Digital shields at British airports could prevent chaos from rogue drones

Giant virtual domes which protect runways from rogue drones could be introduced at British airports to prevent a repeat of the chaos that grounded hundreds of Christmas flights.

The multi-million-pound, 30-mile-high digital shields, based on a similar principle to Israel’s “Iron Dome” anti-missile technology, can seek out and jam unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and then locate their operator by tracking remote control signals.

Evening Standard understands their introduction is being considered in response to a series of UAV flights that breached the airspace at Heathrow and Gatwick around Christmas and the New Year.

German firm Aaronia, which developed the shields, had a display at the Security and Counter Terror Expo in Olympia this week. Evening Standard has been told the company is in talks with Heathrow, although the airport declined to comment.

The digital dome is created by up to six mushroom-like tracking antennae around the airport perimeter, which can be hooked up to heavy-duty laptops to create a drone-hunting mobile unit.

It locks on to a drone’s radio frequency to track and jam it as a three-dimensional topographic map flags its location, and that of the operator. The system — called Aartos, or Advanced Automatic RF Tracking and Observation Solution — is used in some nuclear plants and at Muscat International Airport, and was deployed to protect last year’s Nato summit in Brussels.

It is claimed to have an “extremely high detection range” that can reach more than 160,000ft in the air — some four times the cruising height of a commercial jet — but apparently “cannot be confused by other flying objects such as birds, balloons and kits”.

Thorsten Chmielus, Aaronia’s chief executive, said: “We have 360-degree dome coverage so even if a drone flies very high we could detect it.

“You can catch the operator because we can see where they are and we can see where the drone is flying. We also get a prediction to see where the drone will fly in the next 20 seconds.

“Then you can really see what the target of the drone might be. Then you simply shut down the airport for a few minutes, catch the guy and reopen again.”

In January, departures from Heathrow were halted temporarily after a drone sighting. The previous month, drone sightings at Gatwick led to about 1,000 flights being cancelled.

A Heathrow spokeswoman said: “In the interests of safety, we do not comment on issues relating to security at the airport.”