The Drone News and Discussion Thread

Why not ban their use in a residential area or when there's a crowd nearby?

A man has admitted illegally flying drones over professional football matches and London landmarks. Nigel Wilson admitted nine breaches of taking video over football grounds and tourist attractions last year. Wilson, from Bingham, Nottinghamshire, was originally accused of 17 breaches of the Air Navigation Order but some charges were dropped due to insufficient evidence. He was fined £1,800 at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

It was the first case in England of a person being prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service for using drones after a police-led operation. Wilson, 42, was accused by Scotland Yard of flying the aircraft unmanned and "failing to maintain direct visual contact".

The charges he admitted included flying the drone on:

• September 16 - Liverpool v Ludogorets FC at Anfield
• September 23 - Derby County v Reading at iPro Stadium, Derby
• September 27 - Palace of Westminster^note  aka. Houses of Parliament, London
• September 27 - Arsenal v Tottenham Hotspur at Emirates Stadium, London
• October 9 - Queen Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace and north bank of the River Thames in London
• October 18 - Manchester City v Tottenham Hotspur at Etihad Stadium, Manchester

The court heard police horses were startled by Wilson's device as it flew over a Champions League group stage game between Liverpool and Bulgarian visitors Ludogorets at Anfield. He was also twice arrested in London and had his drones confiscated.

District Judge Quentin Purdy told Wilson, a security guard, he had put the public at risk by flying the drones over busy, built-up areas. He said: "At each and every one of these places an accident could have occurred simply by a gust of wind or something of that nature taking it out of your control.

"In each and every case you knew what you were doing. Several times you were warned by police, who seized drones from you, and on numerous occasions by people posting on your You Tube channel. It was the height of arrogance in terms of public safety."

Wilson, a father-of-two, shot the videos using three unmanned aircraft and uploaded them to his You Tube channel, PV2+ Adventures.

Susan Bryant, defending, described Wilson as a "hobbyist", adding: "It was something he put a great amount of time into in terms of improving his skill."

He believes someone will inevitably be killed or seriously injured as drones become more popular.

"In the industry they call it 'The Incident', and it's an incident that everybody knows is going to happen one day," he says. "Everyone will be looking at the drone industry, saying 'why the hell weren't these regulated more?' There will be such a knee-jerk reaction to it. So people are kind of ready for this to happen."

Police are investigating a pilot’s claim that his plane was struck by a drone as it approached Heathrow airport.

The Metropolitan police said they were contacted on Sunday afternoon by the pilot, who landed the plane safely at Terminal 5. No one has been arrested, officers said.

The flight, BA727, was coming in to London from Geneva, carrying 132 passengers and five crew.

British Airways said the Airbus A320 had been examined by engineers and cleared to take off for its next flight after the incident.

Earlier this month, the airline pilots’ union called for an investigation into the likely effects of a drone strike on an aircraft after a report by the UK Airprox Board found that there were 23 near-misses between drones and aircraft in the six months between April and October last year.

They included one on 22 September, when a Boeing 777 that had just taken off reported that a drone narrowly passed the right hand side of the airliner. Investigators concluded that the drone was at the same height and within 25 metres of the jet. A report was made to police but the drone operator was not traced.

Days later, a drone was flown within a few metres of an Airbus A319 landing at Heathrow. The pilot told the UK Airprox Board the drone may have been just 20 feet above and 25 yards to the left when it passed by the aircraft.

The jet was flying at an altitude of 500 feet and was on the final approach when the drone was spotted.

Steve Landells, the flight safety specialist at the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa), said that data on bird strikes was not useful because “birds don’t have a big lump of lithium battery in them”.

He raised the possibility of engine failure in the event of a drone striking aplane. “You end up with very high-velocity bits of metal going anywhere they like. That could be through fuel tanks, through hydraulic lines and even into the cabin,” he said.

“Losing the engine is not going to cause an aircraft to crash because they are designed to fly with one engine down. But an uncontained engine failure is going to be different every time. That could be very serious indeed.”

“The first thing we want to do is get a drone or at least the critical parts of a drone flying at a windscreen of an aircraft. The indications so far with computer modelling are that you’ll end up with penetration of a windscreen.

