Recently completed testing of technologies for detecting drones and mitigating potential threats at five domestic airports showed mixed results in terms of vendors’ systems that were able to complete the test program, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) official in charge of the effort said on Wednesday.
The actual performance of the counter-unmanned aircraft system (C-UAS) technologies that were tested is still being analyzed but 62 percent and 33 percent of the detection and mitigation technologies, respectively, completed the program, Jim Patterson, the manager of the FAA’s drone detection and mitigation program, said at the American Association of Airport Executives Aviation Security Summit. Combined, 53 percent of the detection and mitigation technologies completed the program, he said.
The FAA evaluated 30 technologies, 21 for detection and nine for mitigation, supplied by 18 vendors. Of these, 12 vendors successfully made it through the test program, nine with detection systems three with mitigation technologies, he said.
Six vendors with four mitigation and two detection systems “washed out” of the program due to radio frequency or other performance issues, Patterson.
The FAA did not create a standard for the various technologies to be tested against but held each vendor to their own assertions about what their respective systems could do, Patterson said. In some cases, systems were emitting on frequency bands that that the “vendor wasn’t aware of,” he said.
“So, if the vendor said they could detect at four miles, we expected four miles, Patterson said. “So, if it came out to two miles, that to me didn’t answer. That was a bluff. ‘We’re sorry. We’re gonna have to ask you to leave.’”
The FAA’s information gives “confidence” but is also “sobering,” Chris McLaughlin, executive vice president for operations at Dallas-Fort Worth International, said. There has been progress the past five years on developing technologies to detect and mitigate drone threats at airports but “there’s more work to be done,” he said.
McLaughlin moderated a C-UAS at airports panel that also included Department of Homeland Security Representatives.
Nearby drones have been a nuisance for some U.S. airports, disrupting and in some cases canceling flight operations. At Gatwick Airport near London, in December 2018 a drone sighting forced significant disruptions to airport operations over a two-day period. McLaughlin called the Gatwick incident a “watershed” moment for airports contending with small UAS, typically due to careless and clueless operators, although there remain concerns that nefarious actors could weaponize these drones or fly them into a plane.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has also been testing technologies to detect, track, and identify drones. The agency cycles its testing between Miami and Los Angelis International Airports and conducts the evaluations amid regular airport operations.
Jim Bamberger, TSA’s branch chief for public areas security and infrastructure protection, highlighted the effective role technology can play in providing airports situational awareness of nearby drone operations.
Between September 2021 and September 2022, there were 53 visual reports of drones about three miles from the LAX airport perimeter, according to one of Bamberger’s slides. In that same period, the technologies detected 5,175 small UAS. Within one mile of the airport perimeter, which is considered a restricted area, C-UAS technologys detected 41 drones, according to the slide.
“So, the amount of…drone activity is mind-blowing,” Bamberger said.
Bamberger highlighted that the technical sightings were only of Chinese-made DJI drones, which makes up about 75 percent of the recreational UAS market. These detections were done by an electronic monitoring technology provided by Aerial Armor, a Dedrone company that supplies the DJI-made Aeroscope product.
Patterson said that the FAA’s testing, which occurred at Atlantic City, Columbus, Ohio, Huntsville, Ala., Seattle, and Syracuse, N.Y., took a deeper technical dive into the various technologies than TSA’s. Still, TSA is working to get a good understanding of what the technologies can and cannot do.
TSA is examining how well each system detects and holds a track of a drone, whether they detect the controller, and not violate personally identifiable information, Bamberger said. The data is provided to the different vendors, he said.
TSA plans this fiscal year to produce a catalog of its testing results to give airports. Currently, the agency has tested about 15 technologies but the catalog will grow as more testing is done, he said.
Bamberger and Patterson said that where C-UAS equipment is positioned in and around an airport matters in terms of performance. In testing at MIA, Bamberger said that radio frequency interference from the terminal prevented C-UAS technology from working in certain directions, creating a “virtual wall.”
In one of FAA’s tests, an RF sensor that was tested stopped working because it was sited to close to a stronger sensor on the airport’s property, Patterson said. Airport surveillance and weather radars, communications equipment, and even Wi-Fi networks, can interfere with the drone detection and mitigation systems, he said.
Later in 2024, the FAA will provide airports a guidance document with the performance results of its testing, Patterson said. The document will have two main components, one being where to site C-UAS equipment based on lessons learned in the testing and the second will be minimum performance characteristics, which may be done using third party validation or some type of self-certification process, he said.
What the FAA will not do is choose winners, say “who is best-of-class of the different technologies,” or approve vendors, Patterson said. The test was an “educational exercise for both the government and for the vendors,” he said.
The FAA testing involved 14,772 UAS flights. Patterson said seven vendors backed out of the program before signing a contract to participate for reasons such as their systems were being provided to Ukraine and supply chain issues.
The FAA tested different RF sensors, radar, and cameras. The mitigation technologies included RF takeover and RF interruption, Patterson said.
There is no silver bullet technology and a layered system is probably the best approach to enhance C-UAS coverage, Bamberger and Patterson said, adding that what is best for one airport may not be what another airport needs.