Until a man and a woman were arrested in connection with the string of drone sightings that brought Gatwick Airport to a standstill, the airport had closed, opened, closed and reopened again, all within three days. What boggles the mind is that British police and the armed forces were, until the arrests, at a loss to figure out who were flying the drones, what their motive was, how to apprehend them or whether the airport would close yet again. That this happened in the UK’s second largest airport during the busiest time of the holiday season, causing travel chaos for hundreds of thousands of passengers, made many wonder how something like this could ever happen in the first place.
Before the arrests, the authorities were at their wits’ end as to what to do. Police considered shooting the drones down but were concerned about stray bullets. They could not disable the drones because that would require jamming the frequency between the controller and the drone itself, which would be dangerous because it would interfere with aircraft and communication systems.
It was also determined that it was too risky for airplanes to fly at the same time as a drone was up in the air. There could be a direct collision with the cockpit which could crack windscreens. It would be catastrophic if a drone were sucked into an engine. If a drone hit an aircraft’s wing it would probably be as inconsequential as when planes strike geese or hail, but it was not worth the risk.
The result was that the closures, one of which lasted 32 hours, left thousands of people stranded at the airport, while others ended up stranded all over the world. People were sleeping on the floor in Gatwick’s terminals with staff unable to offer much information. Some were given food vouchers and initially offered a hotel room but in the chaos the offer was shortly afterwards retracted.
It also seems unlikely that affected travelers will be able to claim compensation from their airline. The UK Civil Aviation Authority announced that given the reasons for the current disruption, the body considered the event to be an extraordinary circumstance. This means airlines are not obliged to pay compensation.
The drone incident threw into sharp relief the need for registration and licensing of drone operators so that the police can track and trace them. While it is illegal to operate drones within one kilometer of a UK airfield boundary, there are no effective countermeasures in place to prevent it in practice. That means the industry relies on users flying drones responsibly, which obviously just isn’t good enough.
Due to the difficulty of catching the pilots, technical measures must be proposed to ensure flying a drone near an airport is not just illegal, but technically impossible. So, there could be a combination of radar, camera detection, radio frequency detection, and jamming technologies used by airports to shut down illegal drone flights. This would allow authorities to connect to and land any drones operating suspiciously. Having flight data would also allow authorities to differentiate between legitimate, registered drones connected to the system and any operators attempting to circumvent it. Although drone users in the US have been required to register their drones since 2015, similar rules for UK owners aren’t due to come into effect until late next year. Such measures might become necessary earlier thanks not just to the events in Gatwick but to the increasing numbers of drone incidents recently experienced in the US, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and New Zealand.
If the two people behind the Gatwick disruption are sentenced, they could face up to five years in prison for endangering the safety of an aircraft. This is strong deterrent punishment and that, along with tightening drone laws, is what’s needed in the wake of what happened at Gatwick.
