Are they still ...
Droning on about that?
Sussex Police still have no clue what happened during the Gatwick drone fiasco of Christmas 2018 – though the force now claims witnesses saw two small unmanned craft over the London airport during its 30-hour shutdown. In a statement released today, Sussex Police claimed it received almost 130 sightings during the airport's …
That conclusion seems undersupported to me.
This could have EASILY been a test run by some organization with patience. Not every terrorist group wants to be in the headlines right now, and certainly state actors don't.
With no suspects, we simply cannot know. What seems really, REALLY unlikely is that we are dealing with a couple of kids or people on a lark. Such people don't have the discipline to keep their mouths shut.
I'm not saying that closing the case is wrong, just that it should be worrisome.
XR or at least one of their "claimed" "unrelated offshoots"
Their kind of tactics, cause total and utter misery and disruption for everyone else so they can virtue signal and "save Gaia"....forgetting the UK is less than 2% of world emissions and dropping.
Won;t bother going anywhere that actually does majorly contribute though due to "lack of awareness in those countries" Translation they would laugh at you, tell you to Foxtrot Oscar and lastly arrest, charge, convict and then deport you after a spell in jail for being a pain in the rear / terrorists
IMHO Roger Hallam is more than overdue for a lengthy spell at HM Pleasure for the disruption his fringe group is creating and damage to the economy, that or exile him to South Georgia, though the local wildlife might complain about having to share an island with that rabble rousing twat...
I'm not saying that closing the case is wrong, just that it should be worrisome.
Yup. I think the focus has to shift to detection. Which will be fun/expensive as I guess drones don't have a large RCS, especially with regular airport radars. So whether airports will need to be supplemented with drone detection kit.
Also curious if RDF would work. I'm guessing that'd be easier for RC aircraft, but less so for drones operating in the 2.4Ghz range. I don't know how often the drone transmits so RDF could look for transmitters at altitude, but the regularly used drone bands are noisy. So I guess it'd need a form of RDF+DPI to try and profile drone traffic amongst all the other 2.4Ghz transmitters. And that assumes a drone is being remote controlled or transmitting rather than just flying a pre-programmed flight path via GPS.
I think this was alluded to with DPI...
Yup. Problem seems to be identifying drone + controller traffic amongst all the devices using the 2.4Ghz band, and there'd be a lot of those around an airport. So DPI might be able to profile the traffic as drone signals, and then it's how to locate those devices. So I guess radar might detect a drone, then try to isolate it's transmissions, then identify what it's transmitting to and find both endpoints.
But there's encryption to make that harder, and profiling based on SSID/MAC might not be reliable, especially if it's an open-source drone. And it still leaves the challenge of dealing with the drone, so don't know if it could be jammed/spoofed into thinking it's lost comms, then landing or returning to base.
If I were the pIRA, gearing up for a return of a NI border and fun of (re) fighting the battles of the last century, this is exactly the tack I'd take.
I'd also use some modern tech to tell me the 11 pinch points in the UK transport network where a simultaneous bomb warning would gridlock UK plc, if not most of Europe for a good few hours. The fact that the UK police have done half the job for me with their anti-civil disorder measures (I can't be the only one to have noticed them ?) is just an added bonus.
False flag is certainly a possibility. Disrupt large swathes of the populous to bring them onside, then say "we warned you something like this would happen", makes it easier to push the registration angle. Bonus points if they can later require all drones be fitted with some kind of broadcasting identifier e.g. IFF.
And of course risibly completely missing the point that real crims (a) won't register (or use a nicked drone), and (b) would disable their IFF (should such become required).
I'm not aware of any copter drone that can do this sort of flight time, but fixed wing drones can do it, a Parrot Disco for example, cheap(ish) and advertised as being able to do 45 mins flying easily. Most copter drones do around 25 mins, but something like a DJI matrice are advertised at 38 mins max, but they are not cheap at all. They're also fairly large, easily a threat to aircraft, come supplied with multiple batteries for quick turnarounds, and they have a very long range, around 8km I think, still keeping connectivity to the controller, further on a pre planned mission, which means you could be quite a distance away. I would say users are supposed to keep line of sight at all times, but I doubt that would be a concern to someone doing this.
130 sightings, not one of them had a camera / smartphone to hand.....?? National Media onsite with high spec cameras..nothing??
Gatwick sold a few days later for knock down bargain basement price, coincidence?
Probably no drones anyway, but if they were flown, flown by someone taking a massive bung from the French buyers, or from some drone defence firm who secured a £5m contract shortly thereafter, or both!!