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Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

nytimes.com

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Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#131

Post by mianos »

noobiemcfoob wrote: post #99
mianos wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

#7 or bird shot would not even scratch the paint if falling under gravity. It is approximately 0.1 gram. If you ever see what it looks like in real life, it is tiny and soft. The only reason it does damage is because the charge gets it going at a fair speed (which is loses very quickly).

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#132

Post by [deleted] »

AWildC182 wrote: post #128
trhway wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russian airbase in Syria is regularly [according to them] attacked by drones https://www.rt.com/news/415454-drone-attack-syria-turkey/ https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2018/08/16/drone-attacks-ru... Russian military jamming equipment is pretty powerful though, and these systems are also supposedly deployed there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantsir_missile_system (the key in this case is the 30mm radar guided autoca…

I think this is an interesting case. The force response here is a bit different than in non-war-zones but it's still a useful anecdote. Lasers will probably be part of the solution at some point but it's worth noting some of the drawbacks. You need the target to be above the horizon for safety obviously, so that means you need to be fairly close to it in a semi-urban environment which negates some of the nice range a…

[deleted]

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#133

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

wokwokwok wrote: post #126
dpark wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

This is what I find astonishing. If a car is on fire in a normal street, half the people just stop to take photos or start live streaming it (this happened in Melbourne recently). How did no one pull out their phone and take any pictures? People takes photos of airports and planes all the time because it’s so different from day-to-day stuff. It seems implausibly unlikely that both no one took photos and no one shared…

Aren’t ATCs not allowed to have their cellphones in the tower?

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#134

Post by mimixco »

Airbus has had drone defense tech for years. They can drop any drone out of the sky when it's miles from an airplane.

http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/airbus-technology-disrupt-dron...

The poster here who claimed drones operate on "any frequency" is incorrect. Like any other radio device, radios in the drones and their controllers can only operate on limited frequencies which are known in advance.

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#135

Post by dpark »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #133
wokwokwok wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I find astonishing. If a car is on fire in a normal street, half the people just stop to take photos or start live streaming it (this happened in Melbourne recently). How did no one pull out their phone and take any pictures? People takes photos of airports and planes all the time because it’s so different from day-to-day stuff. It seems implausibly unlikely that both no one took photos and no one shared…

Aren’t ATCs not allowed to have their cellphones in the tower?

They have to be off. But Controllers still Snapchat at times.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/268495-rep...

But more to the point, the poster I was replying to did not claim that the witness was working in the control tower. Merely that they observed a drone hovering near the control tower. Of course, they might have been far enough away that they couldn't capture a photo. That would indicate that they likely were far enough away that they couldn't definitively ID a drone, too.

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#136

Post by petre »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #94
jackweirdy wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Kestrels also call a lot. We have a kestrel family on a tall chimney nearby.

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#137

Post by fathead_glacier »

giarc wrote: post #101
venantius wrote: post #62

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?

Unfortunately no. According to the BBC [0] the Civil Aviation Authority considers a drone interference accident as an extraordinary circumstance. Therefore, the EU rules for compensation do not apply.

However, it makes me wonder if and when third party insurance companies will start offering this as a service.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-46632302

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#138

Post by petre »

mimixco wrote: post #134

Airbus has had drone defense tech for years. They can drop any drone out of the sky when it's miles from an airplane. http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/airbus-technology-disrupt-dron... The poster here who claimed drones operate on "any frequency" is incorrect. Like any other radio device, radios in the drones and their controllers can only operate on limited frequencies which are known in advance.

There's also an Israeli company that sells a drone defense device. It's like a portable gun and it grounds the drone safely. I'm not sure how safe it is to use it near an ATC tower though.

Another Israeli company has an anti drone technology called Drone Dome that was supposedly deployed by the army at Gatwick during the incident.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_Dome

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#139

Post by netsharc »

mschuster91 wrote: post #102
twblalock wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Accurate except for: "right wing terror attack". WTF man? It was just one kid going postal.

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#140

Post by black-tea »

bump-ladel wrote: post #35

Once the idea of alien UFOs became widespread, the number of reported cases rose. Once everybody has the idea that drones may be flying around airports, will people start misidentifying and reporting other phenomena as drones (causing chaos)?

Reminds me of "phantom vibration syndrome" where people start to feel their phone vibrate even when it isn't.
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