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posted by martyb on Thursday July 22 2021, @01:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the Just-give-me-a-reason dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 22 2021, @08:21PM (2 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday July 22 2021, @08:21PM (#1159216)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by Anti-aristarchus on Thursday July 22 2021, @08:59PM (1 child)

    by Anti-aristarchus (14390) on Thursday July 22 2021, @08:59PM (#1159232) Journal

    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

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday July 22 2021, @09:10PM (#1159236)

      Well, return to the vast empty salt lake area - not exactly land in the CO's office.

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