Dangerous flying car drone zoomed into UK's Gatwick Airport airspace after killswitch failed
- Reference: 1613777293
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/19/airspeeder_alauda_drone_goodwood_investigation/
- Source link:
The homebuilt Alauda Airspeeder Mk.II crashed into a field near the airfield in Chichester, West Sussex, after climbing to a height of 2,398 metres (7,867 feet) – well inside one of the holding stacks for airliners flying to Britain’s second-busiest airport.
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The demo flight took place on the first day of Goodwood’s annual Festival of Speed on 4th July 2019. Instead of being a short hop around the airfield to show off the craft to spectators and media alike, however, the flight ended with spectators being told to run for cover as the drone dropped from the sky into a nearby field.
A remote kill switch had failed when the drone’s operators realised the craft was no longer responding to their commands, leaving it free to fly off totally out of control. Only its low battery capacity stopped the 95kg quadcopter from flying any further.
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“The kill switch was powered by an independent 7.2V battery and operated on a different frequency (433 MHz LoRa) and control system to the normal flight control system” said the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB). It added, in thinly-veiled criticism of aviation regulators: “There was no Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) position system fitted and no return-to-home function available, nor was there required to be.”
The drone, which was intended to carry a human (although nobody was aboard during the 2019 flight) “was not designed, built or tested to any recognisable standards”.
Just a quarter of a mile south-west of Goodwood is the town of Chichester, home to around 120,000 people. The Airspeeder Alauda climbed for four minutes until its battery ran down. Luckily it fell in a field next to the aerodrome.
A [3]scathing AAIB report published this week found a litany of failures in the design and manufacture of the drone, including how its makers used prototyping breadboard for its onboard electronics.
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Airspeeder's killswitch. Note the use of red breadboard instead of a PCB
The cause of the “hard landing”, which severely damaged the drone, was found to be “a fault in a battery feeder cable connection.” Pictures published by the AAIB showed the quality of workmanship that went into the craft.
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Burnt soldering and inverted components on the Airspeeder's control board
The drone even penetrated Class A controlled airspace over the Goodwood VOR radio beacon, inside a cylinder of the sky reserved for airliners between 7,000ft and 13,000ft.
Although Airspeeder’s Australian-approved safety manual gave details of how crowd safety distances were to be calculated, the operators used an outdated Google Earth satellite picture as their reference – not realising the airfield layout had changed in the years since it was taken.*
Couple wrongly arrested over Gatwick Airport drone debacle score £200k payout from cops [6]READ MORE
Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority had issued safety certificates to Airspeeder – and Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had, based on those certificates, given the firm permission to fly in the UK. Yet British regulators were kept in the dark about a crash just the day before the public flight, found the AAIB.
Astonishingly, the drone’s safety critical command-and-control radio system was operating on the 915MHz band – just 0.1MHz above the 902.5-914.9MHz band [7]licensed (PDF) by the O2 mobile network. While 915.0MHz and upwards is unlicensed spectrum reserved for “non-specific short range devices”, per Ofcom’s [8]frequency search page , running safety critical data comms on unlicensed spectrum and right next to a mobile phone operator’s uplink band was an extremely poor design choice.
A switch on the drone and its controller could have flipped it from 915MHz to 868MHz – a busy but unlicensed band reserved for LoRa IoT wireless comms, such as the ones used in UK smart meter rollouts.
Incredulous AAIB inspectors said: “In the ‘UAV Signal Loss’ section of the [operating safety case], it stated that ‘All spotters will be equipped with kill switches and radios, spotters will be positioned such that there are no blind spots on the flight path of the UAV, in addition a spotter will be next to the pilot in command’. On the day of the accident, only one kill switch was available which was located with the spotter standing next to the remote pilot.”
In a prepared statement Airspeeder told The Register : “There was a short loss of control caused by unforeseen external factors affecting our control systems. Since the incident was concluded we have worked with regulators and the appropriate bodies to provide all required information. Recommendations made have been addressed and the company has since moved through three successful development phases.” ®
Bootnote
* The AAIB criticised Airspeeder for not consulting the UK Aeronautical Information Publication (AIP) entry for Goodwood when calculating crowd safety distances. This is a bit of a red herring: the AIP contains nominal distances such as runway lengths and taxiway widths along with a schematic of the aerodrome layout.
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It doesn’t contain the information the drone operators needed, which was the distance between the runway in use and the crowd line. That could have been obtained from Goodwood Aerodrome itself.
