When the Federal Aviation Administration closed the airport in El Paso, Texas, and the airspace around it on Feb. 10, 2026, the cause was, ironically, the nearby use of a technology that could be key to keeping airports and airspace open and safe.
According to news reports, Customs and Border Protection officials used a Department of Defense anti-drone laser weapon to target what they identified as a drone crossing the border from Mexico. The FAA closed the El Paso airport and airspace out of concern that the weapon inadvertently posed a threat to air traffic in the area.
The targeted drone turned out to be a party balloon, though U.S. officials claim that drug cartels based in Mexico have flown drones at the U.S.-Mexico border. The episode highlights the need for counter-drone technologies, the state-of-the-art systems used by the U.S. military, and the challenges to safely and effectively countering drones, which are also known as uncrewed aircraft systems.
I am an aerospace engineer and director of the Counter-UAS Center of Excellence at Oklahoma State University, where we develop and evaluate technologies to detect, identify and counter drone threats. The military laser weapon CBP that personnel used near El Paso is an example of one of three categories of counter-drone technologies: directed energy weapons. The other two are radio frequency jamming and kinetic, or physical, weapons like missiles and nets.
The emerging threat
Starting in 2015, the ISIS terrorist group modified commercial off-the-shelf drones to drop grenades and mortars on U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria, who had little way to combat the threat. This started the trend of modifying consumer drones for military purposes that continues to this day on the Russian-Ukrainian front lines.
While military bases ostensibly have some protective capabilities, critical U.S. infrastructure such as airports and power plants have few methods to track, let alone defend against, drones. For example, in 2018, traffic at London Gatwick International Airport in the U.K. was shut down for three days because of an unidentified drone in the airport’s airspace. Hundreds of flights were canceled, affecting over 100,000 passengers.
Sites such as civilian and military airports, power plants and stadiums are vulnerable to drone flights, both from malicious and negligent operators. Drone flight over open stadiums such as those hosting upcoming FIFA World Cup soccer matches are banned by the FAA. But the ban wouldn’t prevent an errant civilian drone or a drone used in a terrorist attack from entering a stadium and potentially causing serious harm to spectators.
A drone flies near a small airplane in a test at Oklahoma State University.
Jamey Jacob
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