Securing Gatwick's Skies

SECURING GATWICK’S SKIES

Counter-UAV defences are now top priority for airports and critical infrastructure around the world, after drone panics that saw the military called into assist at the UK’s two largest airports. But public and media scares about mystery aerial intruders have been precursors to new aerial technology before, argues Tim Robinson

Nearly a month on from a 36 hour shutdown that saw thousands of passengers delayed, flights cancelled at the UK’s busiest single-runway airport during the most hectic time of the year, the motivations of who was actually behind the ‘Gatwick drone scare of 2019’ are still a mystery. Was it one, multiple drones? Ecoprotesters, a criminal blackmail gang or a ‘hybrid warfare’ test? There is also the uncomfortable possibility, raised by the police themselves, that there was in fact no original drone menacing the skies and it was a case of escalating false alarms as people reported official UAVs searching for the intruder.

False alarms and media hysteria about ‘rogue drones’ popping up everywhere and causing a knee-jerk reaction is nothing new. Indeed over 100 years ago, there were reports of ‘Phantom Airships’ by the public in the UK and US – mystery dirigibles sightings by the public, that in some cases were whipped up and exaggerated by the press, who had spotted a guaranteed headline-grabber. These occurred just as the potential of steerable lighter-thanair vehicle technology was entering the public consciousness. Paradoxically, of course, the last wave of mystery airship sightings over the UK in 1913, was followed only three years later by actual hostile airships in the form of German Zeppelins, reigning down death and destruction – and causing public, media and political outrage in Britain. These airship raids, along with the fixed-wing Gotha bomber attacks in 1917, thus contributed to pressure for an independent air service, and laid the seeds for RAF’s air defence network that would be so critical in 1940.

COUNTER DRONES NOW A HIGH PRIORITY

In a sense then, the identity of the perpetrators does not matter. The public and media outrage over the shutdown (whether justified or not) has seen Counter Drone (or C-UAS) measures catapulted right up the priority list of the UK Government’s already stuffed in-box – and visibly demonstrated (luckily without loss of life) the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure to this technology. For defence planners, security experts and airports, both in the UK and around the world, this has been a timely wake-up call to prepare and defend against a cheap, yet difficult to counter form of air attack. As one BBC correspondent has noted from the Iraqi police and army’s experience fighting IS armed drones, the only really concrete CUAS solution, is to find and kill the operators. What was an asymmetric weapon used by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, armed consumer drones in radical groups (or individual) hands have the potential to carry out precision assassination strikes – as has been seen in Venezuela and most recently Yemen.

However it is important to remember, that as with the ‘mystery airships’ of the 1900s, thanks to today’s 24 hour rolling news coverage and social media exaggerating every sighting, a large proportion of unidentified lights or objects in the sky are likely to turn out to be hoaxes, misidentified aircraft or balloons, or even, as in one pilot aerial near-miss report, a plastic carrier bag. Overreaction in some cases, may be just as (economically) damaging as underreaction, and sifting genuine reports from false alarms will be a major challenge. What is true is that that the drone era is well as truly with us.

This article was originally published on the Royal Aeronautical Society website.

Tim Robinson is Editor in Chief of AEROSPACE - the flagship magazine of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

FURTHER INFORMATION

www.aerosociety.com