The aviation community pretty much acknowledges that unregulated, civilian-operated unmanned aerial systems (UAS) represent a serious threat to aviation safety.
It stands to reason, then, that enterprising businesspeople would try to capitalize on the counter-UAS market.
As this morning’s Idaho Statesman reports in an article headlined Revenge against drones: Boise company thwarts drones, ne’er-do-wells, Boise company Black Sage Technologies has built a civilian system to locate and track unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in flight.
That’s nice. But then what? Detection and tracking of an incoming UAV is not a countermeasure; it is a warning measure.
The Statesman article says nothing about the company’s product being able to do more than possibly blind a camera if that is the UAV’s payload and to possibly follow the UAV when it goes back to its pilot.
But what if the UAV is on a one-way flight with a payload of something much more dangerous than an enterprising paparazzi’s camera? Something explosive or toxic?
UASs are not new. UAV is the snooty term for the advanced versions of model aircraft hobbyists have been using radio control to fly for years.
Anyone who thinks that civilians couldn’t conceive of putting a dangerous payload on a UAV might want to research the Red Army Faction (Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Ulrike Meinhof — The Baader-Meinhof Gang) in Germany in the 1970s.
And of course today, Jeffy at Amazon-dot-Clueless wants to start delivering five-pound payloads via drones with Amazon Prime Air.
So we repeat: Detection and tracking of an incoming UAV is not a countermeasure; it is a warning measure.
Effective countermeasures to UASs are necessarily going to be intelligence driven. If you don’t know the command, control, and communication mechanisms of that thing coming at your facility, your ability to effectively counter it is seriously degraded.
There are companies working to develop effective countermeasures. One is Blighter Surveillance Systems in the UK.
Readers interested in UASs might want to read some of the online articles in Signal, the magazine of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association. Similar articles such as this one appear in Aviation Week & Space Technology.