>>17036 It isn't school playgrounds I would worry about - here are some interesting and relevant things from 2 (!!) years ago about what the ISIS drone makers have been getting up to.
As you can see, these are all the consumer-level DJI ones repurposed, so fairly easy to mitigate against.
If I wanted to spy on school playgrounds, or something similar jimmy-like, I think it would be a flying wing rather than a quadcopter. If I just wanted to hurt people, well, RC aircraft have been around for years, flying something into someone would definitely kill, and in the old days they would have petrol and shit - far more combustible. Most model aircraft/drones nowadays are ridiculous fragile (carbon fibre, balsa, polystyrene makes up nearly all of them), you wouldn't be able to take many people out. There is also the cost - the OP picture is a professional level DJI used for filming - I guess one could repurpose it for kiddie-fiddling-type surveillance, but it costs about 6 grand and you would be likely to lose it; I imagine even paedos are working to a budget. Lastly, these things can stay in the air a LONG time - there are some amazing YouTubes showing first-person-video flights.
"We are also going through many reports of sightings of drone activity over the last few days," he said.
He added there was "always a possibility that there may not have been any genuine drone activity in the first place", but they were working on a range of information from members of the public, police officers and staff working at Gatwick who had reported otherwise.
Christ on a fucking bike, it gets worse.
PERHAPS THE WHOLE THING WAS TROLL COMPLAINTS???
So a load of eco-warriors make complaints saying they saw a drone and that shuts an international airport?? This is even more nuts.
That surely can't be right. The tower would have been able to see the drones and they wouldn't have shut down the entire airport without such confirmation.
>>17045 It's human nature. All it takes is someone in the tower to think they've seen the drone everyone is talking about or to adopt the mentality that they they daren't admit
they can't see it because the consequence of saying it's fine for planes to continue flying leading to an incident when they were forewarned would be too great.
>>17040 I reckon it's time Purpz hands over our resident drone-lad. Today it's closing airports and stopping kids going outside at playtime but next thing you know he will stop Father Christmas from coming.
>>17049 I've always thought it particularly cruel to try and train animals to intercept drones - the chances of the props turning them into mincemeat is pretty fucking high, even if you have super eagle eyesight and claws.
Far more sensible to let the Police cosplay as anti-tank soldiers.
A few pigeon hunters would solve this problem nicely. I know drones are pricey, but if you can't keep it in your proverbial pants, you should learn what a bell end you are.
The Dutch have abandoned the idea of using trained eagles.
It's an endemic problem in all sorts of research - they didn't sanity-check their hypothesis and method by asking some people already working in that field. I keep seeing experiments where they only tested on the consumer-grade DJI drones, presumably because they're easy for novices to get up and flying; the problem is that these drones are incredibly benign in all sorts of ways. They're small, they're slow, they don't produce a lot of torque and they're designed to be as safe as possible in a crash. Crudely speaking, they're expensive toys.
A decent heavy-lift drone of the type used by professional photographers is a genuinely scary bit of kit. It'd make absolute fucking mincemeat out of a bird of prey. Serious racing quads are capable of 0-60mph in under 2 seconds and a top speed of well over 100mph. Accidents involving larger model helicopters have caused decapitations - they're basically flying lawnmowers. Anyone who thought that an eagle might be a serious deterrent to drones clearly hasn't asked any radio control hobbyists.
>>17053 That camera drone is fair enough - scary amount of battery, but otherwise just a nice big drone.
The mad helicopter, though - even watching it at 0.25 speed, it's insane. It just seems to row itself through the air. How on earth can it have enough side thrust to do that? The multiple-g up & down is impressive, but the off-axis stuff is stunning. Clearly matey doing the flying is quite good - but the machine's performance is unreasonable. Not sure I'd want to see an FPV feed...
I don't have a clue what I'm talking about but what if every drone had a remote identifying feature, sort of like a remotely accessible pet's microchip,then if law enforcement had a skeleton key type of override feature and could take over the remote control.
>>17058 I can build a drone from scratch if I want, Make PCBs, solder components onto it, load open source software into it. Plans like yours would only work on commercially made drones, through legit sales channels, and would only affect the lawful and idiots, not miscreants.
>>17059 Simple solution. If a drone doesn't provide identification, shoot the fucker down. The technology already exists to do this without using projectiles.
>>17061 >If it's pissing around with an airport, why ask it for ID?
I'm not ruling out the possibility that in future there may be legitimate reasons for a drone to be at an airfield. Also it would be consistent with existing air and sea practice where you hail an unknown craft before firing upon it. If you know who's operating a given drone, you can notify them if it's going somewhere it shouldn't. In future it could be used to alert an autonomous vehicle to emergency airspace restrictions.
Why can't a drone just be tracked by old fashion means. I assume Gatwick has a radar system and a few helicopters around what's wrong with just finding out where it lands and seeing who collects it and giving the opperater the traditional 'polite conversation whilst the cameras are off down at the station'?
