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London's Heathrow Airport Halts Departures Over Drone Sighting (cnbc.com) 128

Posted by msmash from the growing-problem dept.
London's Heathrow Airport halted departures on Tuesday after a report of a drone sighting, less than a month after a similar event crippled operations at a major U.K. airport. From a report: "We are currently responding to a drone sighting at Heathrow and are working closely with the Met Police to prevent any threat to operational safety," a spokesperson for the airport said. "As a precautionary measure, we have stopped departures while we investigate. We apologise to passengers for any inconvenience this may cause."
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London's Heathrow Airport Halts Departures Over Drone Sighting More

London's Heathrow Airport Halts Departures Over Drone Sighting

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  • DDOS: Drone Denial of Service (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MDMurphy ( 208495 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @02:47PM (#57925868)
    Could a few dozen drones, a few at each of major airports, with some nice shiny radar reflectors, clog the air traffic system? They could pop out of parked cars spook everyone, to hide after a minute or two, or be replaced by the next one in the queue. Can it be that easy? I would hope not.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You don't even need the drones, just reports of people seeing them.

      The previous incident the summary mentions? The police aren't sure there even was a drone, and so far there's been no proof that anyone was flying drones near the airport.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Can it be that easy? I would hope not.

      It is even easier than that. You don't even need your parked car. All you need is to convince someone at Heathrow that there is a drone in the area and they will voluntarily suspend all departures. This is actually happening right now. It also happened last month at Gatwick.

    • I'm looking at this as proof-of-concept. Next step are the protection payments. I mean ongoing invoices to be paid in bitcoin for keeping the place drone-free.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      of course! the enforcers for the 1% are dead set on making a big deal of anything drone related

    • 1) They have military anti-drone devices deployed at UK airports. A persistent threat will be disabled.

      2) Other parts of their government are monitoring radio broadcasts. If you make yourself into a persistent threat to air travel, they will track your transmissions.

      So, yeah, you could disrupt things for an afternoon, but you'd spend decades in prison as a terrorist.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by saider ( 177166 )

        If they catch you.

      • A drone does not necessarily require a radio to be guided. It can steer itself via GPS+IMU, no need for the operator to communicate. So finding it, or it's operator, via any transmitted signals, isn't the most reliable method of deterrence. If your object is mischief, it's best not to be standing outside underneath it with a box and a big antenna looking up.

        • Yeah, if somebody with advanced technical skills is doing it, it might actually make them easier to catch.

          It is a really stupid type of thing to do, it is on the level of a prank, but a prank that can send you to prison as a terrorist. Any smart person who is insane enough to do that already is on the list of people who make online threats. They probably got onto the list with stupid jokes that they didn't realize would be taken as threats!

          And did they do it without having to do an internet search on it fir

      • I have several wings that are fully autonomous, they navigate a pre-determined flight path, take actions at certain gps co-ords and then fly back to me. The total radio connection time is arming the flight controller at launch and then radio control to land. Even then I could let them land auto if I wanted but that would probably break them.

        The only way to shut them down is to shoot them down or spoof local GPS enough to put them into the ground / solid object.

        • Why use GPS? Dead reckoning will get you close enough.

          • Because it's cheap, allows more complex flight paths and the ability to accurately position hold.

            Once you are in the air it is very difficult to measure how far you have traveled without GPS. Dead reckoning is fine if you want to just fly-by, but to know you are at a particular location you need gps.

          • GPS is receive-only, you don't transmit anything, so that much is reasonable.

            Dead reckoning takes a long time to program, and has to be tuned for each device. GPS you only have to do standard GIS transformations, and the rest of the hardware is irrelevant.

            Dead reckoning you give up the first time you try to operate it outdoors in a slight wind.

        • The total radio connection time is arming the flight controller at launch and then radio control to land.

          OK, but you've already done this in public. The military monitors radio traffic. Operational information about your control system is already stored in databases, but it isn't parsed out or cross-referenced or anything. Yet.

