Last September, Denmark was gripped by a spate of drone sightings near airports. It’s familiar territory for Hackaday, as we reported on a similar drone panic saga at British airports back in the last decade. Back then the British police dragged their feet and hid behind secrecy laws for years to avoid admitting they overreacted, but it seems in Denmark they do things differently (Danish language, Google Translate link.).
The Danish police in Jutland have rolled back their report, and noted that a reported observation alone is not enough to confirm a drone was present. It’s not confirmed why they’ve taken this step, but we’ve been told that there’s been an effort within the drone community to identify possible aircraft flight paths which could have resulted in a false drone sighting at the times in question.
We welcome this correction, and hope that its important message travels widely. Of course it is the right thing to do for a police force to take drone reports seriously, but overreacting as the British police did is of little help. We commend the Danish police for taking this step, and we’re likely to trust any drone reports from them a little bit more in the future. If you’d like to read our plea for a sensible response at the time, it’s here.
Thanks [UAVHive] for the tip.
We have this now too in Switzerland: drones flying in formation over critical targets (air ports, nuclear pp) and just disappearing after. It’s official (yesterday in Tagesschau), the question ist only, wheter it’s a psyops for panic or to spy potential european targets.
Probably both:
Gather information, but even if that appears to be useless: Contribute to destabilization by triggering “loss of safety” emotions. Bewildered people will vote for extreme right positions, thus destroying the very substance of their own nations. No fiction, it’s actually happening.
Drone-lovers should not allow to get exploited by such incidents. Those who did this WANT us to mistrust our authorities.
“Fear will keep the local systems in line.” – Moff Tarkin
Appear and disappear until no one cares any more, then use the gathered data to strike, if destabilization hasn’t worked out by then. The public is not very good at staying in the healthy middle of two extremes on a larger time scale :-/
…and 20 people are dumber than 10.
The real “mass effect”.
The average IQ of a group is the lowest IQ of any member divided by the number of people in said group. One really daft idiot (say, a circus-peanut-colored President) or a large group (or worse, BOTH), and you have a very low group IQ indeed.
@dremu
TDS is real. Hopefully you seek treatment.
Please refrain for stupid political name calling in these blogs. Many people come here to get away from that kind of evil…
US restrictions did not occur under “far-right” positions. I bought a drone (over 250g, not designed in the PRC), registered myself and licensed it. To fly it over my own property. Not allowed to even take pictures for free for my neighbor, or of a peewee league baseball game for parents, for free, without getting a commercial UAV pilot’s license.
And then, they mandated a broadcast ID module that would have required the French manufacturer to write up a new firmware to blurt out the machine ID, which they chose not to do, since they went for the non-hobbyist, higher margin market. I bought a broadcast module and still haven’t worked through the process of figuring out how to retrofit it so I can use it for my intended use, flying camera.
And this all occurred well before the British cops freaked out about Heathrow.
it’s why every dollar or euro or pound spent to defend Ukraine is a unit of currency well spent. i don’t think people have any idea how badly Putin intends to destabilize the west; just look at how much he as already succeeded
if stability is what you want…
Ah, the olde “let’s you and him fight.”
I’m thinking of buying a shirt with a big Z on it and running around at airports shouting ‘BZZZ I’m a drone’
Or maybe I’m just phishing to see how many ‘journalists’ contact me with sponsoring offers, to see if I can refuse such generous financing.
Police overreacting to false reports of drones? The rest of your comment implies the Danish police believe it’s actually happening to them…
Have you considered local Pilatus manufacturer just making trials of their own drone systems, and infrastructure just happening to be nearby? You may be overreacting over natural activity of your very successful local industry.
or : somebody who is selling anti-drone systems trying to build a case for selling such a system
That’s just good business
“…but we’ve been told that there’s been an effort within the drone community to identify possible aircraft flight paths which could have resulted in a false drone sighting at the times in question.”
Sounds like a, we should work with others so this will not happen again, type of situation.
Local (patriot) volunteer drone fighting units. Cameras and RF visualisators turned to sky. Drones to observe and track suspicious drones. Hackers of all nations, help fight for your freedom, now!
I’d say they have “partially” rolled back their report, instead of saying they are sure there were drones, they are now saying they can neither confirm nor deny if there were drones, they say there was something there but don’t know what it was so I suppose it’s UFO sightings now
Prime Minister went on national propaganda channel : It I’d drone frome an unknown actor which you can guess, who really is!!!
And then the “investigation” called them “insects” etc.
Builds trust in authorities… or…
When I were a lad… we paid men to walk around airfields with a 12 gauge to get rid of birds.
remember a couple years back, when handheld laser pointers were the big scare? and people when getting arrested for pointing lasers at police helicopters and commercial planes? and the thousands of planes and helicopters that went down, and the millions of people killed? i remember all except the last part, because it didn’t happen. laser pointers are safe at point blank range, and barely noticable at aircraft distances. the “distranction” nonsense was nonsense because seeing a laser from the air is less intense than looking at a traffic light light from the same distance.
now its drones. drones are being used as weapons. of course, without high explosives, they are no worse than a bird strike. so all governmemts everywhere must ban birds.
Those presentation laser pointers aren’t the ones they are worried about. You’d be shocked what you can buy on aliexpress. And just because something hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it will never happen; you’re being mentally undisciplined with this “remember when millions of people were killed” non-sequitur, as if countermeasures are irrational if holocaust-level casualties haven’t happened yet. A single plane going down and killing 200 would permanently change regulations all over the world.
And you almost strike on a good point in the second paragraph: birds do not carry explosives. How do you prove a drone doesn’t have a payload? If it’s near an airport, you’d be a lot better off presuming it does and being wrong than the opposite.