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Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

nytimes.com

91–100 of 150 posts

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Britain is covered in CCTV. Surely if there's a drone it will be visible in camera footage?

Yes, CCTVs in busy streets, sometimes in shop entrances. Not in Random places in the middle of an airport.

Sounds like that's the first step...

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Knocking a slow moving object out of the sky is literally not rocket science. No, but it's not a matter of some yahoos with a gun shooting them: https://twitter.com/sommervilletv/status/1080724993238069249

Pistols and rifles, not birdshot? RPGs? What a complete joke. If you put these morons in charge of hunting birds they'd probably conclude that shooting birds doesn't work either. Try hunting birds with pistols and rifles and you'll have the same result. Meanwhile in Kentucky: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/judge-rules-in-f... Meanwhile in Virginia: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/65-year-old-…

I think you might be underestimating the problem. Airports are generally spread across huge areas (square miles/km i.e. one or more football fields) and birdshot from shotguns has an effective maximum range of about 250 meters (according to various websites and charts), therefore you'd need a ton (hundreds?) of these micro-CIWS devices scattered around the perimeter to have any fighting chance. Also you want to make sure you don't hit any airplanes or helicopters already in the air. I can imagine certification from various government agencies in any country would take several years at best.

Furthermore, imagine you have your dream-drone-killer... how do you even find them? Neither of these recent sightings were even verified to be drones, they just received reports of sightings, therefore initially they would need to deploy devices to find/verify them. Once spotted, it wouldn't be hard to send a couple trained shooters with shotguns loaded with birdshot, assuming knowing their location isn't already enough to find the pilots...

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#94
post #10

Just as in Gatwick before this, the police and the airport are not able to produce even grainy footage of a drone that is supposedly "buzzing" the tower. Gatwick reported "67 sightings", but couldn't confirm if some (all?) were their own drones [1]. And now Parliament is tabling new powers for the police [2]. Was there ever any evidence presented that there was ever a drone present? Is there any evidence that this wa…

They were not all of their drones, because reports were coming in before the police had launched any drones. Among the people reporting drone sightings before the police turned up at Gatwick were pilots

* the people reporting drone sightings before the police turned up at Gatwick were pilots*

Considering that a passenger jet on final approach has a speed > 300 km/h and that a household drone is something like 30 cm wide you wonder how many of these drones were in fact hovering kestrels on the hunt for voles. How can you distinguish the two?

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Heathrow bear a resposibility to prove anything to you or any other random person on the internet? You seem to be insinuating some conspiracy by asking vague questions.

Err, yes, yes they do if it's going to be used as justification to pass sweeping new police powers.

This happened today. Can we not even wait for the incident to conclude and for them to get some planes off the ground before we start blowing the conspiracy whistle?

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#96
post #50
post #10

Just as in Gatwick before this, the police and the airport are not able to produce even grainy footage of a drone that is supposedly "buzzing" the tower. Gatwick reported "67 sightings", but couldn't confirm if some (all?) were their own drones [1]. And now Parliament is tabling new powers for the police [2]. Was there ever any evidence presented that there was ever a drone present? Is there any evidence that this wa…

IMO the odds of this being a mass hysteria event are at least 3:1 versus an actual drone being intentionally flown to disrupt air traffic. I would say it’s less likely an intentional misinformation campaign to get new police powers, but even that is more likely than an intentional drone attack, again just my opinion. It’s absolutely incumbent on the authorities to provide incontrovertible evidence of an illegal drone…

I have a first hand report from someone who works at gatwick that there was a drone hovering near the control tower for a while but I'll admit there seems a shortage of photos.

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#99
post #86

To those wondering why we can't just take down the drones, it's not as simple as a jammer or a shotgun. Jamming drones is a non starter for the most part. You can make a drone operate on just about any frequency you want and with modern equipment becoming more frequency agile, this will only get worse. A simple thought experiment would be a drone using GSM for video and control. Can you just jam all phones? Obviously…

Birdshot has such small energy when falling you hardly feel it. It is more like rain. No way it would damage the skin of an aircraft.

You overestimate the strength of aircraft exteriors. Even minor scratches become important under full stress.
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