Can You Make This Thing Go Faster? by Jeremy Clarkson

Author:Jeremy Clarkson [Clarkson, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781405946520
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

Lasers, nets, eagles, jammers – it’s all pie in the sky. Our only defence against drones is luck

As I write, planes have started to take off from Gatwick and everyone is now wandering about in a state of bewildered impotence, trying to work out who is responsible, how such a thing can be prevented in future and, of course, whether drones should now be banned.

Commentators have pointed out that over a 14-month period one gang alone used drones on 55 occasions to deliver drugs worth more than half a million pounds to Britain’s prisons.

Then you have celebrities, who complain that paparazzi are using aerial tech to photograph them mating with other celebrities, and I know of a young lady who found a private place to do some topless sunbathing last summer, only to find that, because of a perv drone, it wasn’t private at all.

For sure, they are extremely useful when it’s the day before Christmas and you can’t think of anything to buy your son. But even here there are issues, because on Boxing Day morning, when you are on the lavatory, his new toy will arrive at the window and transmit live pictures of your No 2s to the internet. And then the next day it will crash into a tree, and that’ll be that.

A ban, therefore, makes sense. Except it doesn’t, because my film crew uses drones to get aerial shots, and Sir Attenborough does too. Not even the most reclusive monkey or stork is safe now from the prying eyes of the BBC’s natural history department. And neither are terrorists. Remember Jihadi John? Well, his last thought was: ‘I wonder what that buzzing noise is.’

Then you have rail operators, which use drones to see just how much trackside cabling has been stolen in the night. In China they are fitted with flamethrowers and used to clear debris that’s stuck on overhead power lines.

Amazon is working on drones that will deliver stuff to your back garden in less than 30 minutes. And there’s talk of the NHS using them in London to move urgently needed medical supplies between the capital’s 34 hospitals.

The trouble is that drones are a bit like guns: extremely useful when they’re in the right hands but extremely unuseful when they’re not. And there’s always been a suggestion that some radicalized halfwit will fit a gob of C-4 plastic explosive to a £40 drone and fly it into the left engine of an El Al Boeing that’s coming in to land at Heathrow.

To get round this, most drone makers that sell to the public fit their machinery with so-called geofencing, which stops it being flown near a prison or an airport or, I’d hope, a nuclear power station. But to get round that, almost anyone with a laptop and a soldering iron can buy a DIY drone kit that could be piloted right into the conning tower of the nuclear-powered sub HMS Astute.

Or, as we’ve now seen, into Gatwick. I don’t believe the culprit was a terrorist.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.