Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Something, possibly

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Brevet Cable
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Brevet Cable »

jalfrezi wrote:I'm surprised they don't have any jamming devices, or their own drones to counter these.

BBC & Sky news have been showing a number of the systems available.
One thing they all seem to have in common is that they're all short-range ( tens of meters )
Whether or not the Military have more sophisticated longer-range kit is another matter.

Edited to add....
Now being reported it won't re-open until 16:00hrs.
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pbeardmore
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by pbeardmore »

When you consider the size of a major airport and then include the relevant airspace, its a huge area.

To be fair to the Police, I dont think there are any easy solutions here. A good example of how quickly tech has developed and created threats to which there are no easy solutions. When they start sending out tweets asking for the public to come forward with info, you know they have run out of options.
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Ken Shabby »

Tough words from the PM's spokesman this morning: "These drones have been flown illegally and the law couldn't be clearer that those found endangering aircraft could face up to five years in jail."

So how many months inside will that actually equate to (assuming the perpetrator(s) is caught, of course)? Or a conditional discharge perhaps?

Nothing serious will happen until an airliner is brought down and there are hundreds of dead bodies laying in a field.
Ken

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Phantom 892
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Phantom 892 »

Pen Pusher wrote:
Phantom 892 wrote:About time there were severe sentences for anyone doing things like this. :mad:


There is a 5 year prison sentence but as Brevet say's you've got to catch them first.



...which won't get used. Instead they'll get a 3 month suspended sentence!

But am amazed that these drones were flying there for several hours without anyone being able to do anything about it?!
If nothing else it hi-lights a serious flaw in airports not having any safeguard against such things happening.

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Wrexham Mackem
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Wrexham Mackem »

The more I think about it the harder I find it to believe that these things can't just be picked off as soon as they're spotted. I went clay pigeon shooting at the weekend, and I'm no crack shot, but even I could have popped one of those drones off without too much trouble.

Is there more to this somehow, or am I missing something obvious?

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Southendnick
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Southendnick »

Southend Airport was trailing a drone detection system earlier this year

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/1 ... detection/
Spelling mistakes and grammatical error specialist

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jingernut
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by jingernut »

Wrexham Mackem wrote:The more I think about it the harder I find it to believe that these things can't just be picked off as soon as they're spotted. I went clay pigeon shooting at the weekend, and I'm no crack shot, but even I could have popped one of those drones off without too much trouble.

Is there more to this somehow, or am I missing something obvious?


Like to see you manage that in the dark.

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starbuck
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by starbuck »

Phantom 892 wrote:If nothing else it hi-lights a serious flaw in airports not having any safeguard against such things happening.


Or, as others have already said it is nearly impossible at the moment with the technology available to be able to prevent it happening so why not praise Gatwick for being able to identify the problem when they did and instigate the safeguards they do actually have at their disposal and prevent a tragedy from occurring. Yes people have been inconvenienced but everyone is still going to be opening their presents on christmas morning.

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pootle
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by pootle »

On the range issue, I fly a Phantom 3 Pro, a Phantom 4 Pro and an Inspire 1. They are limited in terms of legality to a maximum range of 500m from me and always in VLOS.
However, the Phantom 4 is good for up to 2.8km-3km straight out of the box. Disable the restrictions in the set-up (its a tick box) and you can fly it to those maximum distances. Likewise height. Legally I can't go over 500ft. Remove the tick box restricter and my law abiding nature and easily several thousand feet out the box......and that basically the same for all three of my units.

These things are very sophisticated bits of kit for £1000 new or even less on auction sites!

I've undertaken filming at sea and used longer ranges and the speeds they get up to as well is pretty impressive. I can outrun my local lifeboat doing a full 27 knots to get passing shots. A shotgun carried range is what 50m with the spread of the shot? bit to short to easily reach a drone flying around at 120m height! Using anything firing multiple bullets in any sort of automatic mode seems a bit 'Bruce Willis & Die Hard' for this type of drone!

