Brief Analysis of Main Safety Hazards for Unmanned Aerial System in Low Altitude Airspace

With the development of the low altitude industry, the application of unmanned aerial system has become increasingly widespread, playing a significant role in areas such as national defense and security, emergency disaster relief, logistics and transportation, agricultural plant protection, traffic guidance, electric power line patrol, and combating illegal and criminal activities. However, UAVs often face various threats in practical applications, which pose serious challenges to ensuring the security of low altitude airspace. UAVs countermeasures, adverse climate impact, geographical environment, and unprofessional operations are important factors that directly threaten the flight safety of UAVs. This paper focus on analyzing the main technical threat factors faced by UAVs in low altitude airspace and briefly discuss the corresponding countermeasures, which will promote the construction of a safe operating environment for UAVs, improve the safety quality of aviation flight, and ensure the safety of people’s lives and property in low altitude airspace.

Analysis of safety hazards

Threat factors caused by UAVs flight failures: The security threats caused by sudden failures of UAVs during low altitude flight are analyzed [1]. UAVs have no onboard pilots, making it difficult to directly carry out airborne troubleshooting when faults occur. The advanced UAVs have the automatic homing function in the event of a malfunction and may crash during the return journey due to a malfunction. When the electronic equipment of UAVs is disturbed by harsh natural environments, such as heavy fog and airflow, it can easily affect the completion of air missions [2]. The flight path of UAVs used for cruise missions is relatively fixed, making it difficult to change the route in advance and make flexible maneuvering responses when encountering air threats. When approaching for reconnaissance, UAVs can easily expose the positions and be shot down by ground defense equipment due to noise and low flying altitude.

Threat factors brought by low altitude early warning and detection system: UAVs detection network is an important task in UAVs countermeasures technology [1] and it is also an important threat factor for UAVs. In the ground UAVs defense area, UAVs detection equipment is usually installed around the special important targets, combining different altitudes and depth distances to form the low altitude detection network with different detection ranges [3].Currently, some kinds of low altitude detection equipment can monitor the entire flight process of UAVs, master the flight situation in real time, and even detect the radio communication signal strength and content of UAVs and ground stations, which will directly expose the hidden position of UAVs.

Information security threat factors of unmanned aerial vehicles: UAVs mainly rely on air-ground links for control in low altitude airspace. Currently, many civil UAVs have transparent communication links [4], open frequency points and lack confidentiality measures. Interference, eavesdropping, interception, and tampering with communication links usually pose a significant threat to UAVs. Many civil UAVs use Wi-Fi to communicate with mobile terminals such as mobile phones. To attack the Wi-Fi communication link, information intruders can disconnect the WIFI link between the UAVs and the mobile device and take over the UAVs. Some UAVs are equipped with ADS-B equipment. The ground terminal UAVs defense system can obtain the UAVs position in realtime through ADS-B information, and attack the UAVs based on the detected position. In addition, some specific computer viruses can record data interactions and instructions through vulnerabilities in UAVs flight control software, posing a significant threat to UAVs security.

The security guarantee of UAVs is the key task to the healthy development of the low altitude industry. This paper briefly analyzes the main threat factors of UAVs from the physical failures, low altitude detection networks threat and information security hazards, which has a positive guiding role in formulating safe flight support strategies for UAVs in low altitude airspace.

This paper was funded by the open fund of the national defense key laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (No.092919251261) and the scientific research and training fund of Shandong Police College (No.YKYPYZX202201).

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