Gatwick Airport: Drone sightings cause delays

Do the controllers or the drone give some sort of signal? Surely in this and age it must be possible to track where this is coming from. BBC news saying there was another sighting in the last hour
 
HomerJSimpson said:
Do the controllers or the drone give some sort of signal? Surely in this and age it must be possible to track where this is coming from. BBC news saying there was another sighting in the last hour
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Multiple, preprogrammed drones using 4G comms could be controlled from a considerable distance.
 
drdel said:
Multiple, preprogrammed drones using 4G comms could be controlled from a considerable distance.
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They could but there is still the issue of battery life. Most drones struggle to stay up for more than 30 minutes before a change of battery is needed. It does seem really odd that the police have a helicopter in the air, the drone is up and must be landing for a new battery but somehow they have failed to spot it land every single time.

When I have my drones landing it’s not a massively quick process, unless you’re crashing it. I’m surprised that a police helicopter hasn’t managed to spot that yet.
 
Well, it looks like flights have finally started to resume now.

I am intrigued to find out more about this story, drone is such a wide-ranging term that covers everything from a child's toy that can barely be controlled and lasts 5 minutes before running out of juice, up to a piece of kit the US military use to remotely take out targets in the Middle East whilst being controlled from an office in New York.
 
Still think this is an odd one.

With all the worlds media, police etc etc and the footage of the drone is very grainy and from a distance and almost none of it.

May sound like a tin foil hat moment but still think there’s more here than meets the eye.
 
HomerJSimpson said:
Do the controllers or the drone give some sort of signal? Surely in this and age it must be possible to track where this is coming from. BBC news saying there was another sighting in the last hour
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need_my_wedge said:
Was listening to Radio 4 news earlier. Apparently there are a number of ways to control them aside from normal remote control. They can have a pre-programmed route in them that doesn’t require a remote control, only GPS. Or they can be remote controlled via phone on 4G, and you don’t even need to be in the country to do that. I don’t know much about them, I don’t know if it’s scaremongering, but it is worrying that whoever is doing this can bring it all to a standstill like this. Hope it gets sorted soon as my mum is supposed to be flying from Gatwick tomorrow.
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If they are using GPS or 4G, it will be a lot harder to track them down
 
Dibby said:
Surely if you obtain the drone, or it's SIM card signature, you can then just trace the path back down the network. If you can trace calls, it wouldn't be much different.
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The majority of retail drones are controlled via wifi, the link is either between a phone and the drone or a controller and the drone. Not sure how much more sophisticated this is however.
 
Current predicted delay at Tenerife airport is currently just over 5 hours, on the plus side at least we're going to Gatwick and not somewhere else.

My son (who is 5) woke up at 3am and vomited 8 times in 2 hours.

Now I've seen there is an overturned lorry on the main road into east Sussex.... I'm hoping to be home by 2:30am. We shall see.

1st world problems eh.
 
rudebhoy said:
Biggest defence budget in Europe, and we can't take out a drone? Laughable really ...
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It’s not the first time this has happened so you would think a big airport like this would have some sort of protocol to deal with it.
Are all our major airports this easy to disrupt?
If so things need to change, especially in court when they catch whoever it is.
 
clubchamp98 said:
It’s not the first time this has happened so you would think a big airport like this would have some sort of protocol to deal with it.
Are all our major airports this easy to disrupt?
If so things need to change, especially in court when they catch whoever it is.
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I'd imagine that not only are our airports this easy to disrupt, but also our roads and railways. If not by drones then by actions which are equally easy to perpetrate. Our country (not just ours, obvs) has become so used to very large numbers of people and goods moving about efficiently, but this just makes it even more vulnerable to disruption.
 
It's transport - it shouldn't be that difficult to work out why we didn't know what to do; that concerns raised by pilots association (2014 link) have been largely ignored; that we dithered about doing whatever little we could and in making decisions on what to do next. Fayling Grayling - who else could it be!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29781931
 
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