Drones over gatwick..

This is unprecedented.

In the UK, all it takes to shut down an entire international airport, is a couple of folk phoning in a fake drone sighting. No need to even have a drone!
 
Heathrow's response was pretty good I feel.
Outgoing (more at risk) flights only were stopped for a few minutes whilst they checked and cleared the threat.
I guess the Gatwick debacle may have set us up to deal with this better going forward.
 
I agree, Heathrows response was pretty good.

And it was a confirmed sighting from officers too:

Scotland Yard said a "full criminal investigation" had been launched into the incident - and that officers were among those to see the drone
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Even with anti-drone tech, if there's a sighting then you need to halt flights whilst they make sure it is dealt with. Other than some small delays, despite being an actual drone it seems as if there was little on-going impact.
 
I'm interested in knowing what drone it was, it would need to be a pretty expensive drone to cover the range needed to enter the airspace. Your typical £30 drone from Argos is unlikely to fly 100ft let alone several thousand feet to disrupt air travel. With the increase from 1km to 5km for the air port exclusion zone, it would need to be a £1000+ drone at the very least.

My mavic 2 (2lbs) would manage it (8km range, limited to 5km in the UK) and that cost £1300 with a 30 minute flight time, my other drones a £30 (~170g) mess about drone that gets blown about in a slight breeze and can just about manage 300ft distance and maybe 100ft up. My final drone is my 4S FPV (~£200 and ~450g) which can cover about 1km range very quickly but then its battery will be dead in 2-3 minutes anyway

The thing is bird strikes happen daily in the air and nothing ever really happens, wanna know what a 30lb goose does to a jet liner when struck at altitude. Nothing. Besides a bloody mess all over the air craft.

There is a possibility that a bird could enter the engine and shut that engine down, but then jet lines are able to fly with an engine out anyway.

There are a millions of bird strikes a year. Never see that plastered all over the media.
 
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Malt_Vinegar said:
Heathrow's response was pretty good I feel.
Outgoing (more at risk) flights only were stopped for a few minutes whilst they checked and cleared the threat.
I guess the Gatwick debacle may have set us up to deal with this better going forward.
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Heathrow has both runways in use, one for departures and one for arrivals (which are then switched during the day) whereas Gatwick has two runways also, but only one can be in use at a time due to the closeness of them.

Maybe the drone was spotted at the far end of the departure runway, away from arrivals.
 
MadMossy said:
The damage an exploding LiPO can cause is minimal when compared to a 30lb goose. Specially in consumer grade drones.
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The effects of bird strikes on engines are tested extensively during engine certification, the effects of ingesting a drone of whatever size are not, it really is as simple as that.

I expect extensive engine testing and certification will be done in the future with regards to the effects of drones.
 
MadMossy said:
There are a millions of bird strikes a year. Never see that plastered all over the media.
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Not quite sure how you came to that conclusion. In the UK, there were less than 2000 confirmed strikes in 2016.
That figure increases slightly year on year with the increase in movements.

You tend not to see it in the media because they don't know and probably wouldn't care.
 
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