“One possibility is that the battery smashes the windscreen and the inside layer of the windscreen shatters and you end up with a lot of glass in the cockpit, probably moving at quite high speed.

“As a pilot, I don’t want to be sitting there when that’s going on.”

Despite having performed a maiden sortie some three years ago, details remain sketchy on the flight-test campaign of the BAE Systems Taranis unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) demonstrator.

So far, there have been three test phases – the most recent taking place in 2015. Although the manufacturer declines to detail that effort, it has divulged the rationale and intentions behind previous evaluations.

Addressing the Royal Aeronautical Society on 11 May, Paddy Bourne, chief engineer for UCAVs at BAE, said the combination of advanced low observability (LO) technologies that have to be incorporated into a UCAV design proved a challenge, even for a seasoned developer of military aircraft.

“From the point of view of the programme there were a number of challenges… a number of issues that are difficult in that context to be able to integrate together,” he says. “Elements around integrating secure communications onto an LO autonomous vehicle, how you integrate missions sensors, propulsion systems, the exhaust, and how do you control the vehicle.

“All of those things together combine to make the overall integration and overall design of the vehicle more complex and more difficult to both design and also to clear and fly.”

Bourne adds that another area that poses a problem in the development of LO technology is the requirement to clean up the airframe – removing protruding items such as probes.

He says that “open doors, and the number of holes and vents” are elements that need to be considered in a stealth design, and “all need to be perfectly controlled.

“Those are the aspects that all conspire against the designers, conspire against the people who have to build it, and conspire against the flight testers who [typically] add things on at the last minute.”

Although the Taranis’s off-the-shelf Rolls-Royce Turbomeca Adour engine is manually started, the aircraft is able to taxi to the runway “entirely automatically”, then take off and carry out a number of functions without pilot input.

It will then fly into a test area, and then “to a greater extent, but not entirely, [we] allow it some freedom of operation", says Bourne. Typically it is presented with an area inside a test range in which it is required to locate a target.

Taranis is designed to enhance the aeronautical experience that BAE has gained through numerous projects, producing a stealthy, autonomous weapon system.

When pressed on whether true stealth capability had been achieved, Bourne simply says that “the customer is very happy”. “It continues at a pace, and we aren’t cleared to say what’s next,” he adds.

Test flights were carried out at the Woomera test range in Australia. “We elected to operate over a sterile area… by doing this and ensuring the area was clear of all personnel, all we had to prove was that as long as we stayed inside that sterile area, we’d have a safe trial,” says Jon Wiggall, lead flight-test engineer for Taranis. The location in South Australia also benefits from low levels of electromagnetic interference, he says.

A significant amount of Taranis’s flight testing was carried out in an automatic mode, says Wiggall, one of three flight modes available.

When in automatic flight – the primary mode for take-off, general flying and landing – Taranis is essentially following 3D waypoints, similar to the autopilot on a commercial airliner or a Eurofighter Typhoon.

When in autonomous mode, however, the aircraft “starts to think and self-navigate”. “It can self-navigate within a boundary of set constraints,” Wiggall says. “It does have limitations on what we give it in the mission plan – it can only fly in certain areas – but it does think for itself, it will navigate, and it will search for targets.”

The aircraft self-plots a route, and the aircraft will fly around until either it has completed its mission or tasking, or it is instructed to return to base, Wiggall says.

The third mode, manual, provides a fail-safe, although this was rarely used: “Manual for Taranis is a back-up mode, and is very much a mode where something has gone wrong and we want to get the aeroplane back,” Wiggall says. “We usually get the aeroplane back under automatic control if things aren’t going great – it gives us a get-it-home capability.”

Although no system errors generated a need for manual flying, the mode was utilised to evaluate its functionality. “We didn’t want to get into a real emergency and find that the simulator isn’t representative,” says Wiggall.

Beyond Taranis, the technology developed will roll into the Anglo-French Future Combat Air System programme, which is currently in a two-year feasibility phase, ahead of the likely assembly of an initial prototype.

“We are hoping that we will get a contract for that in the next 18 months,” says Bourne. “Negotiations are under way. All flight trial objectives were met – the customer had a big smile on his face.”