Drones kill Christmas

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'm starting to develop a sneaking admiration for the fucker responsible giving the police and army the runaround

Yeah my main thought has been it's a really impressive bit of disruption.

[confettiinmyhair]

Could this inspire copycat droning? Imagine someone launching a drone near Heathrow.

[hamfist]

Could this inspire copycat droning? Imagine someone launching a drone near Heathrow.

And Schiphol, Frankfurt, Charles de Gaulle simultaneously- bring a continent to a halt.

Great to have something else in the headlines that's not Theresa May being a cunt or Brexit being peen though. A nice relief. Good breather for Theresa too. Great to have this welcome distraction instead of more bad news about the government like every day for the last month.

[Sebastian Cobb]

And Schiphol, Frankfurt, Charles de Gaulle simultaneously- bring a continent to a halt.

Great to have something else in the headlines that's not Theresa May being a cunt or Brexit being peen though. A nice relief. Good breather for Theresa too. Great to have this welcome distraction instead of more bad news about the government like every day for the last month.

https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/gatwick-drone-chaos-perhaps-a-glimpse-of-no-deal-brexit-claim-people-not-in-denial-20181220180803

[greencalx]

Could this inspire copycat droning? Imagine someone launching a drone near Heathrow.

My immediate thought was that we're likely to see a lot more of this sort of thing now. Although it's  been said that the drone in question is quite high grade (so presumably expensive) which may limit the activity somewhat.

[Cuellar]

And Schiphol, Frankfurt, Charles de Gaulle simultaneously- bring a continent to a halt.

Great to have something else in the headlines that's not Theresa May being a cunt or Brexit being peen though. A nice relief. Good breather for Theresa too. Great to have this welcome distraction instead of more bad news about the government like every day for the last month.

Suspiciously convenient for Corbyn too - gets rid of 'stupid woman' gate. HMMMMMMMMM

[manticore]

In related news, the British legal system convicts people preventing an aeroplane from deporting asylum seekers as terrorists.

The Stansted 15 protesters, who stopped the government deportation flight from taking off in March last year, have been found guilty of breaching terror laws...

The court heard the protesters secured themselves around the nose wheel and wing of the Boeing 767, with pipes and foam, having cut a hole in the perimeter fence.

They had all pleaded not guilty, but a jury at Chelmsford Crown Court returned a guilty verdict and they now face up to life imprisonment.

https://www.lancasterguardian.co.uk/news/history-will-vindicate-us-says-ex-lancaster-uni-student-found-guilty-of-terror-charges-1-9490992

[Twit 2]

FUCK THIS COUNTRY

[BlodwynPig]

In related news, the British legal system convicts people preventing an aeroplane from deporting asylum seekers as terrorists.

https://www.lancasterguardian.co.uk/news/history-will-vindicate-us-says-ex-lancaster-uni-student-found-guilty-of-terror-charges-1-9490992

Life!??! Yes, let Britain crumble

Post-Brexit, im sure we'd get done with terror laws for just writing that

[Sebastian Cobb]

My immediate thought was that we're likely to see a lot more of this sort of thing now. Although it's  been said that the drone in question is quite high grade (so presumably expensive) which may limit the activity somewhat.

Yes but when you think about the tens of thousands of people it has inconvenienced, it's a relatively cheap form of disruption that while not harmless, still less bad than letting bombs off.

[imitationleather]

Life!??! Yes, let Britain crumble

Post-Brexit, im sure we'd get done with terror laws for just writing that

I imagine the terrorism offence they were found guilty of is more aimed at people leaving bombs lying around and whatnot. Where life would be understandable. Which does demonstrate that they really had the book thrown at them here. If they get a hefty sentence it's a disgrace.

As for Gatwick it just feels so retro, the country being all terrified of potential climate protestors.

[Sebastian Cobb]

It's just a quite eligantly, advanced form of lorry drivers blocking things.

[pancreas]

Sorry if this has been explained already, but something everything doesn't make sense.

