[infecto]

Jammers work pretty well. I would expect most large airports would have a defense response. They would have the tools setup to one instantly identify and track said drones come within the space and two have the tools like the portable jammers to “shoot” it down. These tools are not that expensive and exist from multiple vendors.

I would have expected this to be table stakes at running large busy airports.

[slightwinder]

> Jammers work pretty well.

On publics airports? Where planes have to land all the time? Can they be pinpointed exactly on one specific target without disturbing the others? And this is assuming there even is a remote-control to jam.

[infecto]

Yup. At least in the prior case this year the airports all shutdown. I see no reason you should not be able to quickly react to a scenario like this? Most European airports have some sort of federal response in or near the airport anyway. Not that big leap to think you should be able to jump on it.

[creer]

Civilian airports can "shut down" by telling all traffic to (glibly) find other things to do. The traffic is still around. How resistant is all this traffic to jamming? and what kind of jamming? You can probably experiment with that around an isolated military airport. Perhaps. "Perhaps" because you still have civilian traffic in line of sight. I don't know that it's an easy decision to screw around with jamming around a crowded civilian airport.

What you can certainly double down on is tracking and close to the ground monitoring. And it would be surprising if this did not give results (over hundreds of sightings) as to who is launching them and recovering some hardware. Drones fall off pretty easily and it might be hard to repeatedly recover drones without getting caught if there is a surge of police around.

[infecto]

The jammer argument is fair and I just assumed since other airports have different levels of counter measures that this is a possibility. These are targeted shots of jamming with distances that commercial flights should not be in.

But yes detection is key and surprising airports don’t already have this. This is not an exactly new phenomenon.

[FinnKuhn]

How quickly can you deploy a portable jammer? The drone might have disappeared until you have done so already. So you definitelly need automated systems for detection and targetting, which will probably take time until they are widely available.

[infecto]

They make hand helds that can be used without human LOS with something like 3km range. You don’t definitely need automated systems but obviously that would be probably more bullet proof.

[FinnKuhn]

A 3km range seems pretty low looking at the size of e.g. Frankfurt Airport.

The bigger issue I assume is probably that even if you react very quickly the drone might be already gone already anyway.

[infecto]

It is but I would hope these entities are trying at least something and those jammers are cheap.

In Paris they developed an electronic barrier wall for drones. Yes maybe these are autonomous enough that when the link is cut they continue on their mission but I think something is better than nothing.

These tools are widely available.