          If you turn into a terrorist trying to disrupt air traffic, you'll be even easier to catch that the guy using an off-the-shelf system.

          Being more clever doesn't actually help the terrorist in this case; it simply shows a lot more planning and increases the prison sentence they'll get. It

          • All of this stuff is off the shelf components. It is the absolute standard stuff that anybody that plays with RC gear uses.

            All the flight control and way point planning is done via iNav - https://github.com/iNavFlight/... [github.com]
            Flight controllers are ~$20-$50 off ebay
            The radio receivers are generic, $20 items.
            GPS module is $20

            It is all done in the 2.4g band. There isn't anything to detect, parse or cross reference. It's all consumable crap made for peanuts in china. There is nothing special about anything I'm

  • Could it be another construction crane sighting?

  • Drone warfare (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Thanks Obama.

  • Is that all that it takes? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @02:53PM (#57925932)
    If flying a drone is all that it takes to bring Heathrow down to its knees, the Brits are even in more trouble than we thought.
    • I'm thinking they need to invest in the technology to quickly and safely shoot these out of the sky and resume operations. I'm also thinking most of them would cause less damage to a jet than a goose strike would.
      • It would be nice if the industry self regulated and build in some sort of disarm signal sensor so emergency workers can bring drones down. It wouldn't work for custom drones but would work for most cases

      • Re:Is that all that it takes? (Score:5, Informative)

        by ISayWeOnlyToBePolite ( 721679 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @03:23PM (#57926156)

        I'm thinking they need to invest in the technology to quickly and safely shoot these out of the sky and resume operations. I'm also thinking most of them would cause less damage to a jet than a goose strike would.

        Some tests have been made with drone and aircraft collisions https://www.aerospacetestingin... [aerospacet...tional.com]
        “The bird did more apparent damage to the leading edge of the wing, but the Phantom penetrated deeper into the wing and damaged the main spar, which the bird did not do,”

        • that test was at 238mph while most take-off and approach speeds are around 150-180mph (based on google - I'm not a pilot)... wouldn't the test have made more sense at 180mph?

        • I'm thinking they need to invest in the technology to quickly and safely shoot these out of the sky and resume operations. I'm also thinking most of them would cause less damage to a jet than a goose strike would.

          Some tests have been made with drone and aircraft collisions https://www.aerospacetestingin... [aerospacet...tional.com]
          “The bird did more apparent damage to the leading edge of the wing, but the Phantom penetrated deeper into the wing and damaged the main spar, which the bird did not do,”

          Not to take away from a test result that is truly concerning about the structural impact to the aircraft, they tested it against a Mooney M20. This aircraft isn't particularly large. I kind of wonder how the wing structure of a larger airline hold up against the same impact?

          I would think the greatest concern with an airliner would not be structural damage to the wing but risk of fire of deeper penetration from a metal object into the wing tanks.

          • I would be more interested to know if it's even possible to divert a drone into the path of an airplane flying at 180-238mph with such a precision that you can hit the engines.

            • If you were really trying to take out a planes engines you would use a swarm of drones that would launch at once to a predetermined altitude. Then let the plane fly into the cloud. One should hit an engine.

              Getting a single drone into a planes engine on purpose would be hellishly hard. I race drones and a standard race gate is 1.52m x 1.52m. People hit those stationary gates every race and get taken out. Trying to hit one moving at 180mph even on a known path would be down to pure fluke.

              • Which implies that shutting down an entire airport when a single drone is spotted is over reacting to state it mildly.

                • Personally I think it is a massive over reaction. Personally I'd be more worried about red necks taking pot shots at aircraft.

            • Yes it's called augmented proportional navigation and it's been known for decades.
              • And that would work when the speed differences are so extreme between two moving objects? I can see that this is used for cruise missiles but they move quite fast as compared with the slow speed of a drone vs the airplane that it wants to hit.

