Ex-DJI veep: There was no drone at Gatwick during 2018's hysterical shutdown There was never a rogue drone at Gatwick Airport that caused planes to be grounded over the 2018 Christmas holidays, an outgoing exec at Chinese drone-maker DJI has claimed. In an interview given just before he takes up his new veep of governmental affairs post with Boston Dynamics, Brendan Schulman said it was "now clear" …
Once heard an ex USAF pilot who said he now debunks alien sightings after leaving the military. This was back in the days of Netscape Navigator and the early internet. Somebody emailed him to say they had footage of an alien spacecraft moving at speed with coloured lights, then hovering and emitting a beam. He travelled to meet this woman who seemed perfectly normal and not a usual UFO believer. Said he watched her video of the 'alien craft' and checked the date she'd recorded it. Then explained in detail what she'd captured on tape. Sadly her Alien was just a far larger than normal plane going into a local airport making an emergency landing. He said the plane did not start hovering and the beam of light was just from a helicopter probably a police one. Woman was unhappy with this.
There are laws that cover every eventuality already, "Breach of the peace" would work here it covers almost any situation where harm could be inflicted.
There has been a long list of offences added recently, mostly to show something is 'being done' but tbh the ability to gain a fair conviction is more important than the specific name of the offence.
>What kind of drone-sensitive organ do you posess to have "felt" its presence?
Common sense and the knowledge that people have done things with quadcopters that they really shouldn't. Like get some really neat footage of an airliner landing at Las Vegas. From above.
I tend to be skeptical of drone sightings from airliners based on personal experience with birds and light aircraft. A bird like a red-tailed hawk is about the size of a quadcopter and is the sort you might encounter while puttering along at a decent altitude. They're not easy to spot and even at the relatively slow pace of a GA plane -- about half the landing speed of an airliner -- the relative speed is high enough to make it difficult to identify anything. (Try bird spotting from a car on the motorway.)
That said, we've had the clown with the jet pack back recently, floating a few thousand feet up near the flight path into Los Angeles. I personally don't think its a jet pack but more likely a balloon made from a boiler suit or similar. Until we find the people responsible we won't know for sure.
That one is too small to qualify. I fly R/C sailplanes which not only can be quite large but they can rapidly gain height in a strong thermal. A friend got his 3.5mter 'grabbed' and pulled right up to where it was just a tiny speck. He was lucky to get it down. It was equipped with an altimeter which said he'd only got up to about 1300' AGL.
It wasn't seen from the ground, it was seen from the cockpit.
Allegedly. Again, absolutely no pictures, not even blurry ones ... with an airplane on final approach to LAX, and all the grubby little noses of the passengers pressed up against the windows, camera at the ready, as on every single landing I've ever been on since the days of the Kodak Instamatic.
"(Try bird spotting from a car on the motorway.)"
Coming back from Petaluma this afternoon I spotted three red-tailed hawks (two adults, and a youngster (judging by tail feather length)), one peregrine falcon, a handful of red-winged blackbirds, several dozen finches of various varieties, half a dozen turkey vultures, a flock of about a dozen wild turkeys (and another group of about a dozen yearling male turkeys) and a whole lot of gulls.
Most at about 65MPH. And I wasn't even trying, I just happened to notice those.
I'm not a keen birder, I'm just very observant when it comes to the world around me. It's probably a side-affect of growing up hunting crossed with being an avid motorcyclist all my life.
No need for glass ... I don't need to see the details of every feather to tell the difference between a flock of sparrows and a flock of finches at 100 yards.
TBF peregrines can do multiples of that (though primarily in a downward stoop) and well over that in level flight (as can some of their common prey such as pigeons as an "arms race" in speed & manoeuvrability means slow pigeons typically have short lives)
Given they are quite chunky (compared to blackbirds, tits etc.), ducks, pigeons etc. have triggered some speed cameras (though at more casual flight speeds, not at 65 MPH AFAIK)
Some species of duck can hit 75+ MPH briefly (some say canvasbacks can hit 90+).
I forgot about the ducks, geese and swans in this pond ... it's got an algae bloom at the moment, and the poultry are a trifle irritated, but you can still see 'em dotted around where the breeze clears the creeping crud off the top of the water. And of course many of the homes dotted along the road between here and there have chickens running around in the yard.
