With the advent of privately owned drones, wouldn’t it be technically possible for a prankster to fly a loud drone over an open-venue football game in such a way that it continually disrupts the game (i.e., hovering 20 feet above the line of scrimmage, pre-snap, out of reach?) And wouldn’t trying to knock it down with a football be almost impossible if it took evasive maneuvers? (No cop would fire a gun in a stadium of 80,000 people.)
How would stadium security get rid of the drone?
Whoever is controlling the drone would have to be reasonably close to the stadium, and would likely be swiftly found and arrested. Knocking it down with a football would be pretty simple, since the drone won’t have 360 degree vision, and would be vulnerable from behind. Also, a cop very well might shoot it down with a shotgun, or even one of those beanbag guns they have for non-lethal use, which could be done easily and safely in that scenario.
It happened last year at a Serbia v Albania international. A drone carrying a “Greater Albania” flag was flown low over the pitch which provoked a riot by Serbian fans. Full story here.
A man was arrested in Manchester for flying a drone over The Etihad Stadium during a Man City v Spurs match, also last year but, IIRC, it didn’t really disrupt the game. Here.
It’s basically illegal in the US. The federal law for this from Wiki:
As I have learned recently, drones are subject to no fly zones.
Seems to me that if Amazon is thinking about having drone delivery of packages, it would soon be possible for a terrorist to use a drone to deliver grenades to a stadium from a moderate distance. Perhaps they would be found, perhaps not. Maybe they wouldn’t care if they got caught. Just my likely woefully uninformed speculation but there it is.
As it is, it would be trivial to deliver remotely triggered explosives by hand to stadiums anyway. How do drones improve that? If anything, they introduce unreliability into the equation, not mention how not-stealthy commerical drones are.
It wouldn’t be all that hard to send a drone into a stadium carrying a pound or two of explosives. The toy helicopter ‘drones’ can’t carry much of a payload, but construction of something to carry more is easily doable. The trouble is for a helicopter there’s a very short range of control, and it’s very noisy and noticeable, although I don’t know if anyone would have the presence of mind to shoot it down before it got into the stadium. If you’re going to get close enough to the stadium to use a small helicopter drone you may as well just use a mortar to lob shells or explosives.
That’s just for helicopters though. Much simpler would be a plane with GPS navigation. It can be launched from much further away and can carry a much heavier payload over a longer range for the same weight of motor and battery as a helicopter. I don’t know how easily a targeting auto-pilot would be to program but for a mile or two in mild weather conditions it’s probably not that hard.
The future is not a pretty.
Maybe but I’m not seeing any real advantages over an improvised mortar, except maybe range (depending on how drone control systems work, if they’re restricted to line-of-sight you’d have to be in the crowd to guide it).
Helicopters drones can carry a camera so you can pilot them to your destination. But the range is limited, and the usual control frequencies can easily be jammed. Quadcopters are very stable so it may be possible to create a GPS control for them, but you’ll get less range and airspeed from your motor and batteries than with a fixed wing craft.
Drone copters can carry a camera so the aircraft can be guided in remotely without line of sight. However the range is still going to be limited and the control frequencies can be easily jammed. Quadcopters and the like are fairly stable so they could be GPS guided also, but fixed wing craft will have greater range, speed, and payload from the same weight of motor and batteries.
I don’t know a lot about GPS, if the signals can be easily jammed in an a controlled area it’s probably a good idea to start doing that.
There was an airplane that crashed into the stands of Baltimore’s Memorial stadium in 1976 moments after an NFL playoff game. Luckily no one was injured.
That’s essentially a ghetto cruise missile.
I’d think the hard part for your average terrorist cell would be to program it in such a way that it could keep itself in the air. Navigation would be easy, but actually having it fly itself to the target might be pretty involved.
Easier and more effective would be to rig up a R/C system for the airplane (a-la the way *Mythbusters *have done cars in the past), with cameras and basically turn a Cessna into a huge drone with several hundred lbs of explosive.
It’s not that hard to keep a plane flying straight and level. The fuckin’ Nazis had V1s doing that all the way across the English Channel using simple mechanical balance mechanisms. If you can read the GPS and the plane is set on course to the stadium to start with it shouldn’t be all that difficult. RC would probably be effective with a plane though. If the plane can hit 60MPH it can be launched from 2 miles away and be there in 2 minutes. Nobody may notice it coming until it’s too late, but their could be (and oughta be) signal jamming. A full size plane has logistical problems, you need, a real plane, and somewhere to take off from where you won’t be scrutinized. Best to just load up with fuel and ram into the stands instead of trying to enough explosives in to do more damage than that. Also best to teach a suicide bomber how to pilot a small plane, thinks didn’t always work out great on Mythbusters and if you test the system and it fails your whole operation will be blown. You’ll be spotted approaching the stadium, but I don’t know if anyone’s prepared to do anything about it, if the airport is close there’s no time scramble fighter planes. Also if it’s over a populated area it would be stupid to shoot down an aircraft merely based on suspicion.