          • It is a very light and fast aircraft. Not a 100 ton airliner. You could dent a moneys wing with your fist (it would hurt). The leading edge of an airliner is much, much thicker. It is like comparing a rowing boat to an ocean liner.

            And that drone in the experiment was not a 500g consumer drone but something weighing over 1kg. Shot out of a cannon. And it still failed to destroy the wing -- the pilot would probably have limped home.

            In all of this, NOBODY had questioned the size of the drones spotted.

          • I thought the same, but then I looked at the numbers. A Mooney M20 has a skin thickness of 0.025" at the tip increasing to 0.04" at the inner 50% of the wing*. The skin thickness of an A340 at the leading edge slats is 1mm (2mm for an A320)**. 0.04" is 1.0.16mm, so the thickness is about right (the video shows the impact where the thickness to chord ratio is fairly high, which suggests near the root).

            Leading edge curvature may also effect the results. A relatively thin wing will have a higher curvature whic

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          That test simply shot a projectile at a wing and has been widely discredited.

          Sure it's going to do damage but it's not at all close to realistic. You need a wind tunnel and then simply drop the drone and see whether it will ever hit a wing. If a flock of birds could do as much damage, then we'd never get any planes of the ground.

          • That test simply shot a projectile at a wing and has been widely discredited.

            Sure it's going to do damage but it's not at all close to realistic. You need a wind tunnel and then simply drop the drone and see whether it will ever hit a wing. If a flock of birds could do as much damage, then we'd never get any planes of the ground.

            Feel free to add to the discussion by providing a link.

      • Just disrupt the RF signal? Most of these drones aren't autonomous. I think in most of these cases though that the drones go out of sight when authorities showed up to investigate.

        • All DJI drone will go into failsafe mode and either hold position or return to base. They could also have been setup to fly a predetermined path.

          Building an autonomous drone from cheap off the shelf parts is trivial.

      • I'm also thinking most of them would cause less damage to a jet than a goose strike would.

        Based on what? Certainly not physics which includes things like mass and density.

    • What if those drones are carrying knives?

    • If flying a drone is all that it takes to bring Heathrow down to its knees ...

      It doesn't even take that. There is no physical or photographic evidence that there was actually a drone. It was just a reported "sighting".

    • And they don't even have to be real, flying, drones either. Forget about terrorism. Drones are where it's at.

      Nothing I've seen so far has led me to believe there ever was any drone at Gatwick, nor have I seen any proof of a drone in this instance either. Can't prove a negative of course--there could maybe have have been an idiot flying nearby. It's a tough call to make. What I wouldn't stand for is police acting the way they did in the Gatwick case. What a disaster. I hope that couple gets some good compe

    • I made the kids watch this recently. Must have been a different country named Britain that the one we know today.

      (Most Australian kids are taught zero 20th century history at school. Zero. Due to a National Curriculum.)

    • the Brits are even in more trouble than we thought.

      Implying that flying a drone around Orly or LAX wouldn't have the same effect?

  • The only way to remove drones is to cease life services for the drone operators.

    Call in the SAS.

    • Maybe this sounds a bit tin-foily, but since they still have no idea who was using the drones at Gatwick - highly publicized shitshow of arresting the wrong people aside - and now it's happened at Heathrow, I'm wondering if this isn't some foreign power testing to seeif some mid-range autonomous drones are capable of bringing air travel for much of a country to a halt for a few thousand dollars worth of equipment.

      If so, the SAS is probably going to have a very hard time finding the people involved as they w

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )

        but since they still have no idea who was using the drones at Gatwick

        We still have no idea what kind of drones they were, or even if they were drones at all, and nothing more than hysterical UFO reports.

  • UFO (Score:2)

    by ebonum ( 830686 )

    I saw an Arquillian Battle Cruiser near JFK!

    Shut it down!

  • Keep Calm and Ca... Holy shit! Is that a flying piece of plastic?? Shut everything down now!!!!1!!!

    • Yeah a piece of plastic with a few very heavy iron cores that travel at high speed and do wonders when they impact planes.

