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Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

nytimes.com

141–150 of 150 posts

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Read their bio. They are propagandist.

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Three external reviewers hired by the city government disagree: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/amoklauf-oez-muenchen-1...

The only one not agreeing is the Bavarian government because they do not want to admit that after the Oktoberfestattentat and the NSU there has been more right-wing terrorism in Bavaria.

In addition, dubbing terrorists and "school shooters" simply as having "gone postal" is about the most ignorant framing that's possible as it totally ignores the factors that led to the attack (be it mobbing, feeling "sexually underserved" or Nazi propaganda or Islamist propaganda).

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#143
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Read their bio. They are propagandist.

> Read their bio. They are propagandist.

Not really, or do you accuse the independent reviewers for the City of Munich government to be propagandists? https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/amoklauf-oez-muenchen-1...

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#144

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…

You never answered why it isn't possible to shoot it down?

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#145

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…

You never answered why it isn't possible to shoot it down?

I thought I covered that in the kinetic section but if you have specific questions I might be able to help? Basically "shooting" something down requires a projectile so you need something that can damage a drone but won't present a risk to aircraft or nearby communities when it falls back to earth and it also can't present a FOD (get thrown by tires/sucked into an engine) risk if it were to land on a runway.

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#146
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Since you seem to have experience here, what do you think the lightest shot that would damage a midsize drone (ie DJI phantom) at a useful range would be?

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#148
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really would not take long for the airport to launch a drone to look for the other one. Maybe a minute? They could have a experienced pilot on staff at the tower. Costs a lot less than shutting down the airport for hours. I would even say a skilled pilot with a trackable drone in communication with the tower could safely fly to investiage without a shutdown of the airport.

Then they get lots of calls from other people saying they’ve seen it and it’s actuslly the search and destroy drone...

But upstream the assumption was

>Even a small drone surely makes a ton of radio noise just from its motors, no?

So once you have an effective and objective mechanism (this or other) for detecting and tracking drones, you can disregard the peanut gallery.

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#149
1) If we could accurately detect and track drones, we can disregard the reports, or check with the detection system if there was a related near-detection at the reported location/line-of-sight

2) While there will be lot's of electrical motors throughout the airport, perhaps the airport and its infrastructure could be designed to support a 10 minute silence (causing delays etc).

3) Focussing on the electromotor driven propellers, the sound can be expected to have twice the frequency of the magnetic field (both the permanent magnet, and the applied electromagnet fields) since the propeller has 2 blades. It should be possible to use this correlation to filter out electromotor noise without blades. (So fan's will still contribute noise, but known fan noise, and electromotor fan noise of authorized equipment could be filtered out, or canceled)

4) A grid of microphones and magnetic field detectors would probably be necessary.

5) The system should probably be combined with other technologies like LIDAR etc

Re: Drone Sighting Halts Departures at Heathrow Airport

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think a wing on a hovering Helicopter can handle drone impact.

Airplane wing vs DJI Phantom Drone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH0V7kp-xg0

"While the test done is plausible the speed involved in the test is unlikely especially for the type of aircraft involved."

The brick of meat (bird strike simulation) caused approximately the same amount of damage as the drone.

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