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The Gatwick Drone: Little By Little, The Story Continues To Unravel:
If you remember the crazy events in the winter of 2018 as two airports were closed over reports of drone sightings, you might be interested to hear that there’s still a trickle of information about those happenings making it into the public domain as Freedom of Information responses.
[...] Received Opinion had it that a drone had closed an airport, but drone enthusiasts, and Hackaday as a publication in their sphere, were asking awkward questions about why no tangible evidence of a drone ever having been present had appeared. Gradually the story unravelled with the police and aviation authorities quietly admitting that they had no evidence of a drone, and a dedicated band of drone enthusiasts has continues to pursue the truth about those few winter nights in 2018. The latest results chase up the possibility that the CAA might have received a description of the drone, and why when a fully functional drone detection system had been deployed and detected nothing they continued with the farce of closing the airport.
[...] The couple who were wrongly arrested have not held back in their condemnation, but without the attention of any powerful vested interests it seems that some of the measures brought in as a response will never be questioned.
One of the lessons learned? If you want to fly covert drone missions, build your own.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22 2021, @04:00AM (1 child)
Perhaps this calls for an invasion of Iraq *ducks shoe*
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 23 2021, @02:21AM
No, this calls for an invasion of China. The drone was clearly launched from Wuhan. Please do keep up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Frosty Piss on Thursday July 22 2021, @04:16AM (6 children)
I’m also interested in those alleged “drone swarms” in the US South / Southwest last year. All the LE was atwitter and now radio silence. Same with Airpack Guy in LA… The stories just… disappeared.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by MIRV888 on Thursday July 22 2021, @06:22AM (4 children)
The Israeli's have already used swarming drones in combat to wreck that refinery. It's a safe bet we have swarms in testing ourselves. Tiny unmanned death machines that fly would be really useful in combat.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday July 22 2021, @04:14PM (3 children)
It hasn't happened yet, but what happens when someone takes control of a swarm of those things or worse yet somehow gets control of one of those serious war drones with missiles? I'm sure there are a lot of smart people that worked on the whole security thing as far as drones are concerned. I just keep seeing pretty much every other thing in the world subjected to X hack and wonder when the first major military asset will get hacked. At a certain point, it's almost a guarantee, right? Unless we're just so far ahead of any of our shooting enemies that it doesn't matter? We're not about to get into a real war with any of the Nuclear Powers anyway, right? Thus, the ones that might have the tech to do something like hack a military asset?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 22 2021, @08:21PM (2 children)
Most drone autopilots of any level of sophistication have the ability to return home and land themselves in the event of loss of communication. So, for a drone hijacker it's not a simple problem of jamming the command and control link, it's the much more sophisticated problem of replacing the legitimate command and control inputs with valid (encrypted) inputs of their own choosing. There have been some demonstrations of spoofing GPS signals to fool the drone into thinking it's going somewhere it's not and thereby modifying its flight path, but it's much harder to spoof the pressure-altitude signal, and I imagine the serious military hardware is also self-aware enough to recognize wildly inaccurate GPS readings that would cause problems. I do know the military take remote control arming of even the smallest deadly explosives very seriously, multiple layers of security.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Anti-aristarchus on Thursday July 22 2021, @08:59PM (1 child)
Which is actually the last thing you want your drone to do, when it is armed with a thermal detonator! Hoist by your own (drone) petard?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 22 2021, @09:10PM
Well, return to the vast empty salt lake area - not exactly land in the CO's office.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Troll) by driverless on Thursday July 22 2021, @12:48PM
Oh, that one has a perfectly straightforward explanation [gazillions.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22 2021, @04:42AM (1 child)
I'm so surprised! /s
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22 2021, @05:09AM
That's pretty lame. I guess you're too busy enjoying your
unlimited1Gb/s$29.99internet to need the govt.(Score: 0, Troll) by Sally_G on Thursday July 22 2021, @05:27AM (1 child)
We already know that a lot of avian species seem to be dying off, for largely mysterious reasons. I blame global warming.
Meanwhile, drones are breeding like flies!! As the earth grows warmer, breeding conditions for drones will improve. Those flocks of seagulls and geese will soon be replaced by drones. There will be flocks of millions nesting in the vicinity of the airports. We need to DO SOMETHING©℗®™💩!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 22 2021, @12:00PM
Skynet has launched...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MIRV888 on Thursday July 22 2021, @06:19AM
I am aware of numerous drone incursions into the approach paths for 17L & R at SDF. I've seen a bunch of them personally. I called the police to report it once and they basically laughed me off the phone. So now I'm just a spectator. (SDF is UPS's east coast hub, so it's been doing mad business for over a year at this point.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 22 2021, @02:13PM
This reminds me of the news reports of "drone strikes" where you could see in the picture the splatters of drone blood on the plane aft of the strike. IIRC there may have even been visible drone feathers.
Then there's the FAA reports about commercial airliners at 30,000 nearly colliding with a drone only 29,000 feet below.
It's almost as if "authorities" are paranoid about a new technology that could provide high resolution pictures of things they don't want to admit to doing...