Drones over Gatwick airport

Can anyone throw light on the hardware and software used on the drones and on the operator’s equipment? For example, are the CPUs on drones ARM ones? What operating systems do they use?

Probably not something the rozzers are going to want to share.

As I see it, these are semi pro or expensive homebuilt drones (mine, for example, might make it from one side of a runway to the other…), and they come in two flavours:

The first is the long distance radio control, quite possibly with FPV these days.

The second is a completely autonomous device that follows GPS waypoints.

The first could be grounded by figuring out the frequency and blitzing it with crap to swamp out the control signals. Given the airport was effectively taken offline, I don’t see why they can’t do that until the thing falls out of the sky.

The second is much worse, it pilots itself. Not sure how that can be taken down, I’m sure people around Gatwick wouldn’t appreciate attempts to shoot down something that small. But if it is that, to program one of those around a major airport is getting close to an act of terrorism. Was the intention to annoy loads of people, or to crash into a plane? That’s the question right there.

As to a generic reply to your question, it depends upon the drone. My dinky one uses a custom chip with a Cortex M0 core. It is stabilised with a 6 axis gyro connected via IIC. It is controlled by a 2.4GHz control module, however there is also an input (serial?) from the camera module because the camera is a WiFi AP and the mobile app can also control the device. The chip doesn’t have a lot of grunt, so it’s going to be some custom firmware rather than anything that resembles an operating system.

Larger drones have been built from parts and can run Linux on a Pi. These ones can fly to programmed waypoints using an altimeter and GPS receiver. There’s probably something on instructibles…

Since reading John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar in 1968 I have been expecting this bad news. Airports disruptible now, next it will be motorway service stations and the payloads will make Salisbury look like a picnic. Anywhere that humans are funnelled together and then dispersed in many directions is going to be a place to be avoided. The privileged or powerful few who can steer clear of such nodes will have genetically-targeted horrors to contend with. Notice the attendants with cloths so that no DNA-revealing traces are left behind? If you cannot reach your prey through the air, then human contact may work better.

God rest ye merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay.

Small heat-seeking or radio-locked missiles?

I’m sure they will exist! OK, you have to spot one first – but isn’t that what RADAR does?

It is what radar does, but they currently don’t equip airports with radar designed to detect anything as small as even a largish drone.

but they currently don’t equip airports with radar designed to detect anything as small as even a largish drone.

True, for that kind of kit you’d need military standard kit¹ which they didn’t deploy². Detecting and triangulating the control signals doesn’t seem to have been done either. Or did they do that a while before the reported arrests and then observe other contacts?

¹ They have drones, they assume various opposition will have drones so they need to detect them.
² Why reveal what they’ve got if the whole thing can be done with a few uniforms wandering the streets? Thousands of civilians disrupted? Ha! No issue there because it took the spotlight off May and Brexit. Of course actually,quietly, deploying their toys gives a nice trial run.

for that kind of kit you’d need military standard kit

Exactly.

No issue there because it took the spotlight off May and Brexit. Of course actually,quietly, deploying their toys gives a nice trial run.

On both counts, I detect a mind very like mine.

After the Concorde incident, there was suddenly a great interest in detecting small objects on runways. Qinetiq approached our company to see how our radar interfacing/display kit could be used with the (commercial) Tarsier system they were developing: http://www.tarsier.qinetiq.com/solution/Pages/tarsier.aspx

Turn one upside down and you’d have an effective drone scanner.

Turn one upside down and you’d have an effective drone scanner.

Or if you look at the company background you could speculate that someone thought about turning a small flying object radar detection system upside down to scan the ground for small objects and market it for civilian use thereby offsetting the cost of the research and development.

The other thing of course is that you’ve not only got to detect these things, you’ve then got to get rid of them without endangering the public, and ideally you’ve got to catch the operator(s).

….. using an altimeter and GPS receiver.

No need for the altimeter. GPS does altitude as well. Probably more accurately.

The other thing of course is that you’ve not only got to detect these things, you’ve then got to get rid of them without endangering the public, and ideally you’ve got to catch the operator(s).

But destroying such an expensive asset could be very punitive – depending, of course, on who’s funding them and with what aim.

Repeated accurate and routine destruction could change the game definitively, causing replacement-supply difficulties!

Probably more accurately.

Definitely more accurately! But height above ground (or other obstacles) is what you really need, and neither GPS nor altimeter gives you that accurately enough for low flying. Given that you probably don’t have radar or sonar, vision’s your best option. You need damn good software if you don’t have FPV.

Repeated accurate and routine destruction

But how do you do that without endangering the public? Assuming this is quite a biggish drone.