Heathrow Airport was briefly shut down after a drone sighting, and Gatwick Airport endured three days of drone-related security delays.
For London’s airports, the weeks straddling the new year have been chaotic to say the least. Yesterday, Heathrow—Europe’s busiest airport—closed its runway briefly following a security alert. In normal times, this inconvenience wouldn’t attract much attention, but this alert came after Gatwick, London’s second airport, was forced to close for 36 hours, stretching over three days. The stoppages grounded 1,000 planes and affected the holiday journeys of an estimated 140,000 people. But it wasn’t (as far as we know) a terrorist threat or a staff strike that caused these disruptions. It was sighting of that small but increasingly ubiquitous and reviled item of contemporary electronic equipment: the drone.
Indeed, the past month has seen drones become something of an obsession around London. Over the past three weeks, the region’s police, air traffic controllers, and even its armed forces have been squinting at the sky, trying to work out if tiny airborne intruders are heading for its runways. At Gatwick on December 19, over 60 people claimed to have spotted a drone or drones close to the terminal. Infuriatingly, the drones seemed to reappear just at the point when the airport was about to start flights again, triggering a gridlock of frustrated passengers in the terminals.
What made the shutdown yet stranger is that no drone was ever caught on camera, although police insist they were indeed present. In a period when British public life is already somewhat disordered and hysterical, people even started to wonder if the drones weren’t a collective figment of the imagination, some feverish embodiment of the spirit of the ongoing Brexit meltdown.
A couple of local drone enthusiasts were hauled in for questioning and released without charges, but unfortunately not before they had been demonized in the media and targeted with death threats for a crime they apparently had no connection to. As yet, no culprit has in fact emerged, though police are now looking into a possible connection between the two episodes.
Is is really necessary to halt a capital city’s air traffic because of a buzzy consumer gizmo that can be as small as a shoebox? Apparently, yes. Drones can indeed pose some degree of threat to airliners in the event of a mid-air collision. As this Financial Times article notes, a larger, two-kilogram drone could critically damage an airplane’s windshield, an event that might feasibly in the worse cases bring the plane down. FAA testing has documented the dangers of having drones ingested by aircraft engines. And, as this video made by researchers at the University of Dayton shows, even a smaller 1-kilo drone can cause major damage to an airliner’s wing if they meet at more than 200 miles per hour.
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