We have, apparently for the first time (?), a drone flying somewhere near (?) but not actually in (?) Gatwick airport, which cannot be precisely located, cannot be shot down, cannot be jammed, cannot be caught, has to be confirmed by naked eye sightings?

And we can't fly planes?

This is fucking pathetic. If they knew this could happen then drones should have been outright illegal from the beginning. What am I missing?

[Cuellar]

Yes it seems utterly absurd that it's been going on this long.

It's not drones at all is it. Maybe just all the pilots are sick of all this flying and can't be arsed anymore.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Hope people in war zones don't pick up on this cool trick. All the western planes that kill them until they're dead will be grounded.

[Captain Crunch]

How many cheap TV teams are lapping this up?

[Fabian Thomsett]

Good to see Fathers4justice still doing their thing.

[Brian Freeze]

Sorry if this has been explained already, but something everything doesn't make sense.

We have, apparently for the first time (?), a drone flying somewhere near (?) but not actually in (?) Gatwick airport, which cannot be precisely located, cannot be shot down, cannot be jammed, cannot be caught, has to be confirmed by naked eye sightings?

And we can't fly planes?

This is fucking pathetic. If they knew this could happen then drones should have been outright illegal from the beginning. What am I missing?

I only know what I heard on the radio but drones are sold now with software written into them that prevents them from being flown near airports and other areas so it's not that this has not been thought about. It's just not impossible to circumvent if so inclined.

[pancreas]

Obviously they can be circumvented. Obviously.

It's no doubt done almost as easily as circumventing a gun in order to kill people you don't like.

And it doesn't explain why they can't catch the fucker. One drone.

[a duncandisorderly]

I'm slightly puzzled by the lack of cashing-in by the perpetrator(s). could they not have asked for money by now, or a reversal of brexit or summat? & then promise to put their beastly toy away? I flew in to heathrow last night while all this was just getting going. if I'd've been diverted, I'd've been incensed. that picture someone posted of a bigger drone with a net underneath- why haven't they got that? & where can I buy the batteries this fucker's using? even if he's running four of them, he's doing well on the staying-up count.

owls, that's what they want. trained owls with air-to-air missiles attached.

[Dex Sawash]

Trained porpoises could stop this. Maybe it's even being done by trained porpoises.

[Neomod]

Blimey, this is what happened when the last drone incident occurred in 2007.

https://vimeo.com/229874613

[magval]

I had no idea that was such a shared experience. I actually never did finish it, and it's out me off playing VC on PS4 because I've less patience now than I did when it came out.

[BlodwynPig]

I'm slightly puzzled by the lack of cashing-in by the perpetrator(s). could they not have asked for money by now, or a reversal of brexit or summat? & then promise to put their beastly toy away? I flew in to heathrow last night while all this was just getting going. if I'd've been diverted, I'd've been incensed. that picture someone posted of a bigger drone with a net underneath- why haven't they got that? & where can I buy the batteries this fucker's using? even if he's running four of them, he's doing well on the staying-up count.

owls, that's what they want. trained owls with air-to-air missiles attached.

He?

Singular?

Something you're not telling us. You've got some experience with drone too

[Spoon of Ploff]

... What am I missing?

that... you live in Britain?

[Uncle TechTip]

Well it's all over now and for some reason they're very confident things will go back to normal despite no perp or drone.

[buzby]

Sorry if this has been explained already, but something everything doesn't make sense.

We have, apparently for the first time (?), a drone flying somewhere near (?) but not actually in (?) Gatwick airport, which cannot be precisely located, cannot be shot down, cannot be jammed, cannot be caught, has to be confirmed by naked eye sightings?

And we can't fly planes?

This is fucking pathetic. If they knew this could happen then drones should have been outright illegal from the beginning. What am I missing?

