Commercial Extortion !

This week a news item from overseas must have induced a state of terror to both the airline industry and our vast tourist trade.  London's Gatwick airport was closed down for many hours, cancelling flights and inconveniencing hundreds of thousands of passengers right at the start of the Christmas rush.

The closure was on security grounds.  Drones were seen flying down and across the main runway and the risk of collision with aircraft causing a catastrophe was just too severe to allow normal operations to continue.  The airport was briefly reopened at 3 am to allow some flights to resume, but when the drones reappeared that was the end of flights until full daylight.

This was not an incident related to kids playing with toy drones.   Two commercial type drones were seen making no effort to avoid observance and it can be construed that they were deliberately flown to disrupt operations by introducing a risk factor.  They would have been under remote control and the operators could be anywhere.

It does illustrate the exceptional vulnerability  of Sydney airport at Botany.  It opens up the possibility of terrorists using a drone packed with explosives to deliberately collide with an aircraft about to land or a new crime method of threatening disruption by drones unless extortion is paid to remove that threat.

It is quite possible that Gatwick incident was a trial run by either terrorists or a crime syndicate, but it is equally certain that the result will be carefully noted by both the terrorist and crime fraternities.  It can be both a terror weapon and an extortion implement and we need to be ready to deploy adequate defences to meet this threat.

That raises some interesting questions.  Drones are under radio control and the obvious method is to disrupt that control and force the drone to land.  But such a disruption is likely to interfere with the critical communications between the control tower and aircraft and meet a range of laws to safeguard that function.  It is unlikely that security firms would be allowed to deploy anti drone radio technology in close airport vicinity.

Perhaps the best deterrent would be a guard with a gun who would disable the drone with a shot but again this would need caution because of the risk to aircraft.  A downed drone would be of high value in allowing technicians to trace its construction back to the manufacturer - and from there to its owner operator.

What that incident at Gatwick revealed is that a drone intrusion in airport air space can affectively shut down flying operations.   It is now impossible to shield drone construction from commercial availability and even the bigger toys sold in toy shops are able to carry out a disruptive function. It seems inevitable that sooner or later we will experience a drone interruption to airline flights here in Australia.