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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

"fly towards" doesn't scale too well with the huge speed difference. Your intercept cone is super narrow when jets travel 10x your quads speed. Then factor in altitude and this approach only works near airports, where defense is arguably easiest.

where this works really, really well is with boats. Iran did this with 15m RHIBs.

I work on these problems directly. Its scarey but mostly because we're not thinking about it, not because it's something we can't prevent. Don't get me started on all the truly horrifying things commercial drones are capable of even worse than airline terror.

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Let’s not forget what’s possible 20 or 200 years ago. You can poison water supplies, you can stab people on the street, you can crate rail guns shooting out nails, you can drive giant semis into crowds of people, you can bomb or otherwise derail trains, etc etc. The ways to inflict carnage are great. But it doesn’t happen all the time, because most people aren’t seeking out murder on a repeated basis.

Yes we should find ways to defend against new kinds of attacks on common infrastructure that causes asymmetric levels of worry, but so recognize humanity has always had the potential to do damage.

The thing is: with most of what you're talking about: the level of risk taken was pretty high. With drones and other kinds of automated devices, the risk is going to drop near zero.

In other words, the real life will be as scary as the internet.

With FlightRadar24 historical data you already know exactly where regular flights will be, so you just wait there. The only thing left is that the pilot will try to dodge you, but then you have automatic drone control versus human (with low visibility).

I agree with you that this is a high touch attack, a kind of "drone 9/11", versus other low hanging fruits like dropping drones on peoples head.

Drones have 10 to 30 minute loiter time, and they don't reach 10k feet. You're overestimating the ability of small craft to detect, track, and even reach the operational area of large passenger jets. These things are moving at hundred or more meters per second vs a drones ... 15? By the time a vision system had enough pixels on target to detect, it would have seconds to move into position in front of it. And how exactly is it supposed to know the jets velocity and heading?

Let alone it must hit the inside of the engine to do more than become a scratch on the paint.

Still, takeoff and landing maybe ... But still this kind of visual detection, tracking, and maneuvering is harder than you think.

Humans aren't as regular as to allow this. The Mombasa attack failed because the pilot chose a different path that time, and that was an 'easy' attack (takeoff where the plane is slow, using military-grade AA missiles far quicker than any drone).

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