Given the resources committed to the response, it is difficult to believe that any culprit would have continued operations without getting caught. Consumer drones have limited range/endurance and the control signals are not that hard to detect - in open terrain, they would be quite conspicuous.
Almost impossible to spot except....for their clearly visible and known MAC addresses which make them stand out like a sore thumb if you are looking for them in signals of any frequency.
Commercial drone scanners do exactly that on the usual frequencies and the police or the army used something like that at the time and found sod all. That's when they started going on about it being a complicated attack as they assumed the 'drone' either had a pre-programmed path so no radio signal or it had been modified by an 'expert' to run on a different frequency which 2.4ghz scanners could not see
> a big snub to British investigators who insisted there was definitely something there.
It was unidentified.
It was flying (maybe)
It was an object (possibly)
All that adds up to is more unexplained sightings. Some of which might have been real. None of which prove anything.
I wrote to my MP at the time describing the technical problems of holding the airport hostage with a drone for a week. The drone would fly for say 15 minutes and then have to fly back to base for a recharge. This would have to happen a lot giving ample opportunities to follow the drone back to it's owner.
MP called that a conspiracy theory.
Proof the Chinese* have developed a stealth cloak.
Clearly left the zipper undone and was spotted just before it could do it up properly. What's the Mandarin for "Ooh! matron!"?
* Ok, enough China-baiting: obviously the Russians or the CIA (who are the same people lizards anyway).
Actually, there WAS a drone there. After the initial scare, the police sent their own up to try and catch the (non-existent) miscreant. This triggered a further wave of reports, making the situation worse than it was originally.
Since then, plod has been remarkably quiet on the subject, though it is common knowledge in "certain circles"...
--
Pete
As the person doing the FoIAs and delving into this, no one really knows if there was or wasn't a drone for the first sighting. But the first sighting is itself highly suspect. It was raining at the time of the first sighting and it had been raining for some time beforehand, so anyone flying a drone would have had to take off in the rain. Even these days IP rated drones aren't in most cases truly waterproof and they're big expensive and easy to photograph.
Add to this LED lights on drones are low powered, so a drone would have to be close for its lights to be seen, close means even easier to describe and photograph. Most commercial drone pilots have to manually stick a strobe on their drones to fly at night.
The weather data recorded at Gatwick is on Airprox Reality Check so can be downloaded and even used in a flight simulator.
The coincidence in all of this, was one of the few drones that could have flown in the rain is the SkyRanger, most police forces can't even afford this model, the police team stationed at Gatwick being the exception that do own them. So it could have been there was no drone, it could be the police drones were mistaken for rogue drones, we don't know.
We know the events after that don't add up and we know, thanks to the FoIA that the airport itself began to completely ignore the sightings of drones that were made 1 day after counter drone systems turned up, which were AeroScope, Skyperion & Falcon Shield.
Falcon Shield is especially interesting as it had an optical sensor with thermal that can visually track a drone 1km away at night, this never saw a rogue drone, yet managed to pick up each deliberate friendly drone sortie.
Not exactly, not when the defence company Leonardo have said a rogue drone was never detected, the counter drone systems are there at the airport to prove something is not there so the airport can remain open when someone sees something in the sky they suspect could be a drone.
Admittedly the police never said anything at the time but from day 2 of Gatwick they had this on the roof at Gatwick which you can see in press photos at the time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIB0qPS8P1A
If you pay attention to this you'll see a demonstration of a consumer drone (a DJI Phantom) being visually tracked at 1km. If you then look at the former police constable's evidence to a parliamentary committee he says you can't film a drone 1/2 mile away... Erm, clearly you can, then again every photographer already knew this...
There have been many situations where confirmation bias kicks in and those involved reach faulty conclusions, The Second Gulf of Tonkin Incident was one such event - the crews of two US warships fired off a considerable amount of ordnance at an array of totally non-existent threats. Afterwards, this event was used to justify further escalation and military intervention.
Voyeurism from a drone ?
Seems a lot of effort/expense to go to to get some pictures of vey small people sitting in their gardens
Could save themselves a lot of time and money looking on the net for mucky pictures
Only people done so far for Voyeurism from the air, was a group in a police helicopter - and they have much better cameras than any consumer drone can carry
As someone who has taken part in 'Helicopter Voyeurism' I can confirm such an activity does exist. I spent the Summer of 76 flying around the UK doing helicopter pleasure flights at country shows. My job was to take the tickets, load the passengers (bikini wearing ladies guided to sit next to the pilot) and lock the door.
