UK: The Metropolitan Police is investigating the case of a British Airways plane being hit by a drone. The incident occurred when the plane was approaching Heathrow. Though the investigation has been started, it is yet to prove that the object that hit the aircraft was a UAV. If confirmed, it would be the first such incident in the UK.
In September last year, a similar incident happened when a drone helicopter and quadcopter narrowly missed in separate incidents in Heathrow. If the situation did not change, then incidents like these would pose a grave danger to the lives of the passengers.
Hence, solutions like the Smart Responsive Jamming Technology developed by Airbus Defence and Space can be proved useful for blocking the only frequencies that are being used to operate drones. Based on an extensive threat library and realtime analysis of control signals a jammer then can interrupt the link between drone and pilot and/or its navigation.
Thomas Müller, head of the Electronics business line at Airbus Defence and Space, agrees that “all over the world, incidents with universally available small drones have revealed a security gap with regards to critical installations such as military barracks, airports or nuclear plants.”
He adds that “as a specialist in defence electronics, we have all the technologies in our portfolio and the integration knowledge which are needed to set up a quick-response protection system with extremely low false alarm rates."
Since the jamming technology contains versatile receiving and transmitting capabilities, more sophisticated measures like remote control classification and GPS spoofing can be utilized as well. This allows effective and specific jamming and also a controlled takeover of the UAV.
Source: Techaeris
