Posted on 05/02/2013 8:54:46 AM PDT by Seizethecarp
Just as terrorists can use GPS guided drone/UAVs to target jet turbines in the Runway Kill Zone (RKZ) as explained in earlier posts to this blog (here), the quad-copter drone that was hovering in the JFK landing approach of an Alitalia jetliner on March 5, 2013 may have been the first terrorist attack in a Landing Approach Kill Zone (LAKZ). News coverage of the story can be seen here.
Using Jeppesen maps, a terrorist can determine the altitude that jetliners are supposed to fly at for each descending leg of a landing approach to a specific runway. At JFK on March 5, 2013, the Alitalia jet was approaching runway 31R. Going on the internet a recent Jeppesen map for that runway shows a leg approximately a mile in length right before Long Beach, NY (where the multi-copter drone was hovering) during which the airliner is supposed to hold steady at 1,900 feet.
Using newly available First-Person View (FPV) “video piloting” (here) the multi-copter’s remote pilot could hover the drone at 1,900 feet at the GPS coordinates of the Jeppesen landing approach to JFK runway 31R and visually guide the drone to target one of the jet turbine intakes on the Alitalia airliner.
“However, one thing that has not been offered is using a proximity detonation of with fragmentation - kinda like the Jihadi’s pressure cooker bomb without the pressure cooker. The copter drone carries one of those large cannon burst fireworks wrapped with shrapnel.”
See this comment:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3014942/posts?page=44#44
May God Bless you.
I think you don’t really understand what it would take to accomplish what you suggest. Billion to one shot maybe.
While you might pick a spot to place a drone, what you cannot do is pick a spot a plane will be at. The plane cannot re-read and factor out the error, nor does it need to. It just shows the pilot where in the sky the plane is at 4-500 miles an hour and the pilot and autopilot steers the plane to an accuracy that is suitable. At 450 miles per hour, you travel 10 feet in .00017667 seconds. An aircraft GPS keeps the plane in a straight line down a lane that is as wide as a a 250 lane highway. Anywhere in that highway is in your lane. While most pilots would generally tend to drift to the middle of the lane, an 8 foot intake compared to a 229 foot wingspan in a lane that is 23 planes wide is beyond luck.
Just in the horizontal plane, assuming an intake 16 foot wide you have over 600 engines wide staying in the lane!
Adding in a horizontal error of 200 foot vertical drift you are staring at a 30,000 to 1 chance of a hit.
Hitting one engine does not crash the plane, to do that you need to hit two engines.
To put this in perspective:
Chance that Earth will experience a catastrophic collision with an asteroid in the next 100 years: 1 in 5,000
Chance of dying in such a collision: 1 in 20,000
Lightning Strike Probabilities
1. ASSUME -
4 CG flashes/km2/yr/average
House is 10 X 20 m2 = 200 m2
Direct strike to house when lightning hits within 10 m
Predicted strike (1200 X4)/1 000 000 =
4.8 X 10 -3 or once ea. 200 years
Therefore - 1 out of 200 house will be struck per year.
2. ASSUME -
USA population = 280,000,000
1000 lightning victims/year/average
Odds = 1 : 280,000 of being struck by lightning
So if we are going to freak out, lets freak out about being hit by a asteroid, cause that will kill you and blowing out one engine won't. And your odds of being killed by lightning is 3000 times greater than taking out two engines.
900,000,000/280,000 =3,214What happens if GPS autopilot systems are jammed or the link to a base station gets dropped during a drone attack in the RKZ?
Then the plane drifts from the intended path and your odd of sucess begins to go down equal to your drift rate. In real life, nothing changes because you are picking a hit spot at random, there is a 50/50 chance it will drift into your lotto number as drift away.
Can we please put this to rest now?
“I think you don’t really understand what it would take to accomplish what you suggest. Billion to one shot maybe.”
And yet a multi-copter at JFK and a drone at Glasgow appear to have been intentionally placed hovering within 300 ft. of airliners making landing approach this year.
I calculate different odds, especially using virtual piloting combined with Jeppesen maps and GPS navigation.
I believe that I have covered all your objections in the following previous posts on the thread. Note that according to the Jeppesen ILS map for JFK runway 31R at point ZULAB, a point at altitude 1,900 feet almost exactly where the JFK done was spotted an airliner would be travelling 160 knots. In the past three months two drone/UFOs have been placed hovering within 300 feet of
airliners on landing approach. IMO, someone is practicing of failed in an actual attempt at a collision!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3014942/posts?page=8#8
To: McGruff
“That doesn’t sound very easy.”
Imagine yourself in two-dimensions in a small boat trying to intentionally collide with a large ship.
If you have a navigational chart of the ship channel and know the shipping schedule you could position yourself in the middle of the channel using newly available GPS guidance.
You would have the best chance of achieving a collision if you selected a passage in the channel where the large ship would be following a constant bearing as it approaches your intended collision point.
You could sit there at the most likely collision point facing your craft towards the oncoming ship and you would only have to make very small adjustments to the port or starboard (left or right) to insure a collision, assuming you were not detected on the bridge of the approaching craft.
As a boy my Navy dad taught me “beware the constant bearing” meaning that if your craft is following a constant heading at constant speed and another craft is heading across your bow at a constant heading and constant speed, but the “bearing” (compass position) of the other craft is remaining constant (constant degrees to the left or right of your bow) then you are heading for a collision.
Sitting in your small craft facing an oncoming ship it would be easy to determine whether you should maneuver to the left or right to guarantee a collision, assuming the large ship doesn’t change course. All you have to do is observe whether it is coming straight at you and adjust accordingly.
