will also provide another piece to the puzzle on whether this is organised or just mindless muppets
If we calculate the way that people often do when there hasn't been a recent disaster, we can answer that question. It would go something like this:
The closure of Gatwick cost £50M. That has not happened again in seven years. If we only put teams at the busiest 40 airports, that's £179k per airport per year, which for a 24-hour service means an expected hourly benefit of £20.38. If it costs more than £20.38 per hour to hire staff and equipment, then it's not worth doing it.
Which is not the right way to do this calculation since it's not considering actual risk. It's a very common way to calculate it because it is much easier than calculating actual risk and the people doing it feel like they're being cautious because their calculation assumes that the disaster will happen right now when they know the next one is likely quite a way off. If the next version of this is likely to be a lot worse or if the chances of having it are higher, then the benefit goes up and the comparison changes. However, the "can we afford not to" approach is not any better. It prevents the important work of considering approaches that might work better, be more efficient, and whether we need to do this in the first place. Lots of bad policies have gone into place because a problem was scary enough that it escaped the "not my problem right now" period into the "we must do something, this is something" one.
Not only do we not have a good estimate of risk here, we have no idea what it would take or if it is even possible to build a team as described. How feasible is a drone chase squad? How hard is it for attackers to send up a lot more drones so the chasing team can't chase them all? How hard to speed up their drones so the chasing ones can't catch them? How good is the information they would use to try this. When the chasing drones catch up to the interfering drones, what can they actually do to them to stop them being around; they generally aren't equipped with high-strength butterfly nets or machine guns, and neither could be feasibly attached to anything even slightly cheap. A cool-sounding solution doesn't mean that it works or is achievable.
Probably cheaper than whatever the English Highways Agency are called these days with their hundred of premium 4x4’s, and 396 useless miles of uber expensive Managed Motorway's…. Talking of people literally waiting on a car crash to happen on the evidentially safest roads in the country.
Just a few co-ordinated phone calls reporting a drone sighting over an airport will shut the airport.
With care you could even do it without phones by saying loudly in a public area "isn't that a drone over there?" and all those far away lights will suddenly become rather closer drones, in peoples imagination.
They're astroturfing, this is a PR exercise to shut down complaints, safety and privacy issues resulting from the incoming, mandatory RID features that expose legal operators locations to anyone who can be bothered downloading an app.
Obviously the bad actors who want to fly illegally to cause disruption will continue to do so and pay no attention to this ridiculous law.
Dead right! The only ones who have been inconvenienced - financially and otherwise - by the existing regulations have been those hobbyists who have always operated legally and safely. Indeed the drone fad seems to have already faded - much like CB radio did, but much faster.
As for the commercial use of drones for deliveries, those, like fusion reactors, seem as far off as ever....
As an enthusiast of RC UAVs I'm astonished that the "powers that be" think that legislation will do anything to prevent drone incursions. Building an untraceable drone with capabilities to fly autonomously and drop "cargo" at a given location is trivial, and achievable at an extremely low cost. Legislation only serves to make law-abiding enthusiasts' lives harder, with onerous requirements that would stop not a single bad actor. What the aviation industry needs to do is to work towards effective defense systems against any such incursions, rather than introduce legislation which is totally ineffective against such threats.
If drones are outlawed, only outlaws will have drones.
The present RC regulations are completely nuts. For example the requirement for transponders in bigger planes, with very short range and no receiving equipment anywhere. In general the regulations are just a useless waste of money and time. Where I live, the gov transponder registration web site is not functional anymore.
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