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[3] https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/aaib-investigation-to-alauda-airspeeder-mk-ii-uas-registration-n-slash-a-040719
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/02/19/airspeederkillswitch.jpg
[5] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/02/19/airspeedersoldering.jpg
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/15/gatwick_drone_couple_payout/
[7] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/84045/Cellular-LICENCE-Telefonica-UK.pdf
[8] http://static.ofcom.org.uk/static/spectrum/map.html
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[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: WTF?
At 95 kilos, I'd say it was more along the lines of a flying scooter. And most likely a death-trap. You wouldn't get me into one, anyway.
Fail safe is a very old concept and it n3ver depends on expecting the device to respond to a kill command when it is already in trouble. Go back and look at deadman controls designers.
Bloody cowboys
Didn't their wearing of sombreros make the organizers a bit suspicious?
What the AAIB had to say
The AAIB report is here:
https://www.gov.uk/aaib-reports/aaib-investigation-to-alauda-airspeeder-mk-ii-uas-registration-n-slash-a-040719
Very long, but very complete and well worth reading. As usual, the AAIB did an excellent job of analysing the crash and what caused it.
Neither the CAA nor the CASA (Aussy CAA) exactly cover themselves with glory over this, while the Alauda gang, who 'built' this chunk of junk just come across as a bunch of incompetent fuckwits.
Re: What the AAIB had to say
> bunch of incompetent fuckwits.
Indeed. At least they've had their arses kicked before anyone got hurt.
Video of the drone that crashed is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzLzeBJpofQ
Racing manned drones looks about as much fun (as a spectator sport) as watching paint dry (or watching Formula 1 from the last 10+ years, for that matter).
Airspeeder seems like a completely pointless and unnecessary "sport" - let's hope Sky TV pay them a fortune to put it behind an exclusive pay-wall as that's certain to kill it stone dead before anyone has time to care.
Re: What the AAIB had to say
You did put a + in there ... but I'd swap a 2 for the 1. Maybe a 3. F1 has been excruciatingly boring for decades.
Re: What the AAIB had to say
> F1 has been excruciatingly boring for decades.
Yep. F1 has been rubbish since James Hunt stopped racing. Or when they banned the Tyrrell 6-wheeler and other vehicle innovations.
The drivers now lack all personality while contriving a faux edgy persona (if they can bothered at all), there's no actual competition between the teams, and the sport itself is no longer the pinnacle it claims to be where the technology innovations supposedly fed into road cars - it's now more likely to be going in the opposite direction these days assuming the stupidly restrictive F1 rules allow it.
F1 selling the rights to Pay TV broadcasters is just the final nail in the coffin once the sponsors work out nobody is watching. It won't be missed.
Arduino
That looks very much like an Arduino nano v3 clone with an Atmel ATMEGA328P MCU next to the wireless board on the kill switch board. The AAIB report also shows the mainboard with two such devices,and the kill switch transmitter also has one. They can be purchased for under £4 each, including delivery. The type of relay board on the kill switch, around £2.50 each.
Re: Arduino
Nothing wrong with Arduino and ATMega kit in and of itself. I've found it quite robust and very reliable. Would I fly with it? Possibly in an experimental, yes. Low and slow, though. Very, very low and slow. If I were intimately familiar with the code. Maybe.
How these particular examples are assembled, on the other hand ...
Re: Arduino
Agree. I use the cheaper clone devices for prototyping, then switch to slightly more expensive ones assembled in Italy for anything more permanent.
The 2 units bought over for the demo at Goodwood were 3/4 scale versions, so very much a development prototype - but that does not excuse the issues with the design and fabrication.
A breadboard
On something wth rotors? That flies near people and weighs 100kg? I am beyond incredulous. What dd they make the rest of it from, an egg beater and baling wire?
Re: A breadboard
"That flies with a person inside it @200KPH and only weighs 95 kilos?"
FTFY
Actually, the breadboard doesn't really bother me. The bloody awful assembly exhibited by these so-called "experts", on the other hand, very definitely does. I wonder if the FAA knows what they are planning on doing in the Mojave?
Cool Runnings
The craft and pilot position reminds me of a bobsleigh.
No disrespect intended to the Jamaican Bobsleigh team - on the contrary, Respect.
As for Alauda Airspeeder... Mr Bean?
WTF?
Forget the danger to aircraft and spectators. These people were trying to demonstrate a flying freaking CAR? And this is supposed to give me confidence to invest in their product? I'd call it their pipedream but that is an insult to pipes and dreams.