I’ve looked on aghast at the disruption caused to air travel at Gatwick Airport that has been caused by a couple of drones flown by idiots. For several days now the airport, one of the major international ones serving London and the South East, has been inoperative because drones have been seen flying near and over the airport.
It has been extremely embarrassing for me as a Briton to see how so few idiots could cause so much damage yet not be caught. This is a problem that should have been foreseen by both the airport authorities and by the police. It is my belief that if money should have been invested in the sort of radio direction finding (RDF) and jamming equipment that may have ended this intrusion into Gatwick’s airspace much earlier than it has done. There are risks involved in jamming the 2.4/5.6GHz RF bands that are commonly used by drones. Jamming the signals in this way would cause not only disruption to nearby wifi and similar innocent wireless devices, but would also risk the target drone coming down in an uncontrolled manner, but it may have been better to risk these problems than have Gatwick so comprehensively disrupted. The risk of the drone coming down uncontrollably could be mitigated by warning those in and around the airport that that a 5kg drone is about to drop out of the sky and that people should take cover. The compensation that would need to be paid out to those whose property had suffered damage from the falling drone is a great deal less than the disruption that the drone has caused. Warnings of disruption could also be employed if the bands used by the drones were to be temporarily jammed so that legitimate users of these bands could take action to prevent too much business disturbance.
We’ve had several days of disturbance to air travel in the South East now and I believe that this disturbance could and should have been dealt with in a manner that would not have disrupted air travel at such a busy time of the year. The military have had to be called in and it is to be assumed that they are deploying RDF and jamming equipment is much better than that which may be available to Ofcom the UK regulator of the RF spectrum.
However, the government and the airport management should never have allowed the situation to get this bad. We’ve known for years that drones when flown irresponsibly can cause problems and could be employed by terrorists and criminals as tools to achieve their ends. Why have those in authority not done anything to prevent this incident happening? We as a nation spend extraordinary amounts of money to have physical security at airports yet cannot seem to manage to install RDF units and antennas to establish the direction from which the control signal used by these drones is coming from. It’s unlikely that these are military drones with advanced frequency hopping and spread spectrum (FHSS) technology, this sort of tech is expensive and limited in availability. It is more likely to be the case that these drones are fixed frequency and any bit of advanced spectrum analysis equipment and software would be able to sniff out anomalous transmissions that cannot be identified as wifi, burglar alarms or similar devices that use the 2.4/5.6GHz frequency bands.
It is my belief that the danger to airports from errant drones has not been properly planned for by those who should have foreseen this sort of problem occurring. Failure to put in place the correct tech, staff and procedures for dealing with drone incursions is partly why this problem has gone on for so long.
There is, as it is not obvious to many, that Gatwick has deliberately been disrupted, but the question is by whom? The first thought that many will have is that this is the result of Islamic terrorists and although this should not be wholly discounted, this is not the usual modus operandi of such groups. An Islamic terrorist would be more likely to pack the drone with explosives and crash it into an aircraft or into the passenger terminal than just fly around the airport for a bit. It has been suggested that these disruptions are the work of teenagers or drunks or even those local people angered by the prospect of Gatwick airport being expanded. My own view is that teenagers or drunks would have got bored and given up long ago and this sort of activity is not usual for people involved in planning disputes. James Dellingpole over at Breitbart has made the interesting suggestion that this could be the work of eco-loons and he may be onto something here. These groups do have a track record for disrupting air travel by making incursions into airports and protesting. The eco-loons also do, as Mr Dellingpole said, possess the sort of misanthropic attitudes that could propel one of their number to do something like this and destroy people’s hard earned holidays at one of the busiest times of the year.
No matter who has carried out this drone attack, and there is still much speculation, what is difficult to deny is that this incident is extremely embarrassing for the UK government. It has exposed a huge security hole in Britain’s air travel system, one that should and could have been planned for. It has also made Britain the laughing stock of the world. Although Gatwick airport is now open there have been a number of negative comparisons being made between Britain, which can’t even stop one or two drones from flying over an airport and Israel that daily manages to deal with the problem of rocket attacks. Sadly, these negative comparisons to how sensible nations deal with airspace incursions and how Britain is dealing with the Gatwick incident are beginning to look more and more justified.
It’s interesting that the police whinge that they can’t respond to ‘low level’ crime because all their resources are drained by anti-terror activities. Yet is this isn’t terrorism, what is?
And they are helpless.
Agree there. This incident, which could well be linked to eco-terrorism, has shown the police up badly for being incredibly incompetent. It has also shown up Gatwick and probably other airports as being woefully unprepared to deal with what was a known future problem, that of drones.
It could also be linked to the friends of the prophet as a simple way to disrupt the khuffahs’ Christmas, although the militant eco-wankers look more likely as neither care how many they kill to make their points. Especially around Gatwick, the risk of being hit by a falling drone is small, a better strategy would’ve been to give permission for any local skeet/clay pigeon shooting club to blast these drone out of the sky.
One other thing this fiasco has proven yet again, is that all of the treats and bluster about “compulsory registration” and “licensing” is all willy–waving bollocks by politicians and official to make thselves look important and threatening to us cowering plebs. Likewise it proves that no amount of licensing or regulation will force compliance or detect unknown drones, guns, smoked salmon, sugary drinks or meat pies if the owner doesn’t wish to comply.
Should shot them out of the sky, or alternatively there are now companies that use a net system that captures the drone and parachutes it to earth. Saw a demo at a recent security exhibition at Olympia.
As for this fiasco we have been made to look like blundering idiots. Shoot ’em down, worry later.
This ties in with my point of view that it may have been cheaper for the govt / airport to compensate individuals for property damage caused by a falling drone than to allow the disruption to continue. As an aside, I was coming back from dropping Laughing Boy off at nursery and the Radio 4 today programme had on it a guy from a drone defence company who said that these drones may have been pre-programmed to attack the airport, removing the need for a jammable two way control/telemetry link. If this claim is correct, then it does indicate that this may be a much more sophisticated attack than I and others may have originally assumed. However, that does not absolve the airport and the government from blame in not anticipating this problem and putting in place procedures to deal with this potential problem.