A rash of apparent drone sightings in multiple states has fueled questions and some paranoia in recent weeks. Coincidentally, a Virginia Tech team is working to improve technologies for drone identification and mitigation tech.
Tombo Jones, director of Virginia Tech’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, said that his group and the university’s National Security Institute are researching ways to improve drone detection systems. New indoor and outdoor facilities on campus should be complete by the end of 2025, Jones said.
Investigators there will evaluate existing detection systems’ strengths and weaknesses and look for ways to combine them for improvement, in case of actual threats from unmanned aircraft.
“Right now it’s for the [Department of Defense], but we fully expect to expand the information that’s valuable for any entity that has critical infrastructure that it is trying to protect,” Jones said.
The new work begins as federal authorities are discussing more than 5,000 tips about suspicious drone sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere during the past few weeks. The tips generated more than 100 leads, according to a joint statement from the U.S. Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice departments, the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI.
Federal investigators are working with state and local departments and have sent detection technology and trained visual observers to the region. They had not identified anything abnormal and did not assess any of the civilian airspace activity in New Jersey and elsewhere as a national security or public safety risk, according to their public statement.
“Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones,” the statement read.
Virginia-based lawmakers have been concerned about mysterious drone sightings for more than a year, though. U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both D-Va., and Gov. Glenn Youngkin received a classified briefing last week about an investigation into unexplained drone sightings in Virginia. In a joint statement, they called the briefing “insufficient and unsatisfactory.”
Drone swarms reported around the Langley Air Force Base in December 2023 sparked the investigation, according to published reports.
“It has been more than a year since these sightings over key military facilities in Virginia, and the lack of answers about the nature, intent, and origin of these incidents is completely unacceptable,” the joint statement read. “The safety of Virginians remains our top priority, and we are determined to continue pressing for additional details as well as greater coordination with state and local officials. We will be staying in close contact with the relevant federal and state agencies to ensure that these concerns are pursued vigorously.”
Last month, people began reporting seeing drones in New Jersey, including at an Air Force base there, leading the Federal Aviation Administration to ban unapproved flights in multiple New Jersey and New York locations, several news sources have reported.
Reports have skyrocketed in Virginia this month, according to Virginia State Police. More than 150 tips have come in about unmanned aerial vehicles, and all of them are under investigation, according to a state police news release.
What’s going on up there?
Langley Air Force Base is in Hampton Roads, east of Newport News and north of Hampton. The NASA Langley Research Center campus is next door to the air base. People working there heard and saw objects a year ago, but none of the drone detection systems in place worked like they should have, said Jones, the Virginia Tech researcher.
Jones is on the Governor’s Aerospace Advisory Council, and in that capacity learned about what happened in Tidewater. The why of it remains unclear.
There are, generally speaking, numerous detection systems for unmanned aircraft, Jones said. Some use radar, but weather can affect radar. So can sightlines in urban environments. Some systems use electro-optical infrared cameras, but they don’t work well at night and in rainy or cloudy weather. Other systems detect aircraft acoustically, but noises such as those from truck engines can confuse them, he said.
It’s also important to understand what a drone and its operator are up to. Lots of memes have emerged online recently, showing rural people solving the problem with rifles. That is illegal, and rightly so, because people don’t always know what it is they are seeing and could be destroying something with people on board, not to mention an unmanned craft with harmless intent, Jones said.
“But these systems … if they can detect what [type of] drone it is, then they know the protocols to safely take over a drone that’s somewhere that it shouldn’t be, and it’s doing something nefarious,” he said. “That capability exists, but it’s very challenging, and so our research site is also going to help fill in the data for how that can be done successfully and safely.”
More than one million drones are lawfully registered with the FAA. Thousands of commercial, hobbyist or law enforcement drones are aloft daily, and federal agencies said they expect that number to grow.
“I think it’s very difficult for somebody to tell the difference between a drone and an airplane, especially if the airplane is far away where you can’t hear it,” Jones said. “And you mistake it for a drone that’s close, right? Because there’s lots of illusions, like the brightness of a light can make you think it’s closer than it is.”
All night-flying, unmanned, autonomous fliers must have lights visible from 3 nautical miles, but the FAA doesn’t dictate the lighting scheme, he said. Light position and altitude can cause confusion for a casual observer, he said.
Confusion can be a problem in the air as well as on the ground. Congress directed the FAA to develop a framework to help drone pilots avoid “critical infrastructure” such as facilities housing hazardous materials, or even amusement parks, according to the FAA Extension, Safety and Security Act of 2016. That framework is still in process, Jones said.
“It’s quite possible that a drone pilot may be flying in an area looking … for deer, looking at sunsets … and they don’t know that they’re adjacent to some ammunition manufacturing facility, for example, would be one example of critical infrastructure,” Jones said. “There’s not a database. … They’re close, I’ve been told, but that coming out [would be] another good step in the right direction.”
The Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership at Virginia Tech is one of seven FAA-designated UAS test sites. The university’s National Security Institute is for thematic research — like the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute and the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, but for intelligence and defense.
For this project, the aviation partnership will host the outdoor research site at the university’s dairy science complex, Kentland Farm, which is also home to an unmanned aerial vehicle airstrip and hangar. The security institute building will house a facility featuring an anechoic chamber, free of radio and sound waves.
“This test site is intended to inform strengths and weaknesses around counter systems and to evaluate which systems work well in which environments and how they can be paired together so that one system’s weaknesses are covered by another system’s strengths,” Jones said.
Meanwhile, law enforcement has access to devices on the market to “interrogate” drones, he said. The FAA has ruled that drones released for sale as of September 2023 are required to broadcast identifying information via WiFi or Bluetooth. The packet of information serves as a sort of unmanned aerial vehicle “license plate,” Jones said.
Using that information, one can determine who owns the drone’s registration and where it is being operated from.
Those who own an unmanned flier made before then must put a transponder on it.
“Any law enforcement officer has the capability to interrogate a drone to get the remote ID information, and so that’s pretty valuable,” he said. “That’s a step in the right direction.”
That assumes an officer with the right software can reach the location before a drone buzzes beyond the horizon.
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