I can't recall if this is true but are these the couple a national newspaper was insinuating were a couple of morons?
Drones over gatwick..
- Thread starter Felon
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Well for a start it has been reported in the press that the Israeli equipment specifically designed to stop drones had been deployed, they have various RF jamming capabilities regardless... not to mention they also have direction finding equipment.
Soldato
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What if the drone is running on 'auto pilot' and without GPS?
Then jamming it won't work.
Whether or not they have the capability to damage the electronics within the drone in some controlled fashion or not I don't know... this whole area of electronic countermeasures etc.. is rather sensitive for fairly obvious reasons.
The newspapers need to be sued heavily for their coverage.
One newspaper had the headline that they had been released without charge while showing a picture of the moment the police arrested them!
They should look to sue the police for wrongful arrest. It was clear they hadn't done it from the start.
One newspaper had the headline that they had been released without charge while showing a picture of the moment the police arrested them!
They should look to sue the police for wrongful arrest. It was clear they hadn't done it from the start.
What are you on about? Yes, they'll have had grounds for arrest, likely to secure evidence and prevent further offences from taking place.
People operating drones in the vicinity of an airport that's just suffered disruption due to drones are certainly going to be considered suspects until ruled out in some way.
Being arrested and then released isn't grounds for a wrongful arrest lawsuit.
RF Counter measures are a work in progress despite what the press will have you believe.
And can someone explain how an autopilot would work without recieving positioning information?
Not sure if drones with this functionality actually exist over the shelf as anything with GPS will perform better, but there would be nothing stopping a drone using dead reckoning to work out where it was, especially if it has internal gyroscopes.
Soldato
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Surely the military has equipment that can do enough damage to the electronics on a drone to bring it down? In this day and age that would seem an essential bit of kit, not just to stop being used as a platform to drop ordnance but to stop them being used to gather intelligence.
I'm on about people being arrested for a drone based crime for no other reason than living locally and having an interest in RC helicopters and (possibly) drones. If the Man City ground gets vandalised you don't just go around arresting all of the local Man United fans and interrogating them without reasonable grounds to suspect they were involved.
They weren't operating drones, as far as I can tell from what's been reported they were basically arrested based on living locally and 1-2 year old adverts on Facebook selling RC helicopters. Like Trappi$t says now they have an arrest on their record for a major internationally reported crime, when the police could have easily done basic investigation and realised they had nothing to do with it, without rushing in heavy handed and arresting them.
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And destroy the airports equipment in the process, if it was even receiving signals in the first place, which is doubtful. EMP's are still wide area effect as far as i'm aware. You also can't just block 2.4Ghz signal either, you could be blocking any number of emergency calls, as well as potentially a call that'd help you identify it.
All they seem to have currently is an Israeli system that blocks signals, which is useless if there aren't any.
Aircraft have had the ability to navigate using INS/IRS, basically an inertial reference system, for decades. Originally the size of a small fridge and using lasers to provide acceleration data, modern implementations of the technology are about the size of a match box, and I would imagine more accurate.
The system I'm familar with (an older version) would be accurate to about +/- 10 miles over about 10 hours of flight or 5000 miles (very approximately from memory, with GPS the system is rarely taken to its limit).
I own a Mavic which I believe has a similar technology, I don't know much about it but it gets a bit wobbly when it can't see satellites.
The military has had the ability to jam GPS signals since, I would imagine, shortly after it was invented. I've come across it a few times when operating an aircraft in the vicinty of warzones or military exercises. I don't know if they used it at Gatwick but it would be a gutsy call to make. I have no idea how tightly such jamming could be applied and altough loss of a GPS signal is no great problem for the majority of air traffic, losing the capability over the southeast of the UK would stress out already very stressed airspace.
Somebody able to implement accurate inertial referencing independant of a reliable GPS in a drone would really have to know what their doing. To my limited understanding of drones (from simply owning one) - it could imply the possibility that this was some kind of state sponsored act.
My bet..
Working at Gatwick, known drone enthusiast.
His neighbour reported him.
They pulled his phone track data, shows him going to Gatwick a lot recently.
Arrested on suspicion?
Would make sense. Probably nothing to do with him
On the Indy, had interviewed his boss, and the guy said "the alleged times and days the police came up with, he was working on site with the team".
While the Daily Mail called the couple "saboteurs" outright.
Tbh the police blanket profiling is so ridiculous that someone could believe that we are working in a Police state.
In this case the guys were taken for questioning for 2 days, because the guy was "drone enthusiast" so by default a suspect to be questioned for 2 days.
I remember 5 years back an ad on radio that run for 2 years.
"Do you have a neighbour living alone, with windows closed not allowing access to his property? Does it have brand new bought car that doesn't match his income? Please report to police"
Exactly that profile campaign run for drugs production & sale, pedophilia and terrorism.
We have a discussion in this forum about this laughing that how many (incl myself) are ticking all those. And more as i am an "immigrant" also.
Yup.
It's a technology that has been in use in full size aircraft for what, 50-60? years (IIRC V2's used a really early/basic version), still used as a primary location system in subs and IIRC there were variants of it developed for old style drones and larger RC craft going back 20+ years before GPS became a realistic option.
No.
True. But Monkey See, Monkey Do! Many things are possible but not done until someone does it first, gets attention, and the immitators come along. Happy Slapping wasn't a thing. Then someone did it, and it became a thing. The technology had been cheap and around for years, but it suddenly started everywhere at once. The authorities know that if no-one is convicted for this, there will be immitators. Now the immitators probably will be caught both because we'll be better prepared next time and because they wont realise that whoever was behind this was more savvy than just flying some off-the-shelf drone over the airport whilst sitting in their car outside the gates. But that's beside the point - lack of conviction will mean immitators.
Soldato
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Kind of convenient isn't it ?
I guess it reinforces the "they were all automated" idea as nobody would be stupid enough to orchestrate all this drama and then leave the perfect evidence behind would they ?