When can I buy travel insurance that covers “drones at the airport”?
I think your comment is tongue in cheek, but I wonder if trip interruption insurance would cover this?
Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
101–110 of 150 posts
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#102Just 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…
The problem is that once people are told there is a drone they will look for one, and some of them will see drones that aren't there. This could easily be triggered by one genuine drone sighting. It might be better if people aren't told about the drone in the first place. Of course they will demand to know why their flights are delayed, but they might be better off if the hysteria is prevented while the authorities g…
The same phenomenon could be witnessed during the right wing terror attack at Munich OEZ. There was only one shooter active in a rather distant part of Munich, but there were a LOT of reports of shooting sounds from all over the city. One panicked dude jumped through a glass bar window for safety and injured himself, and cops had basically the city on lockdown as they had to verify and clear ever more locations.
It was the probably most stressful event in younger Munich history for both public and police/EMS.
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#103I kind of struggle to understand how there isn't enough equipment and electrical engineering expertise on site at a modern airport to pinpoint these drones really quickly - especially at Heathrow. Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
> Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?
Brush motors sure, brush sparks are nasty EM interference sources. Brushless motors by design don't emit this kind of RF noises, only the motor controllers.
But in any case the power levels are hovering on the undetectable given all the noise from the airplanes, the radar systems, computers, cellphones, ...
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The question posed is not whether anyone reported seeing drones, but whether the reports are accurate. The fact that you got a first-hand report personally doesn't mean it's any more reliable than the first-hand reports the police received.
The claim that they saw it hovering "for a while" actually makes this particular claim less believable. They witnessed it hovering by the control tower for an extended period of time but never bothered to get their phone out?
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#105To 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…
Helicopter prop blast can eliminate drones. https://fstoppers.com/drone/event-organisers-use-helicopter-...
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#106To 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.
It depends on the gauge of shot. It also bears mentioning that having metal shards raining down at an airport presents a substantial FOD risk to engines and could also be kicked up by tires and strike the wing and body.
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#107To 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…
Train birds to chase drones.
.....did you actually read the post?
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#108As the article says, it is surprising how easy and cheap it is to shut down a world-class airport and disrupt 100,000's of people. They haven't even caught the last person.
Essentially a real-world denial-of-service attack.
No, 1 million people didn't try to get on the planes at the same time.
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#109To 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…
Helicopter prop blast can eliminate drones. https://fstoppers.com/drone/event-organisers-use-helicopter-...
Until a rotor strikes the drone and everyone dies in a fiery crash? That was a pretty stupid stunt on both the part of the pilot and the drone operator
Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Drones are likely flying around in pretty well defined frequencies. And the noise isn’t a problem because the receivers are receiving.
Noise is definitely a problem for receivers.
Yes but it’s one they deal with quite happily. Because the bandwidth of the receiver is tiny.