Drones Shut Down Gatwick Airport — Thousands Of Passengers Disrupted

By: James

Published: December 20, 2018

36 comments

I love plane spotting at airports and taking photos of some of my favourite aircraft or airlines. I’ve written before about one of the best places to do this at Heathrow.

But don’t do this.

London Gatwick Airport, the eighth busiest airport in Europe, has been closed since 9pm Wednesday evening (UK time), after two drones were observed flying over the perimeter fence.

Gatwick is a single runway airport, the world’s second busiest.

What is even crazier is that the runway re-opened briefly at 3am local time, before quickly closing again after drones were spotted again!

For anyone who doesn’t know what a drone is, they are popular devices that you can attach a camera to and operate with a mobile phone allowing you to record aerial footage.

Police have said the drones in question are ‘industrial size’ – a quick Google search shows what this means:

Industrial drone (Source: Dronelife.com)

Although this Saturday is likely to be one of the busiest travel days of the year in the UK, today (Thursday) will still see 110,000 passengers using Gatwick Airport on over 700 flights.

Inbound flights have been diverted to other UK airports. Fortunately London has five (or six) airports, depending on how you define ‘London.’

Some passengers who have been diverted to other airports have not been allowed to leave the aircraft so have slept on it overnight.

https://twitter.com/Listy_cl/status/1075600414744170504

As you might imagine, the Gatwick Airport website shows the chaos this is having on flight schedules:

It is illegal to fly a drone within one kilometer of an airport boundary in the UK.

Airport officials are still trying to locate the drone operator(s) before reopening the airport. Assuming the drone is no longer in the air, if the operator has vanished, how are they going to reopen the airport given they have been looking for over 12 hours?!

Local police have called the incident a ‘deliberate disruption.’

Hopefully this will lead to better airport perimeter monitoring processes in the future, so this never happens again.

If you are due to fly in or out of Gatwick Airport today or tomorrow, check your flight status with the airline. This will be better than just arriving at the airport, which will be absolutely heaving, and trying to get information out of the stressed airport staff.

I imagine The Grain Store has a line out the door!

Bottom line

Gatwick is bursting at the seams already and today is a very busy travel day given it’s less than a week before Christmas Day. I feel for the thousands of passengers stuck at the airport with no idea when and how they will be leaving.

I’ll be interested to see how and when they reopen the airport assuming the idiot drone operator is not still in the airport area 12 hours later.

Anyone here using Gatwick today, or the rest of this week?

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Credit Guest

December 25, 2018, 3:04 pm

EU261 always applies on flights out of the EEA or on EEA based carriers. What people misunderstand is the difference between duty of care vs compensation. In this case, there is no compensation, but airlines have a duty of care (lodging, meals etc).

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May Lim New Member

December 23, 2018, 10:09 am

Would travel insurance payout for - delays - missed flights such as the positioning flight to get to EU for the long haul flight ?

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Dom Guest

December 21, 2018, 5:53 am

I was scheduled to fly Norwegian, OAK-LGW got a text at 5am Thursday informing me of the cancellation and providing a full refund, managed to book a United flight SFO-FRA-LHR currently in FRA on a six hour layover.

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Experienced traveller Gold

December 21, 2018, 3:31 am

@Anon ........... You do not understand U.K. Many flights due to land at Gatwick were diverted to small airports like Birmingham , Southampton and London -Luton and London- Stanstead. These airport do not operate at night so there were no staff there to handle passengers until 6am . This is why passengers had to stay on the aircrafts. Nothing to do with British hospitality . @ESA and miscellaneous morons - You also do not understand U.K. There is no legal requirement to register your name when you buy a drone in UK , you only need a license to fly it . I agree ,it is a bit stupid . UK needs to control the import and local manufacturing of drones , register buyers and issue licenses which require drones to be kept at a specified address, A bit like guns in USA. There are only regulations not to fly a drone within one mile of an airport perimeter , but obviously these criminals ignored that . Our son and family were flying from Gatwick today to Paphos in Cyprus at 7am, for Christmas. With Gatwick still closed last night ,their Easy Jet flight was changed from Gatwick to Stanstead ,4 hours later than original and Easy Jet sent my son an SMS and email to inform him . Email was sent at 1am , so someone is working late at Easy Jet to sort it out . WELL DONE EASY JET . What worries me is that terrorists could so easily fly a drone into any major airport , be it UK ,USA or another country . All airports need to get defenses as soon as possible

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The nice Paul Diamond

December 21, 2018, 2:07 am

@ Jackie “I think EU261 applies here. Drones are not extrodinary.” It doesn’t matter what you “think”, the UK aviation regulator, the CAA, has confirmed that EU261 does *not* apply. It’s not just a question of whether or not something is “extraordinary”; it’s also whether it is in the airline’s control. Clearly, someone with drones deliberately buzzing an airport, which the airport operator then decides to close, is not within any individual airline’s control. The fact that the military has also been deployed (this is a very rare occurrence in the UK, where local police forces are in charge) might also suggest this situation is “extraordinary “... Anyway, good to see some flights again at LGW this morning.

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