Counterdrone Tech Takes Center Stage In UK Government Strategy

By Tony Osborne

Britain is taking initial steps to create a mobile national counterdrone capability to protect major events and key parts of the national infrastructure.

Although aware of the potential benefits that small unmanned aircraft (UAS) systems can bring to the national economy, the country has also experienced the havoc they can wreak.

Last December, sightings of small UAS around the perimeter of London's Gatwick Airport resulted in the halting of flight operations, disrupting flights and the plans of thousands of travelers in the run-up to Christmas.

Yet, despite more than 100 such sightings during the shutdown, police investigations have exhausted their lines of inquiry, no charges were ever brought and Sussex Police, leading the investigation, closed their probe at the end of September.

Since then, environmental protesters Extinction Rebellion threatened to use UAS to shut down Heathrow Airport in a bid to disrupt operations, although activists were arrested before they got a chance to try.

Drone use in the UK is growing rapidly. According to consultancy PwC, there could be as many as 76,000 commercial and government drones in use in the UK by 2030.

In 2014, there were around 400 commercial drone operators in the UK approved by the UK Civil Aviation Authority; there are now over 5,000.

The events at Gatwick have acted as a catalyst, prompting the government to get ahead of the threat.

In October, the British Home Office published its Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Strategy to help civilian authorities tackle the issues surrounding drones.

Along with developing a national counterdrone capability for the police, instead of relying on the military as they had to at Gatwick, the government is looking to update the threat picture of how UAS can be misused. They would then develop what officials call a “full-spectrum” approach in deterring, detecting and disrupting that misuse. Perhaps most crucially, the government will provide greater support to Britain's fledgling but fast-growing counterdrone industry.

As well as developing legislation and regulation for counterdrone technology, the strategy also mentions “incentivizing investments” for the most effective technologies.

“Government needs to strike a balance,” says British security minister Brandon Lewis.

“We need a security posture that keeps us safe, but it must also recognize the benefits of the legal uses of drones and allow us to reap the fullest rewards of incorporating drone technology into society,”

But first, the British government will test and accredit anti-drone technologies to better understand their capabilities and develop a catalog of systems that can be purchased by police forces, security agencies and other government departments.

Government officials and industry admit there is no “silver bullet” to protect against all types of UAS.

“There is not one specific system or one capability that solves the problem,” said Tony Burnell, CEO of Metis Aerospace, a UK-based developer of drone detection equipment. Burnell made his comments while speaking to a British parliamentary committee about the domestic threat of drones in October.

“It has to be a multilayered approach. . . . The counterdrone capabilities in the UK, made by industry, will tackle 99.5% of the drones that are out there,” he said. “There is still the 0.5% of drones that you do not know about and that you will [need to] be keeping up [with] to understand.”

Costs of anti-drone equipment also remain prohibitively high. But while military-spec systems to protect an airport are priced at £2-3 million ($3-4 million), that could be overkill and far too expensive for a facility such as a prison. Yet prisons arguably need such equipment most urgently. Home Office figures say there were 284 drone incidents at British prisons in 2016, 319 in 2017 and 168 in 2018, with 165 drones recovered at prisons in 2016-17.

The police are not the only ones taking an interest in drone technology. In September, the Royal Air Force (RAF) selected Leonardo to carry out a three-year-long study to inform a future RAF counterdrone capability.

Leonardo's Falcon Shield was one of the systems deployed by the RAF to Gatwick after a police request.

The Gatwick incident has already prompted changes in British law. In March, laws stating that drones could not be flown within 1 km (0.6 mi.) of an airfield were replaced with new restrictions banning them from operating within an airfield's existing aerodrome traffic zone—a radius of 2-2.5 nm around the airfield. It is also now against the law to operate them in 5 X 1-km zones stretching from the thresholds of an airfield/airport's runway. The UK has introduced legislation that calls on drone operators with systems weighing between 250g-20 kg (0.6-44 lb.) to register them and for the pilots to take an online competency course.

Registration, which began on Nov. 5, will become a legal requirement from Nov. 30, with operators receiving an operator registration number they must affix to their drone before it is flown.

The strategy says the government is now developing concepts for the future implementation of an unmanned traffic management (UTM) system, but it notes that while UTM technology “will not be delivered in the lifetime of the strategy,” security concerns will be appropriately incorporated in early planning.

https://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/counterdrone-tech-takes-center-stage-uk-government-strategy