WW 953: The Casting of Frank Stallone

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@thurrott was a bit flippant and dismissive of Germany looking at passing a law to allow it to shoot down drones. This is part of the escalation from a certain non-EU country and its allies. We have had military drones buzzing military installations and commercial airports in Finland, Poland and Germany, buzzing the commercial airports mean all commercial flights are suspended until the illegal flying object leaves the area and all incoming flights are diverted to their alternates.

The UK has had problems with this as well, with Gatwick being closed for several days due to repeated flights of an unmanned drone around the airport. They eventually caught the person, who was doing it for “fun”, but in the current cases, these are military drones from a foreign power that are causing disruption (whilst doing reconnaisance of those installations).

The state police will be able to shoot down or interfere with flight controls (radio jamming and lasers affecting cameras), when such drones are spotted around sensitive installations (critical infrastructure, military installations, airports etc.).

This is hardly the police going out and shooting down the drone from John next door. Flying drones is heavily restricted in Germany, you can’t fly over towns or cities, you can’t fly over residential areas, you can’t fly over industrial areas or near airports or on their flightpaths, you can only fly over open land, forests or in your own garden (as long as the drone cannot see into a neighbours property) or at designated model aerodromes, although I believe the model aircraft fliers don’t really like sharing their airports with droners. Which means that any drones flying near the types of facilities listed above are already flying illegally.