2023-11-18 09:00:00
“The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that a small drone costing a few hundred euros can cause great damage, particularly by carrying an explosive,” explains a Thales expert. These small devices are very difficult to detect by airport radar systems. “The Ukrainians are now even making drones out of cardboard so that they go unnoticed.” This threat does not only concern airports. Major events are also on the horizon.
The dreaded kamikaze drone scenario
This type of drone attacks is taken very seriously by the French Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, in the run-up to the Olympic Games this summer in Paris. “There are attempted attacks like in Spain which make us think that this type of event could occur in France,” the minister recently explained. Mr. Darmanin was referring to the recent conviction of a jihadist who was asked by the Islamic State group to carry out an attack during a match between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid at the Camp Nou. The most feared scenario? A kamikaze device that would pounce on the crowd during the ceremony or an Olympic Games event.
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During the recent Rugby World Cup in France, the country put in place a system to protect these stadiums. The idea was to trigger a jammer interrupting the signal between the malicious drone and its remote control, thus making it possible to neutralize the device. The Israeli company Rafael has even developed a drone dome, which, like the famous iron dome against missiles, is supposed to protect an entire territory against drone attacks, via jamming.
A radar that differentiates drones from birds
Other defense systems exist, such as interceptor drones which literally capture attack drones with a net. But the big challenge remains detecting these small devices. Most airports do not have radar systems to do this. “This will be one of the major challenges of the coming years,” explains Thales, which has just developed an anti-drone radar. The latter even differentiates birds from small flying devices and would be capable of “countering artificial intelligence, such as a drone which would imitate the flight of a bird to deceive radars.” Visiting the Brabant premises of Thales, which employs 1,200 people in Belgium, last week, the Walloon Minister of Airports, Adrien Dolimont (MR), took quite a few notes. “Even if these risks were not unknown to me, diving into the technical and concrete elements allowed me to have a fairly clear image of the future challenges,” he explained.
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