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Wrexham Mackem »

pootle wrote:I've undertaken filming at sea and used longer ranges and the speeds they get up to as well is pretty impressive. I can outrun my local lifeboat doing a full 27 knots to get passing shots. A shotgun carried range is what 50m with the spread of the shot? bit to short to easily reach a drone flying around at 120m height! Using anything firing multiple bullets in any sort of automatic mode seems a bit 'Bruce Willis & Die Hard' for this type of drone!


Indeed. These things are more capable than I was aware of.

We need to find some way to bring them down, stating the obvious. Is it possible to jam their control frequency?

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Brevet Cable
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Brevet Cable »

pootle wrote:A shotgun carried range is what 50m with the spread of the shot? bit to short to easily reach a drone flying around at 120m height!

Demending on the shot size, with a 12g with a 'full choke' ( longest range, smallest spread ) it'll be somewhere around 30-40".
Standard shot in use for clay shooting used to be ( think it still is ) 'No.8' - the diameter of each shot is all of about 2-2.5mm so you can guess how little each ball weights.
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pootle
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by pootle »

I'd assume you can yes. But I'm sure that might open up all sorts of issues about doing something like that in an area around an airport?
Infrastructure is a tough thing to secure all round. An organisation that just wants to cause disruption rather than casualties has literally hundreds of ways they do it. Road blockades, slow driving convoys.
It would only take a few people to start cutting signalling cables and the train network grinds to halt in hours!

Anything thats a relatively 'soft' target, is accessible remotely or has huge scale is always going to be vulnerable in a modern democratic society such as ours!

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by vulcan558 »

pootle wrote:On the range issue, I fly a Phantom 3 Pro, a Phantom 4 Pro and an Inspire 1. They are limited in terms of legality to a maximum range of 500m from me and always in VLOS.
However, the Phantom 4 is good for up to 2.8km-3km straight out of the box. Disable the restrictions in the set-up (its a tick box) and you can fly it to those maximum distances. Likewise height. Legally I can't go over 500ft. Remove the tick box restricter and my law abiding nature and easily several thousand feet out the box......and that basically the same for all three of my units.

These things are very sophisticated bits of kit for £1000 new or even less on auction sites!

I've undertaken filming at sea and used longer ranges and the speeds they get up to as well is pretty impressive. I can outrun my local lifeboat doing a full 27 knots to get passing shots. A shotgun carried range is what 50m with the spread of the shot? bit to short to easily reach a drone flying around at 120m height! Using anything firing multiple bullets in any sort of automatic mode seems a bit 'Bruce Willis & Die Hard' for this type of drone!


Thats correct regarding the limits. Ive unticked the box before and had mine out at 3.7 miles. You can go further but i bottled it.
Kept the height at 150ft.

These drones once up a few hundred feet are very hard to see. So if they are flying these up to big heights say a thousand or more feet high in to gatwick, then dropping down then departing back at height, they are going to be hard to see until they just drop in.

Must be a at least 2 or more drones. Its been reported of 2 seen at the same time.
Add the battery life of 30 minutes tops. They have a handful of powerpacks and doing a quick pack change. They just push in and pull out, so takes very little time.

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by vulcan558 »

Brevet Cable wrote:
pootle wrote:A shotgun carried range is what 50m with the spread of the shot? bit to short to easily reach a drone flying around at 120m height!

Demending on the shot size, with a 12g with a 'full choke' ( longest range, smallest spread ) it'll be somewhere around 30-40".
Standard shot in use for clay shooting used to be ( think it still is ) 'No.8' - the diameter of each shot is all of about 2-2.5mm so you can guess how little each ball weights.

50m is about it for bird shot no7's. We took 2 small cheapo xc 5 drones down at the shooting range in the summer. The props are the weak link. take a chunk out of it, the lead shot does very well. They come down well demented. Found the 20bore better then the 12.

