By 2022, the FAA expects we'll have 2.9 million drones flying in the U.S.
That's because drones are enormously helpful; in Aerial Photography,
scientific research, even farming and firefighting. But with so many
drones in the sky, sometimes, things go wrong.
It's very public knowledge that airports are getting more and more
incidents of drones in the sky threatening commercial aircraft.
Government says a drone, a couple of drones, loaded with C4, that's an
explosive, went off overhead.
Prisons are daily targeted from drone deliveries and mainly delivering
contraband into prisons.
To let the good ones through and keep the bad ones out, counter-drone
companies are popping up everywhere. They range from startups like Dedrone
in San Francisco to larger defense firms like Rafael and Israel or
Leonardo in Rome. The largest drone maker in the world, DJI, builds
geofencing into its drones so that operators aren't likely to fly where
they're not permitted.
The real wakeup call is the various use cases that drones have. What gets a
lot of noise in the press is grenades dropping on the troops and harming
people. But what you don't see is a lot of the surveillance and
reconnaissance techniques and the sophisticated ways that the adversary is
starting to employ the technology.
Small consumer drones have been used as explosive devices. One carried a
bottle of radioactive material onto the roof of the Japanese prime
minister's office. Drones have crashed into crowds at sporting events and
they're increasingly disrupting airports.
It happened just this afternoon, a very close call between a drone and an
airliner on approach to New York's Kennedy Airport with one 159 people onboard.
The FAA said today this is becoming a very serious problem with several
reports of close calls with drones every day.
For years now airports have been protecting aircraft from wildlife;
protecting aircraft from making contact with birds in the air, animals on
the ground. Now, this is the high-tech equivalent of that. We don't want
drones to ever be in a situation where they might come into contact with aircraft.
The large companies, they fear IP loss and industrial espionage. Large
events, they fear terrorism. They fear drones with bombs like what
happened in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan government, the government says there was an assassination
attempt against Nicolas Maduro the country's leader.
Government says a drone, couple of drones, loaded with C4, that's an
explosive, went off overhead.
The way to detect drones is like we as human beings would detect drones. We
hear them, so we use microphones. We see them, we use cameras. We also
feel them, what we call RF technology like radio frequency technologies.
Drones talk all the time to their base station and to their command
center. If it sounds like a drone and looks like a drone and talks like a
drone it probably is not a bird.
So the system can automatically and continuously track the drones as they
fly around, calculate their speed, their heading and also alert security
staff when they enter certain sectors that might be of critical interest.
We're installed at four U.K. airports so far. We're installed at two more
European airports and we're installed at a lot of U.S. airports from the
federal side. Everybody saw after what happened at Gatwick in England or
at Heathrow that it is very easy to disrupt a multibillion dollar business
such as an airport with a $500 drone.
But what happens once you detect a drone? That depend partly on local laws
but there are ways to take a drone down with everything from shotgun
shells to lasers, signal jammers, even nets.
What we've built with the DroneHunter is something that can work three or
four miles away from your venue, patrol an area in the sky, flying
thousands of feet. If there's something coming into the airspace that you
want to protect we can put eyes on it with our sensor fusion, our radar
and optics fused on the DroneHunter to capture that video. And then you
can make a decision: do you want to let that drone go or you can make a
decision to take it down safely.
U.S. regulators are still scrambling to work out the rules around drones
and counter-drone technology.
Right now drones are considered aircraft. So the idea of capturing that
aircraft really would expose an organization to air piracy regulations.
Trying to take over the control operation of a drone might put that
organization in violation of FCC regulations.
Widespread adoption of counter-drone tech at U.S. airports hasn't happened
yet, but they're weighing the possibility seriously.
We're taking a look at a lot of the drone protection technologies, the
drone detection technologies that are out there and that's really probably
going to be the first step for an airport like ours is securing our
airports, securing our airspace.
It's important to remember that dramatic incidents with drones are the
exception, not the rule.
You as a U.S. citizen have the ability to fly your drone around particular
areas. You're a Part 107 registered pilot, you have the authority and the
freedoms this country offers to be able to fly your drone. What you don't
have is the ability to fly it in restricted airspace.
Some of these solutions are really delivering I think what airports need
and it's not just knowing when it's happening but knowing who's doing it
and where it's happening.
Quite frankly, laws will not keep drones away. It's illegal to fly near an
airport but that won't stop drones. The only thing that will stop drones
is technology and that's what we're here for.