Yes you mean where military aircraft fly low so the curve of the earth blocks the radar signal. Now I want you to think about why I logically think that wouldn't apply when you are within visual sight of an airport and and you need constant signal from a radio control unit.
Modern brushless electric drivetrains deliver absolutely insane amounts of power. The limiting factor used to be servo motors, but they went high-voltage brushless a few years ago. At the extreme end of 3d aerobatics, the main challenge for aeromodellers is building an airframe and rotor system that can cope with the unbelievable g-forces involved. It's not unheard of for a model to just rip itself apart in mid-air.
I can confirm that an FPV feed from an aerobatic helicopter is a horrendous ordeal of motion sickness.
This was discussed at length in the other thread; the police are simply unwilling to shoot a drone down because they can't be sure of where the bullet will land. You know how some Arabs and Yanks like to shoot guns in the air as a celebration? People regularly die when those bullets come back to earth. A shotgun with frangible shot would be reasonably safe, but you're limited to a range of about 100m. Larger drones can happily cruise at a couple of kilometres above ground level.
As was discussed at length in the /101/ thread, there's no easy answer to stray drones. The radio control systems they use are highly resistant to jamming and it's entirely feasible for a serious hobbyist to build a fully autonomous drone that can keep flying even in a complete radio blackout. Jamming GPS signals in close proximity to London is potentially more disruptive than a drone over an airport.
You can definitely see a drone on radar, but at that level of sensitivity you'd be picking up all sorts of other junk as well. A savvy drone builder could use radiotransparent materials (kevlar and glass fibre) for the frame and propellers, reducing the radar profile of their drone to little more than a pigeon. In the general case, false alarms are likely to be far more disruptive than actual drone incursions.
So do we seriously not know who it was? In today's world with all the surveillance bullshit. How is that possible? My uncle got a ticket in the post for dropping a cigarette butt in the street once.
From what I've read, they generally prefer nesting deterrents like spikes and nets combined with active deterrents like birds of prey, noise generators and lasers. Wandering around airside with a shotgun is a massive liability issue.
>The technology already exists to do this without using projectiles
There are some devices on the market that might take down some drones some of the time.
A 2.4GHz jamming device will "shoot down" some radio controlled drones. Some of them will just drop out of the sky, some of them will carefully land themselves, some of them will gracefully return to a pre-programmed landing site using GPS, some of them just won't care because they're not operating on 2.4GHz. A wideband jammer will affect these non-2.4GHz systems, but they'll also interfere with everything else in the area that uses radio; of particular concern are mobile phones, emergency service and aeronautical radio systems. FHSS control signals used by modern radio control systems are remarkably difficult to jam, especially if the operator is using high-gain antennas and exceeding the legal transmitter power limit.
A GPS jammer won't "shoot down" anything. Some drones flying on a GPS-based autopilot will automatically land, some will fly north until they leave the range of the jammer or run low on battery (at which point they'll land), some of them will failover to IMU navigation and continue their flight plan with mildly degraded autopilot accuracy.
A GPS spoofer would cause most (but not all) GPS-guided drones to hurtle back to earth, but they're controlled weapons under international law because they pose a tremendous threat to civil aviation. The GPS signals sent by the satellite constellation are extremely weak and they propagate in unpredictable ways, so a GPS spoofing device may cause navigation errors in aircraft operating tens or hundreds of miles away. You might take the drone down, but there's a very real chance that you could cause an emergency situation on a passenger jet.
All of the above options are currently illegal (even for police forces) without an amendment to the Wireless Telegraphy Act. The Armed Forces can legally deploy these systems, which is why they were called in at Gatwick. For obvious reasons, we're not entirely sure what technologies they are using.
There are various entanglement-based devices on the market, but most of them haven't been demonstrated against high-performance drones. They'll definitely take down a DJI Phantom, but they might be torn to shreds by a big hexacopter or simply outrun by a fast quad.
Some researchers have demonstrated prototypes of ultrasound-based devices that would interfere with the accelerometers and gyroscopes in the drone's aeronautics package, causing a loss of attitude control. These devices have not been successfully demonstrated in real-world situations and would in any case have very limited range.
>>17084 Just knock together a few high PSI air vortex cannons in someone's shed or buy a few hail cannons off the yanks. if it doesn't blow the drone apart it will fall like a brick. There's no risk of a small to medium size air-vortex taking down an airliner, no projectiles hurting peoples feelings and can probably keep pigeons away on an automated system.
>>17307 You ain't fooling us with that old chestnut. It'll be the front page of the Mail for you tomorrow 'PUSHIN' HIS LUCK: CANAL ENTHUSIAST BLOCKING ASYLUM SEEKER DEPORTATIONS'.
Whack some lasers on it! I can't believe the Drone Troll hasn't thought of this yet. The real world effectiveness would likely be quite limited, but ire would be immense.
