Gosh what a mess this situation is. Just before Christmas, Gatwick airport, the second busiest airport in the UK, was closed for 33 hours because two drones were spotted in the airport area. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, delayed or re-routed, with 140,000 travellers affected just days before Christmas. It was the single most disruptive…
Continue reading: UK Police No Closer To Finding Gatwick Drone, Or Offender
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James many thanks for this story. We were just discussing an hour ago here in Brussels. It's absolutely crazy, and this story just gets crazier and crazier. Well, sorry to say it's like a metaphor for the madness known as Brexit: nobody in charge, nobody knows how this all transpired or what's going to happen and everyone is treading water until .... mid-January!
Even on those drones with built in restrictions, it's possible to disable them. So that's not a guarantee that they can't be used around airports. But the problem is not the drones, it's the idiots who operate them. As a drone owner myself, it pisses me off that these morons ruin it for those who are responsible. This s*** ends up resulting in more and more restrictions even where they are not needed.
There are now some reports that there may not have even been any drones in the first place.
Saw a post on airliners.net where someone put forth the idea that this was a test run by the UK government for the chaos a hard Brexit will cause and how planes can be diverted to different airports both inside and outside the country.
UK airports are useless: Heathrow closes when a snowflake hits the tarmac, and Gatwick closes for drones which don’t exist. I am not surprised.
I read somewhere that the intelligence services needed the airport closed for reason of an inbound flight suspected to be carrying the perps of that recent murder in Morocco. They usually have a handy list of excuses ready to do this, with drones being obviously plausible. This resulted in someone putting up a real drone to investigate the situation regarding said flight - with the airport already closed, what could possibly go wrong ? The resulting REAL drone sighting caused a longer airport closure and the chaotic response as they flailed about in their transition from fake drone closure to real drone closure with the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, lower echelons of the local police acting without knowing the whole thing started as a faked cover incident, press leaks regarding suspects, etc. There is always more to these incidents than is officially reported 😉
From the beginning I have suspected that this was a case of "hivizziness".
There may well have been one drone at the beginning, but possibly not.
But everything after that was probably "I thought I saw...", lights on lampposts, reflections of airport/distant helicopter lights, etc. and apparently Police Drones.
But the police are paranoid of being blamed if there is an accident, i.e. they ascribe value on that side, but no value to the disruption caused by closing the airport.
Some of the responsibility for this lies with the way that the media would react if there was a crash.
But the deliberate misinformation such as "industrial specification", "numerous illegal drone sightings" is disgraceful.
It recalls the way that immediately after the shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes the police PR department put out false stories that he had jumped the Tube barrier, run away from the police, and was wearing a padded jacket in the summer.
Policing is not easy, but they should do better at:
a) recognising that they are just are prey to groupthink delusion as other people
b) admitting mistakes quicker.
Speaking from an engineering background with multiple years developing industrial and paramilitary drones, aerospace geofence restrictions can be made more robust, but can still be altered or overridden. Additionally, many technologies to actively jam/disable/destroy rogue drones are already fielded, but authorization and policy need to be prepared for their use.
Side note: paramilitary drones are usually equipped with a transponder, so short range radars can quickly discriminate between friendly and rogue drones.
This is a frightened wakeup call for the vulnerabilities of airports to relatively inexpensive and easy to operate drones.