Earth and Sky...and everything in between...?

Estimates by people who're fascinated by such things suggest that there are around 39,000 aircraft in the world right now, with on average around 9,500 in the air at any one time. The number includes commercial and military aircraft, but not light aircraft - which often fly below the air traffic control ceiling and so as long as the pilots follow the rules of the sky, they don't encounter traffic other than while taking off and landing (as can be verified by Harrison Ford...).

All aircraft - large and small - require air worthiness certification. They're large and difficult to store, you need space to take off and land, and so it's actually quite difficult to inconspicuously procure, own or operate one. As a pilot, you're supposed to have a license, which can only be obtained through a certified training provider, and this is relatively easy to police - because the only points of access to the sky for you and your aeroplane are airfields, all of which are usually inaccessible or remote, so that the vehicles in which you entrust your survival remain un-tampered and justifiably air-worthy.

The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO), a UN body, says that the “global air transport network” doubles in size at least once every 15 years, and so if these predictions can be relied upon (and perhaps they cannot, given the evolution of UAS and the likelihood that some element of larger-scale air transportation will be replaced by smaller sized autonomous flying vehicles) we could perhaps expect close to 80,000 operational aircraft throughout the world before 2035.

In contrast, by March 2017 there were 770,000 commercial drones registered with the FAA in the US. This does not include hobby drones, and by 2021 it is predicted that there will be 3.5 million of these in use in the US alone, with an expected market value for drones judged to be worth in excess of $90 billion.

Although the legislation around registration of drones and licensing of pilots is rushing to catch up, none of the convenient natural controls mentioned above that prevent a person from owning and operating a conventional aircraft (ie their size, cost, accessibility, space requirements or obviousness) apply to drones. It is relatively easy for anyone to obtain a drone. They're available off the shelf in the high-street, or on the web. With relatively little technical expertise (nothing I require a license for) I can obtain open-source hardware and software designs from the internet and 3D print many of the components at home if I want. With access to source code, I can even modify the way the drone works, circumventing safety and control protocols or removing or redesigning parts to do what I want, all from the comfort of my home and without anyone knowing.

Whereas the confounding array of controls in a typical airline cockpit is enough to prevent a layman from even switching the power on, UAVs increasingly arrive with so much built-in automation that it is barely necessary to even read the quick-start guide before taking to the air. Of course, practice and training make a difference for a professional looking to perform intricate and unusual tasks, but "point and click" flying in benign conditions is very achievable even now, and will become the norm as applications like all-weather home delivery find themselves more widespread.

Hobby drones used to only have a payload capacity of a kilo or two - just enough to carry a camera. Now there are off-the-shelf platforms designed to carry professional camera equipment weighing over 30kg, delivery drones that will likely lift even more, crop-spraying drones supplied direct from the internet with built-in systems for distributing large volumes of fluids (for good or for ill) over large areas. The applications and the possibilities are only limited by the opportunism of the people with a need, and technology always delivers.

So how do we reconcile the probability of highly controlled and regulated aircraft in relatively small quantities (but with high-impact consequences in the event of an accident) with a potentially vast number of small and hard to regulate, mostly autonomous objects, each of which may not be particularly dangerous individually, but that operate in the same physical space as conventional aircraft and hence have the potential to cause very serious incidents? And this is before we even start to consider the inclusion of autonomous vehicles that operate on the ground as well as in the air?

Industry's response to this is Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) - a system to handle traffic that is not handled by Air Traffic Control systems. The definition of where the boundary between these two systems exists is vague. In fact, governments on either side of the Atlantic are currently happy to see competing standards be trialled in the hope (?) that workable standards will emerge.

If there were not a commercial dimension to this competition it might have been a reasonable approach, but much of the work is being driven by organisations with a product to sell and a desperation to capture a portion of the international market and achieve some form of market lock-in. Some of these organisations come from the air traffic management industry, and while on the surface of it this might seem logical, we only need to look at the totally different traffic dynamic that's present in the crowded and chaotic swarm-space of UAS to the relative order of traditional aviation sector to wonder if the right sort of experience is present.

While everyone is now aware of the potential threat of uncooperative aircraft in the conventional aerospace sector, we also now know how difficult it is to repeat such activities. However, with an increase in traffic volume by orders of magnitude, and a decrease in detectability of threats the possibility of uncooperative aircraft is very significantly higher. The potential danger from weaponized drones is now proven to be real and alongside the risk we've seen a feeding frenzy from industry in a rush to apply countermeasures aimed at neutralising the threat - some of which are perhaps more credible and practical than others. But in a frontier market like this, there's a lot of opportunity for snake-oil salespeople to push fake silver bullets, or for people to make unrealistic claims from behind a veil of smoke and mirror.

Hobby drones continue to get more and more sophisticated, making them smaller, more autonomous, harder to detect, harder to interfere with, easier to operate, longer flying beyond visual line of sight and even without satellite navigation - all making some of the popular mitigation techniques being pushed by "one trick pony" vendors less effective.

With barely any agreement between professionals in the counter-UAS market on how best to control uncooperative drones it is hardly surprising that the evolving UTM ecosystem is ignoring the problem and focusing on the safety and management of cooperative UAS instead. But we can't afford to allow these standards to become established without baked-in solutions that will allow us to protect critical infrastructure from attack by malicious third parties using fully autonomous, weaponized ground, air or sea vehicles.

Commercial business has proved in the past that they will not wait for safeguards to be put in place before allowing extremely dangerous standards to be established that have easy-to-exploit loopholes, enabling devices to be used outside of their original legitimate purpose by people with the imagination and technical knowhow. The IoT is not the answer. Abdicating responsibility for maintaining availability and security to a black box solution that looks like a fluffy cloud on the page is no way to demonstrate that you've done all you can to ensure that your users and the public - and the infrastructure that is critical to their well-being - is properly protected.

The perceived silos of physical, information and cyber security have long been demonstrated to be false, with true security and safety only achievable through a holistic approach that places equal value on all forms of risk management. The next major conceptual barrier to be removed in security is the idea that you're separated from your threats by the physical boundary that's marked by your perimeter wall. If your Security Management System is not aware of the major threats in your environment then you're living in a blinkered world of denial and waiting for your next crisis to come under, over or through the fence.

Critical National Infrastructure requires three dimensional protection, with the ability to track and classify objects in the vicinity - without requiring the interception or interpretation of signalling, and regardless of whether the objects identify themselves as friendly. Identification of threats needs to happen at sufficient distance to allow defensive measures to be deployed with enough time that they can be effective. Sufficient appropriate technology needs to be deployed as a part of the threat mitigation system to ensure that a consistent and effective response is always deployed, without requiring people to make decisions or take actions under high stress conditions.

Blighter Surveillance Systems Ltd is a UK manufacturer of radar that is proven effective at detecting hard to spot targets in cluttered environments, on the ground, in the air and at sea. We give you the time to save lives.