These were low level 90 second 'experience flights' and when we did the test flights with a stopwatch the pilot (the late, great Dick Meston) always looked for houses with swimming pools so we could fly-by them. The most memorable sighting was in Rhyl where a female house party took great delight in 'exposing' themselves when we flew over, as the afternoon progressed more flesh was revealed due to the consumption of alcohol and out flyover getting lower and lower. As a 16 year old this event is still etched in my mind much more than my BBC Model B activities a few years later. #goodolddays
It all reminds me of that time Tony Blair sent tanks to Heathrow, claiming that there was good evidence that terrorists had a surface-to-air missile and were preparing to use it. Curiously enough it happened on the day when he was trying to get one of his wars through the commons. What a remarkable coincidence. And we've never heard anything about the missile since.
"It all reminds me of that time Tony Blair sent tanks to Heathrow, claiming that there was good evidence that terrorists had a surface-to-air missile and were preparing to use it"
Well, that was yet again an example of Blair relying too heavily on US-led intelligence, exactly the same as the WMD in Iraq. The Pentagon claimed to have foiled a terrorist plot to attack Heathrow shortly afterwards.
"one of his wars"? Iraq 1.0 was a UN sanctioned operation. Iraq 2.0 was based on debatable/wonky US "intelligence", but given our so-called special relationship with the US why would he have cause to doubt it?
It is very very clear that the tanks were a political stunt with absolutely no intelligence behind them and without any intent or belief that they woudl protect the public.
How do I know? Because tanks or any sort of armoured vehicle are completely pointless and useless to prevent the claimed threat. If the threat had actually existed, or believed to exist, they would have reacted differently.
The drone panic was clearly a genuine response to a perceived threat by the authourities albeit one that was almost certainly entirely non-existant.
The contrast is quite striking a report of a drone just being near an airport leading to flights being cancelled versus a report of a group planning to use an anti-aircraft missile against aircraft resulting in no flights cancelled at all.
Hmm....
In Cambridge we've gained a monstrous barrier across King's Parade "because of terrorists".
... the only entities terrorizing the denizens of Cambridge are the city and county councilors.
I dunno about you lot in Blighty, but here in the US we're far more afraid of the stupidity of our government than we are of any so-called "terrorists" ... probably because the .gov is entirely too massive and pervasive (and getting worse daily), and so-called "terrorists" are rarer than hen's teeth.
Does anyone else remember, that the exact week of this 'drone' incident, Gatwick was up for sale? Or at least a portion of it was. Now, suppose that all of Gatwicks systems were current and state of the art perhaps a drone story wouldn't be needed. However, just suppose that their systems had suffered a meteoric failure, one that just might affect the sale and of course, the money. What is the best squirrel story that could deflect attention away from any decent journalist discovering this fact, you got it. A drone story.
Sale goes ahead.
Drone searchers pack up and go home.
He left DJI on Friday, gave his views on Gatwick over the weekend and started at Boston Dynamics on the Monday.
So he was expressing his personal view having kept an interest of the evidence being uncovered since 2018.
He didn't speak out against Gatwick while at DJI as he didn't want to drag the company into the debate.
He was one of the highest profile personalities in the drone industry.
I personally have no faith in the police’s expertise in flying drones. Only a couple weeks ago recently they were flying a drone (with infra-red facilities) to try and spot a person who had jumped off the Beachy Head cliffs to the bottom in a suicide (550 + ft) at night. They were unable to spot the remains. The local RLNI inshore life boat was called out and they asked the police if they would fly the drone again. The police replied that they had no battery power left for their drone so could not fly it. Eventually the main large lifeboat was called out. To top this saga a coastguard helicopter was then called in to do a search. This whole event must have cost thousands of pounds probably, just because the police did not have the forethought to bring more drone batteries out with them on a call out. Not of course to mention the life risk of the searchers on the ground/sea at the bottom of the cliffs. People like Lemmings come to Beachy Head to jump over almost on a weekly basis, so you would have thought that more batteries would have been carried by the police as its a regular occurrence.
No, don't press THAT button!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/19/sussex_police_drone_crash_crawley/
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