Forums Forums National News Gatwick Drones

Why can't they shoot these drones out of the sky, making so many peoples lives a misery. Surely they can lock on to the menace Drones and put them right out if action , obviously still search for the stupid idiots doing this.

Just watched on the one show,apparantley a drone is classed as an aircraft so you can't just shoot them down.

How daft is that? Don't know why they come up with these things soppose there will a good reason, hmmmm!!

You can't shoot skyward in a populated area, what goes up must come down.

Jammers have been available for some time but there are ways round them.

The better answer would be to have radio direction finders at airports which could pinpoint the location of the transmitter nearly instantaneously. This would also be useful against the idiots that try and jam aeronautical radio and radar frequencies as well.

Men can walk on the moon (allegedly) but they can't sort out a drone ? Houston we have a problem

Well just heard on news that they are considering shooting down the drone if it's safe to do so.. Not before time I say.

Send another drone up and crash into it or follow it home..

Why wouldn't it be safe to do so.. They can shoot anything else, including flying ducks, geese. Why would this be any different if aircraft aren't moving ?.

Because when you fire a bullet into the air, it comes down almost as fast as it goes up. If it happened to hit - say - you, granny, in the head it would kill you,

I actually think drones are going to be very difficult to stop. They are not always radio controlled and can fly autonomously using inertial guidance or GPS or both., so 'jamming' the control signals is not always possible.

They can fly at an altitude of a couple of feet, hopping over obstacles like perimeter fences so are almost impossible to detect with radar or anything else.

And it is not just aircraft who are vulnerable. Just imagine the carnage an attack on the terraces of a big football match using drones carrying nail bombs would cause. Or an attack on an electricity substation? Or a theatre. Or an office building.

I doubt whether banning them is likely to be effective. They are not very difficult to build, using readily available components, and I am quite sure that terrorists are able to build them.

That they are an effective weapon against us is demonstrated by the fact that all the king's horses and all the king's men seem incapable of stopping just one of them paralysing Gatwick!

As stated above, its in a populated area, what happens to the bullet if it misses or goes through the drone. As far as I am aware they do not shoot birds at any major airport they have other measures to resolve the issues.

Also the runways have to be kept clear of FOD so every time they shot one down near a runway they would have to do a sweep..

Shooting it down may be a temporary solution taking the above into account but they obviously need a more permanent and flexible solution. The solution has to prevent the drone from arriving in the airfield to prevent delays, its no use stopping it after it has arrived.

Well, if they are so bad why were they allowed to be sold to the public anyway ? It's only a matter of time before these new technologies are used for ulterior motives. They know the problems and anticipate that everyone will behave accordingly, and when they don't then they have a problem because they don't; know how to handle a bad situation. The whole country is crazy with too many graduates thinking that their degree is 100% better than common sense. They don't even come up trumps with general knowledge these days or how to run a bath.

If the Government had licensed these things from day one they would not be as profuse and hence would be considerably dearer which would limit a lot of the simpler abuse.

There are still no regulations of their physical design, these things can have blades whizzing around at up to 50,000 rpm and the only restriction is the overall weight of the machine with no requirement to shield the propellers.

Shooting them down does not catch the culprit which is probably at least as important as stopping them flying. Clearly there must be preventative measures put into place to stop drones entering any areas where they can upset normal life.This will be a real wake up call for the government and let's just hope it is not too late to close the stable door.

Well they'll have to do something to stop these drones, as said it chills me to think if what they could do with the things. Apparently you can get something that sends out some kind of barrier which stops it operating when hits it . This is being used in some countries and it's invented in Britain , a guy on the news was talking about it. Also some countries are using birds of prey to grab them , must admit that sounds abit hit and miss to me.
They have missiles that lock on to objects ( remember scud missiles) and they explode on impact with whatever , surely a small version of this could be used over the airfield where it's open and not populated obviously you would have to be very precise about where it hit but the technology must be out there . Maybe I'm talking rubbish , just thinking out loud.

I fail to see how a 30-40cm drone can bring down a plane either taking off or landing??

Passenger planes weigh between 50 to 300 tons and a drone perhaps 5 kilos maximum. If a large bird of prey was flying around Gatwick would they close it for 36 hours??

To me, it's health and safety taken to ridiculous levels................