Radio Controlled aircraft & helicopters could also have been used to do this since the Seventies. The difference was that they were very expensive, difficult to fly (more difficult than a real aircraft), short ranged on both fuel (usually Glow fuel, though bigger models use petrol engines) and radio range. You also officially needed to be a member of the British Model Flying Association and have insurance cover to legally fly one, usually from a designated flying field. They were normally built from kits as well, which required some skill and dedication on the part of the owner to assemble and fly (I built and lost a couple while attempting to learn to fly and the anguish from seeing the effort I had put in being reduced to a pile of firewood and sawdust made me return to RC cars and boats).

As motor and battery technology advanced, brushless DC motors and  LiPo batteries took over from engines as a power source (RC modellers were actually at the forefront of this, discovering the problems of battery thermal runaway and developing the charging and discharging profiles to mitigate it). Due to it's use in WiFi, the 2.4GHz radio band saw the development of cheap, reliable radio link chipsets and modules that came to be adapted for use in Radio Control systems, which greatly extended the controllable range and were practically immune to interference, and removed the need to have discrete radio channels for each model.

By around 2010, these two advances in RC technology met in the form of the electrically powered quadcopter model, which is basically a helicopter that uses 4 rotors (this is what came to be commonly called a 'drone'). These use solid state gyroscopes developed for RC helicopters to aid stability and control, but having 4 rotors make them massively easier to fly than an RC helicopter.

Further technological advances led to the use of on-board cameras that use 5.8GHz radio links to transmit the drone's field of vision back to a monitor or LED glasses so the pilot can 'see' where they are flying, and onboard GPS and processing modules gave the opportunity to make models that could effectively 'autopilot' themselves, either on a preprogrammed route or to a 'failsafe' flight profile in the event of loss of the control datalink from the transmitter. To ease concerns from pilots and the aviation authorities, this was also used to implement 'geofencing', which is supposed to prevent the drone being flown in the vicinty of airports and controlled airspace, but it is trivial to disable this in the firmware.

This sort of technology used to be very expensive, but it's now got to the point where it can be bought for under a grand, and cheap price, pre-built 'ready to fly' nature and ease of operation means the RC flying hobby has got orders of magnitude more popular than the 'niche' interest model flying was years ago. This has also meant that they now pose a real hazard to manned flight, and apart from registered commercial operators (aerial filming and so on) the people who own and fly them are usually from outside the 'old world' of the BMFA and have no insurance either.

The root cause of this incident is that the regulators and legislators could basically get away with ignoring RC flying as it used to be (which was effectivly self-regulating), but the step change in the hobby (the old barriers to entry of cost and skill have been removed)  has caught them on the hop. Next year they are bringing in registration for drones, but as this incident shows if you buy and fly an unregistered one how are they going to catch you anyway?

There really needed to be some form of registration implemented on sale, and also the implementation of some form of mandatory SSR transponder (Secondary Survelllance Radar, the system used on real aircraft to transmit their ID and some flight parameters back to air traffic control). but the horse has already bolted on that front I think.

[BlodwynPig]

Well it's all over now and for some reason they're very confident things will go back to normal despite no perp or drone.

But TOUGHER LAWS

[Cuellar]

I do hope they find the person, as I really want to know their motivation.

Grayling said that you "can't just shoot down a drone" and gave the example of somewhere else in the world where he said that hundreds of bullets had been fired from a machine gun and yet a drone had not been brought down.

Couldn't you get a really good sniper to have a go? I know drones move about a lot, but they must be stationary at some point before whizzing off again like a naughty.

[greencalx]

The root cause of this incident is that the regulators and legislators could basically get away with ignoring RC flying as it used to be (which was effectivly self-regulating), but the step change in the hobby (the old barriers to entry of cost and skill have been removed)  has caught them on the hop. Next year they are bringing in registration for drones, but as this incident shows if you buy and fly an unregistered one how are they going to catch you anyway?

There was a lot of talk about extending the no-fly zone to 5km on the news last night. No one seemed to point out that if people can happily breach a 1km exclusion zone, extending it to 5km isn't going to change anything.