I’d think that DARPA could help with this.
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The reaction of MPs to this has been interesting; there seems to be bipartisan support for immediate institution of new draconian regulations on purchase and operation of drones. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would wonder if this wasn’t a way for the government to get ahead of the inevitable independent drone coverage of the food lorry pileups that will happen the day after Brexit.
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If you’re willing to spend some money you could skip the retrieval part entirely. Just let it crash somewhere when it runs out of power. You could be on the other city of the airport already when this happens, but you’d have to be careful not to leave fingerprints and dna on the drones if you want to get away with it.
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Are they going to buy it with cash, and not get it delivered?
My son’s DJI drone won’t fly without registering with the manufacturer first…
These are probably concerns if you want to pull off this stunt with only a few drones and retrieving them as well. I imagine that the UK police is currently feverishly looking up every drone purchased over the last few years with no regard for privacy at all. It’s surprising that they’ve not already found someone, this international airport has been closed for more than a full day already and won’t be open before 6 am on Friday. By any measure, if this was someone deliberately doing this, it’s wildly successful.
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Someone at the news agencies would have big telephoto lenses and good photographers. It’s surprising that there aren’t any photos of these drones yet.
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Make sure it shoots rainbow glitter and sprays fart spray.
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Of course!
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It’s pretty much mid-winter, there’s barely 8 hours of daylight. Having said that, that should be long enough.
From reddit: This photo I took of gatwick this morning.
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Yeah, the willingness to use disposable drones just worsens the situation, as it doesn’t take much of a drone, I’d imagine, to get the same response. It just has to be big enough to be visible (which one could probably do easily enough by altering a cheap drone).
I’m really surprised this hasn’t been an issue until now. I fully expected to see more stories like this as soon as drones started becoming popular, given how easy they are to abuse and how few countermeasures exist widely.
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Many of the cheaper quadcopters seem to have been engineered with this risk in mind. For example my son’s DJI drone uses wifi to send video back to the user’s mobile phone. The absolute best range we have got out of the wifi system is about 200 metres.
I could engineer around that by building a relay system with good antennas, but it means that it is difficult for a drone to be bought in the shop and immediately put in harms way.
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Small, at a distance, relatively quiet, moving agile in the clear skies over wintry England… even a skilled pro with the right equipment would have to rely on a huge amount of sheer luck1) 2).
1) Which tends to favour the prepared, but still…
2) Not that it would be impossible. In the late 1970ies/early 1980ies my BIL was with an advertising agency in London that worked for Canon, so they always got their newest cameras and lenses to promote. Naturally, the agency’s own photographers also used whatever they fancied to work or just play around with. At one time, after fooling around with a tele lens in the +1000 mm range, one of the photographers found that he had accidentally caught a SR-71 in flight; probably either shortly after take-off or when coming in to land.
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Just ask the Tokyo police for help.
See also:
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Pretty pricey kit, I’m sure. You could probably do the same with some tablets, Software Defined Radio dongles, and DYI antennas. There’s a nice Defcon video of someone using off the shelf software to do frequency analysis to find a transmitter, then zoom into on the protocol.
Or if you’re lucky… A real estate agent was taking pictures of a neighbour’s house and his DJI had an open access point. I resisted the temptation to connect with a Pi and then port scan it with masscan.
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If the UK police fired one of those it would incur a considerable amount of paperwork.
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Well, time to update those 747s…
although it is almost 2019, let’s get freaky
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Too soon?
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If the operator is driving on radio signal, then they should have triangulated them ages ago. WW2 wireless operators would bank on being caught if they were transmitting for 30 mins or more.
If they’re on mobile internet, there’s various ways they could have intercepted/blocked the signals.
They just look incompetent at this point.
