Airside operations
purposes, while the remaining 522,645 were for commercial operation. These drone users, then, are the ones that airports most often have to deal with. “We call it the three C’s – the clueless, careless and the criminal,” explains Oleg Vornik, CEO at DroneShield, an anti-drone technology developer. “The issue from the airport’s point of view is that all three are equally threatening, whether it’s a drone flown by a child or by a plane watcher.” Aircraft are at their most vulnerable during landing and take-off, and drones present number of threats during these moments, whether it’s the danger of distracting pilots or the damage that a lithium battery could cause if punctured when a drone is flown into an aircraft’s engine. “Gatwick was a very, very worrying test case, in that it demonstrated how unprepared we are as an industry,” says Steve Wright, senior research fellow for the Engineering Design and Mathematics department at University of the West of England. Much of the safety legislation around airspaces in the UK was built around the idea that aircraft should not be forcibly brought down to ground under any circumstances – a reasonable concept when dealing with manned aircraft, at least. The default reaction to an incursion, then, has been to close the airstrip until the sky is clear. That’s been a viable system in the past, but as Gatwick demonstrated, bigger airports can’t allow their operations to be halted for minutes, let alone days.
Drone detected However, any anti-drone countermeasures can only work if a drone is indeed present and can be tracked down. Reality isn’t always so simple, though. A drone doesn’t have to be physically present within an airspace to cause disruption – the operator just needs to think that one might be. “We need a way to provide airspace awareness,”
says Vornik. “A lot of people are fixated on the defeat of the drone, but in a large perimeter facility like an airport, you need a reliable way to detect a dinner- plate-sized white object flying against white clouds.” One of the key issues facing airports is that their legacy sensor systems, used to identify birds or debris on the runway, are completely inefficient at detecting intruding drones. DroneShield and Dedrone both offer a range of sensor equipment for use in airports, combining a couple of different systems. Today, there are four principal ways to detect the presence of a drone. The first is radio frequency (RF), which is used to target the communication happening between the drone and the remote control. This is the cornerstone of any counter-drone system due to it being both highly accurate and also passive, which is of the utmost importance for an airfield. Anti-drone sensors often use video cameras in a secondary role, allowing for a visual payload inspection of a drone. Optical sensors typically need to be
Future Airport /
www.futureairport.com
directed by other sensors, so they know exactly where to look. This is usually done by either RF or radar, though the latter can have issues identifying specific objects – if radar is set to search for drone-sized targets, there’s a good chance it will turn up every bird or plastic bag in the target area.
The final type of sensor commonly used in anti- drone technology is acoustic, which is used to sense the presence of the rotor speeds, for example. However, this type of sensor isn’t very effective in an airport setting due to its low range and often presents a lot of false positives.
“So no sensor is perfect,” explains Amit Samani, vice-president of sales (Americas & UK) for Dedrone, another anti-drone technology company. “Most organisations today are starting with RF because it’s cost-effective, it’s passive and is low on false alarms. And over time, they’re going to be adding additional sensors as the threat evolves and grows bigger.” At the same time, governing bodies are looking to make identifying drones easier for airport operators through remote identification. Drones will need to provide certain information that can be received by other parties, similar to registering a mobile phone for a wireless network. That’s not to say, however, that it will solve all the problems facing airport operators. “It’s not going to solve the bad actors because it’s going to be fairly easy to bypass,” says Samani. “It’s also not going to be backwardly compatible with some of the drones already in the market, [of] which there are many, many millions.” What remote ID is good for, he explains, is to allow security professionals to “distinguish between the good and the bad”. If five drones are seen operating in a restricted airspace, but four have their remote ID active, then it’s only that final drone that is the real cause for concern – the others can simply be tracked down and asked to take their drone out of the area. In the US, the FAA have given drone manufacturers 18 months from 21 April 2021 to integrate remote ID into their drones, and 30 or 36 months for operators to ensure that their drones are compliant. Similar laws are under discussion in the UK and EU.
Any airspace security system will rely on a human mind to decide when a threat has been addressed and operations can resume.
18
Months from 21 April 2021 that the FAA has given drone manufacturers to integrate remote ID into their drones.
FAA 33
Dedrone
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45