Now imagine a remotely piloted multi-copter drone remote pilot attempting to achieve a collsion with an airliner where the airliner, like the Alitalia jet approaching JFK, is flying a constant bearing(315 degrees, per Jeppesen) and constant altitude (1,900 feet per Jeppesen) for a mile as it approaches a known optimal collision point (labeled ZULAB on the Jeppesen map and GPS identifiable in three dimensions) right before the airliner begins final descent.
Point ZULAB on the Jeppesen map is a known constant three-dimensional location through which all jetliners must pass on approach to runway 31R at JFK right over Long Beach, NY where the rogue drone multi-copter was spotted “hovering” only 200 feet away from the Alitalia Jet.
A remote terrorist drone pilot positioning the attach drone multi-copter at point ZULAB and facing the drone at bearing 135 degrees (opposite of landing bearing 315 degrees) the terrorist now has a two dimensional target to collide with. The terrorist would only have to position the drone up or down, or left or right to maintain the “constant heading” of the incoming jetliner relative to the drone.
In particular the terrorist would want to target one of the jet turbines of the airliner.
8 posted on Thursday, May 2, 2013 12:31:43 PM by Seizethecarp
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3014942/posts?page=21#21
To: Revolutionary
“The odds of bringing down the aircraft are almost zero because they can land just fine on the other engine. But the fear factor would be great.”
True. But two terrorists operating two drones could knock out both engines. This JKF drone event on March 5, 2013 could have been a proof of concept.
The cost of drones is now so low and drone swarming software is now available so that a swarm of drones could be maneuvered into the GPS coordinates for ZULAB in the Jeppesen. This would reverse-engineer a bird-strike crash such as Captain Sully experienced.
Here is a video of coordinated drone swarming recently achieved which terrorists could soon be bringing to the Runway Kill Zone (RKZ) or the Landing Approach Kill Zone (LAKZ) near you!:
Video: Swarm of Tiny Quadcopters Do a Delicate Dance
“Towards a Swarm of Nano Quadrotors”
Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger, Vijay Kumar, GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania
“Perhaps it’s somewhat hyperbolic, but seeing the ease and grace with which these things move in and out of formation, negotiating obstacles and ducking seamlessly between each other as they execute a figure eight really tickles the fanciful, sci-fi-friendly part of the brain. GRASP Lab creations have already shown us how quadcopters can work together to manipulate objects and even build structures together. The idea of looping more than a dozen of these things together—as we see in the video below—and putting them to work on complex projects makes this kind of precision performance feel very much like the future.”
21 posted on Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:20:30 PM by Seizethecarp
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3014942/posts?page=34#34
To: wxgesr
“CBDR
Constant Bearing Decreasing Range”
There you go. This is what my Navy dad was trying to explain...as opposed to “increasing range” which would avoid collision, of course.
In our scenario with a jet aircraft approaching Jeppesen point ZULAB at 160 knots with the remotely piloted drone held nearly stationary on autopilot, “decreasing range” is a given!
34 posted on Thursday, May 2, 2013 2:30:51 PM by Seizethecarp
Indeed it does seem like that. Not going to work, but does not mean someone is not trying it, and may cause much damage to a very expensive plane. Suck one in a windshield and it could get ugly.
Actually it is almost exactly 1 in 1000.
The aircraft will be within plus or minus 100 ft both vertically and laterally. That is 40,000 square feet. The engine has an area of about 20 square feet. Two engines equal 40 square feet. If the UAV doesn’t move, the random odds of hitting an engine is 1/1000. I just did the math for fun.
Cubic feet three dimension. Add time and reality since a perfectly unmoving UAV isn’t reality.
You’re confusing bearing with heading. Just because you know his heading doesn’t mean anything with regard to his bearing to you, which is his compass position relative to you. You can be on a reciprocal heading to him, but if your flight path is displaced 50 meters from his, then you won’t collide.
So this will not work without some way of determing bearing of the approaching aircraft. Radar would do it, but I don’t know of any sets that small. A video camera with built-in compass would do it, but I’ve never seen such a thing.
I’m not sure it’s so easy. Yet . . .
“You’re confusing bearing with heading.”
Thanks for your comment.
This is an important distinction, but I think if you look through my responses to other comments you will see that I do, in fact, clearly distinguish between the bearing of an approaching target aircraft relative to an attack drone on the one hand and the heading of the incoming aircraft following a predictable heading on an instrument approach.
As I discussed in a previous comment their are on-board video cameras that can permit a drone operator to observe the bearing of the target aircraft adjust the position of the drone at the last minute to increase the probability of a collision.
In fact, I believe that the drone in the JFK Landing Approach Kill Zone (LAKZ) and also the unidentified airframe in the Glasgow LAKZ were most likely operated by terrorists attempting to strike airliners, in effect by “mining” the LAKZ.
Use of swarms of inexpensive UAVs, especially mini-copters, could greatly increase the probability of a successful strike.
Seems more than mildy likely
could a laser weapon...onboard such a drone be accurate enough to do significant damage as to take one down?
These handheld lasers have never taken down a singe airplane, IIRC, due to multiple backup systems starting with a second pilot not likely to be simultaneously injured and the fact that most large airliners use instrument landing technology and can be flown with no visibility outside the aircraft.
Land-based laser pointing at airplanes in landing approach zones is arguably even more effective that air-mounted laser pointing on a UAV, I would expect.
Think of that restaurant in Denver where people can see the incoming planes lined up for 50 miles approaching the airport. Any malicious laser-pointing terrorist or creep can use any promontory to attack the cockpits in incoming planes without needing to mount the laser on a UAV.
UAV/drones are much more effective against aircraft turbofans as a kinetic weapon with no onboard lasers or explosives needed, IMO.
Perhaps all aircraft need to be retro fitted with similar lasers....programmed to seek out “incoming” laser light sources...and DESTROY them and thier operators?
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