Lack of airspace awareness creates problems for Europe’s airports

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

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.”

New Jersey drone scare recalled

Michael Robbins, president and CEO of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems (AUVSI), agreed that the lack of low-altitude airspace awareness can create headaches for infrastructure operators on the lookout for nefarious drone activity. “Right now, we lack good awareness of what’s in the sky, as does Europe, which leads to fear and leads to misunderstandings and to all kinds of negative consequences like what you’re seeing in Europe,” he said.

The reaction of European officials to perceived threats from UAVs points to the need to “narrowly expand the mitigation authority so that when something is a threat it can be dealt with appropriately by trained individuals with proper oversight.”

Absent such an established system for conducting counter-UAS operations, infrastructure operators in both Europe and the U.S. are likely to overreact to perceived drone threats, Robbins said.

“Arguably, we almost experienced that last December when, there were drones over New Jersey. I say ‘drones’ in air quotes over New Jersey,” he said. “The media had a bit of a hype cycle around that. And yes, there were some drones over New Jersey, there’s no doubt.

“Some of them were, legal, in-compliance drones that were conducting safe missions. But also, there was a lot of fear and people were seeing helicopters and thinking they were drones,” he said. “People were looking at the landing patterns at Newark Airport thinking those were drones. People were looking at stars and misidentifying those as drones.”

Part of the reason the New Jersey drone story spiraled out of control was that scarcity of “good low-altitude airspace-awareness technology or the authorities to operate that technology,” Robbins said.

Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.