      "Wow is that a bullet coming towards me! Stop!"

  • This is just stage 1: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sheramil ( 921315 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @03:11PM (#57926070)

    Stage 2 involves deploying drones that somewhat resemble pigeons.

    Stage 3 is where the relevant authorities discover they can't tell the drones from the pigeons, and all air traffic is halted, permanently. The pigeons win.

  • news from inside the shoe event horizon (Score:3)

    by Thud457 ( 234763 ) on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @03:13PM (#57926080) Homepage Journal
    The actual problem is that Heathrow is having problems with its supplier of lemon-soaked paper napkins.

    They just don't want to unnecessarily alarm people with talk about the incipient collapse of civilization.

  • Why not just shooting at that flying junk?

    • Why not come to the UK aglider? We could do with your magic expertise of hitting a drone first shot in such a way that no debris gets left behind on runways/taxi-ways to be sucked up into engines.

      Of course, with your shooting being so accurate we needn't worry about missed shots carrying a rifle bullet onto the two major motorways around the airport (the busiest roads in Europe according to some sources) or into a terminal full of people, or into hotels ....

      Or maybe, just maybe, the UK authorities consider

      • You know a lot about the airports, don't you?
        You know a lot about the space between the users area and the lanes. Don't you?
        You know a whole lot about early intrusion detection (not IT) systems at airports, don't you?

        Good for you.
        I am here, though.

        • As it happens, I do know Heathrow very well. I live nearby and have used it many times. It's in an area of relatively high population density (apart from the reservoirs and lakes a few miles to the west).

          The airport is bounded on two sides by major motorways with another major road to the east and it has terminal buildings in the middle. Aircraft are parked between the runways and along the side of the airport.

          It would be difficult to draw a shot line that didn't run any danger of collateral damage.

          Even

          • You may know Heathrow, but you don't know a thing about firearms, and not much about aircraft operations. Firearms: Why use a rifle/pistol? A shotgun has a maximum range of about 300 yards. It was *designed* to hit flying targets. In terms of the risks of collateral damage, how about looking at the number of casualties on the ground from the Battle of Britain? Ya know, the one where there was massive air combat over a large urban area (London). Aircraft: so, you have to clean up the debris. You have to do

  • Welcome to the drone age.

  • In the gatwick incident, the police admitted that there may not have been a drone originally, then the police flew their own drones which may have been reported as further drone sightings.

    The technology cat is out of the bag. Anyone with a little smart and a little money can build a drone that ignores the rules.

    • No, the police admitted that some of the drones may have been police drones. That's very different from "the police admitted that there may not have been a drone originally". It's just the way the headlines were written. Take the Torygraph, for example, and then compare the 1st paragraph of the actual article.

      Source: Gatwick Airport drone sightings may have been of police equipment, chief constable admits [telegraph.co.uk]

      Some of the drone sightings which kept Gatwick Airport on lockdown for 36 hours may have been reports of Sussex Police's own aircraft

      Like you say however, it'd be very easy to build a drone that uses a single nitro engine and collective

  • The drone hysteria, and not drones, has armed mischief makers. It now looks like the Gatwick incident didn't actually involve any drones at all. There isn't much evidence that there was any wrong-doing at all in the Gatwick incident. I wonder if there will be at Heathrow.

    I have a DJI Mavic Air for photography and a couple of self-built racing/acro drones for fun. The Air's electronics make it a cinch to fly, but it won't allow it to anywhere near an airport. Even if it could, it's so docile that it would

    • The chances of a drone getting into a jet engine are extremely low, but they will make a serious mess if it happens.

      When a small bird like a pigeon strikes a modern turbofan engine the main fan converts it to coarse pate and hurls most of it through the bypass channel. Any small amounts that do pass through the core of the engine are unlikely to damage the turbine wheels. Ingesting a larger bird like a goose usually causes main rotor failure which will destroy the engine immediately.

      The important difference

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