An article by DRONELIFE.com shares:
A flurry of drone-related security incidents at European airports highlights the need for greater low-altitude airspace awareness across the continent, according to aviation security experts.
In September Copenhagen Airport, one of Northern Europe’s busiest travel hubs, shut down operations for nearly four hours following reports of multiple drone incursions.
Then, in early October, Munich International Airport halted flight operations after multiple unconfirmed drone sightings in its airspace. The disruption caused 17 outbound flights to be canceled, 15 incoming flights to be diverted and impacted nearly 3,000 passengers.
The same month, Reuters reported that Norway’s Oslo Airport temporarily paused at least one landing following a report of a drone sighting near the airport.
The incidents occurred amid heightened concerns across Europe that the air war raging between Russia and Ukraine could spill over into Western European countries. Military experts have warned that European countries’ defenses are not prepared to protect airports and other vulnerable sites against incursions from UAVs flown with hostile intent.
In an interview, Grant Jordan, CEO of airspace security company SkySafe, said a large part of the problem plaguing European airports stems from a lack of intelligence and awareness of what’s flying in the nearby airspace.
“I think there’s just a lack of information and data sharing around monitoring and tracking what’s in the air,” he said.
Jordan said the problem with lack of airspace awareness is one that’s common on both sides of the Atlantic. “Both the EU and U.S. have Remote ID requirements for drones,” he said. “The drones are supposed to be broadcasting the information about themselves, in the same way we do in traditional manned aviation, with ADS-B.”
However, Remote ID only tackles one aspect of the airspace awareness puzzle, he said. Although remote ID acts as a digital license plate, sending out identifying data from a drone, “we don’t have the infrastructure for actually receiving that data and distributing it appropriately so there’s actually a knowledge of what’s in the air,” Jordan said. “It’s not just a matter of everyone buying more equipment, it’s a matter of being able to share the information.”
Jordan said one difficulty that airport operators and operators of other types of infrastructure face in conducting counter-UAS operations is drone misidentification. “Part of the issue here is that there can be a lot of authorized drone operations, a lot of good operators who are being misidentified and mischaracterized as threats or safety problems.” This problem also can be traced to the lack of distribution of authorized flight information, “of knowing who is or isn’t actually authorized to be in an area,” he said.
“If the folks on the ground — the critical infrastructure operators, the stadiums, the airports — don’t have the information about who actually is authorized, who’s registered, who has received waivers and just general information of whose drone is whose I think the immediate thing is that they jump to the conclusion that this must be a risk or a threat.”
In the same way that the traditional manned aviation industry relies on an established air traffic management system, UAV industry leaders need to work with aviation regulators in their respective jurisdictions to establish an integrated UAS traffic management system, Jordan said.
“It’s not just a matter of everyone buying more equipment, it’s a matter of being able to share the information,” he said. “I think the key is that it’s not the mission of the stadium or the airport or the prison to become drone experts, to figure out all of the different types of detection equipment or whatever. What they really need is just the actual information that they can trust and that they can make good decisions on.”
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