Two drone arrests, but airports lack defences
British police arrested two people yesterday for suspected ‘‘criminal use of drones’’’ in the Gatwick Airport case that created holiday travel delays for tens of thousands of passengers.
Sussex police did not release the age or gender of the two suspects, and did not say where the arrests were made.
Police Superintendent James Collis asked the public in the Gatwick area to remain vigilant. ‘‘Our investigations are still ongoing, and our activities at the airport continue to build resilience to detect and mitigate further incursions from drones by deploying a range of tactics,’’ he said.
New drone sightings yesterday caused fresh problems for holiday travellers at the airport, which reopened after a 36-hour shutdown, only to hastily suspend flights for more than an hour on one of the busiest travel days of the year.
The persistent drone crisis at Gatwick, 45km south of London, has had ripple effects throughout the international air travel system.
The latest drone sighting came after British police and transport officials said extra measures had been put in place to prevent drones from intruding on the airport, which serves 43 million passengers a year.
Military forces with special equipment have been brought in, and police units are working around the clock.
Police said a sophisticated drone operation was targeting the airport to cause maximum disruption during the holiday rush. The motive for the drone invasion was not clear, but police said there were no indications it was terror-related.
Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said there had been about 40 sightings of ‘‘a small number of drones’’ while the airport was shut down.
He told the BBC that the drone disruption at Gatwick was ‘‘unprecedented anywhere in the world’’.
The British Army had to borrow an anti-drone device from a private contractor to deal with the Gatwick incident, as it emerged that British airports are unprotected without the help of the military.
Chris Woodroofe, chief operating officer of Gatwick, said he could not rule out future disruption from drone users due to a lack of equipment to deal with the threat.
He said the airport had been working with technology providers for the past 12 months but at present there was no ‘‘commercially available airport-licensed proven technology that I could implement’’.
Under Britain’s Wireless Telegraphy Act, airports and other key civilian sites are banned from interfering with electronic signals, so cannot deploy militarygrade anti-drone devices.
The military was able to deploy an anti-drone system, developed by Chess Dynamics, at Gatwick. It has brought down or ‘‘killed’’ more than 700 such devices using jamming technology.
The anti-UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) defence system, which can take over the controls of a rogue drone, can also detect the speed, direction and origin of a drone, to be used as evidence.
While there has been extensive commentary about the availability of technology to bring down drones, much of it is untested. There are also concerns about the potential for such technology to interfere with air traffic control systems and equipment inside terminals.
Owen McAree, a drone expert at Liverpool John Moores University, said that while technology existed to target individual drones in isolation, authorities would be wary of introducing it widely at airports.
‘‘There are a lot of critical radio systems at airports, and any high-powered jamming technology, even one targeted at specific drone frequencies, may have unintended consequences,’’ he said.
A source familiar with the Chess Dynamics device said it was up and running at Gatwick yesterday. It has been tested at RAF Spadeadam in Cumbria, the only electronic warfare tactics range in Europe, in 2015, and by the British military as part of an exercise last year.
Hundreds of travellers stuck overnight at Gatwick described freezing conditions as they slept on benches or the floor. Many complained that they weren’t being kept informed about rerouted flights. electronic airport
‘‘There are a lot of critical radio systems at airports, and any high-powered jamming technology . . . may have unintended consequences.’’ Owen McAree, drone expert