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A New Drone Defence System for Airports

posted by janrinok on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the two-birds-with-one-stone dept.

Mainframe Bloke writes:

Reuters reports of an experimental drone system tested recently in Germany. Unfortunately there's not a direct link, only this story on the ITNews site:

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/germanys-dfs-rheinmetall-demonstrate-system-to-prevent-drone-disruptions-518969

Basically, a good drone takes down the bad one, as in this excerpt:

"In December, authorities regained control over the Gatwick airfield only after the British army deployed military technology to guard the area. But shooting down drones, or immobilising them with electromagnetic pulses or even jamming them, is impractical at civilian airports given the possibility of inadvertently causing harm to people or aircraft.

Instead, DFS and Rheinmetall, Germany's largest arms maker, have tested a solution that could be highly automated, connecting existing air traffic data with advanced radar systems, acoustic and infrared sensors and optical equipment to first detect possible intruders, and then neutralise them with other drones.

In Wednesday's demonstration, which was hosted by the German military's Technical and Airworthiness Centre for Aircraft (WTD61) about 50 km (35 miles) north of Munich, a "good" drone threw a net over a potentially threatening one, taking it to the ground."

Nets definitely seem the right approach to me. What do you think?

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:50PM (1 child)

    by theluggage (1797) on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:50PM (#797841)

    Nets definitely seem the right approach to me. What do you think?

    Hmm... Drone-on-drone dogfights vs. the previous "too cool to fail" solution of trained drone-killing eagles... So hard to choose. Oh wait, were you asking whether it would actually work?

    "Can you beat the defence drones" sounds to me like a challenge to the sort of attention-seeking idiots who get their kicks from buzzing airports, and the "good guys" are always going to be at a disadvantage against the ones who don't give a fuck if they dodge across the main flight path.

    Boring solutions like not running airports at 110% capacity (so delaying a flight for 30 minutes to deal with a drone doesn't cause a massive cascade failure), having good contingency plans rather than running around like headless chickens, or making sure that an airliner can take a drone hit without falling out of the sky (since you're never going to catch them all) spring to mind, but they're expensive and don't make such good headlines.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday February 07 2019, @10:28PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday February 07 2019, @10:28PM (#798014)

    Drone-on-drone dogfights (...) "Can you beat the defence drones" sounds to me like a challenge to the sort of attention-seeking idiots who get their kicks from buzzing airports.

    *Booming announcer voice* Welcome to BattleBots 3D !!!!!