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by pbeardmore »

People are grasping at straws re shooting them down. Can you imagine some "keystone cops" scenarios re a guy on the back of a pickup trying to get it in his sights? (according to wiki, you have 674 hectares to cover) If there was an obvious solution, it would have been invented and patented by now.

pootle, see the link below, would these work if a drone was in an autonomous GPS mode (I assume in that mode, it does not require a radio frquency?)

https://www.defensenews.com/digital-sho ... f-the-sky/

http://ixitech.com/2017/08/11/drone-kil ... gust-2017/
Last edited by pbeardmore on Thu 20 Dec 2018, 1:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by vulcan558 »

pbeardmore wrote:People are grasping at straws re shooting them down. Can you imagine some "keystone cops" scenarios re a guy on the back of a pickup trying to get it in his sights? (according to wiki, you have 674 hectares to cover) If there was an obvious solution, it would have been invented and patented by now.

pootle, see the link below, would these work if a drone was in an autonomous GPS mode (I assume in that mode, it does not require a radio frquency?)

https://www.defensenews.com/digital-sho ... f-the-sky/

Yes no radio. Just going of a pre plotted satalite route. Wont say GPS, as they use a combination of it and the better Russian system of Glonass.thou wifi data i think can be tracked by the police choppers. They use it i understand to find missing person and criminals through there phone.

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by vulcan558 »

pbeardmore wrote:People are grasping at straws re shooting them down. Can you imagine some "keystone cops" scenarios re a guy on the back of a pickup trying to get it in his sights? (according to wiki, you have 674 hectares to cover) If there was an obvious solution, it would have been invented and patented by now.

pootle, see the link below, would these work if a drone was in an autonomous GPS mode (I assume in that mode, it does not require a radio frquency?)

https://www.defensenews.com/digital-sho ... f-the-sky/
On another note regarding that device in the link.
On the phantom via its lightbridge data link with an app you can change the unit to use 32 different signals or channels. From the 2.4 ghz up to around 4.5ghz swapping and hopping between all 32 if one goes weak or down.
Im not up on a lot of the techno these things can do. But there are hackers out there that can make these things do some amazing things.

http://ixitech.com/2017/08/11/drone-kil ... gust-2017/

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Dan O'Hagan »

So much of the story doesn’t add up.

But, hey, it’s got the public looking away from the Brexit train wreck. Almost as if that was the intention all along.

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by pbeardmore »

It was the alien on the grassy knoll :smile:
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by vulcan558 »

Dan O'Hagan wrote:So much of the story doesn’t add up.

But, hey, it’s got the public looking away from the Brexit train wreck. Almost as if that was the intention all along.

Be those peski Russians. Having a laugh.
send in a chinook over Gatwick. The down draft will cause it a few problems, get a few out the back and side doors with shotguns.

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Brevet Cable »

Dan O'Hagan wrote:But, hey, it’s got the public looking away from the Brexit train wreck. Almost as if that was the intention all along.

Not Corbyn, then?
Or Muslims, immigrants, UKIP, the Welsh/Scottish......anyone I've missed out?
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by James1971 »

LGW Xmas party? :grin:
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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by vulcan558 »

Has any one posted a good picture of the Drones, they have been flying around for half a day or more and no pics or videos yet.with big media coverage since yesterday evening and flights up till lunchtime today.
I find it strange that no pics or videos are about.

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by pootle »

I guess its about location and right time right place. A drone at 400ft up and 500m away can be hard to see when you're looking for it in order to keep line of sight. If you're at one end of the runway and the drone is flying around 1.5 miles away at the other end, or over to the far side by the terminal aprons, you wouldn't know until someone told you! We've all taken images of aircraft that appear as little more than black dots in the sky, these drones are only brief case side or smaller to start with.

At night you can be much more visible. I do some night work and have tw pairs of lights that attach to the body and have different strength and 'blink' setting. Without perspective you could easily wonder what these two bright white lights in the sky are? Is it a mile away or 200 yards!

I wouldn't be surprised to see the frequency of the drone appearances increase again as it gets dark. Depends if they've caused enough chaos now or want to go on for longer?

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Re: Gatwick Airport Closed Due to Drones

Post by Brevet Cable »

Only image I've seen claiming to be one of them is this :

Image

Hmmm.....maybe it is a UFO !! :shock:
:lol:

Edited to add....
The BBC were showing a video supposedly of one of the drones last night ( basically, a light in the sky ) but have since pulled it, possibly because people were saying that it was more likely to be the Police helicopter.
Last edited by Brevet Cable on Thu 20 Dec 2018, 3:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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