5 Times It Wasn’t A Drone After All

Before Christmas, air traffic at London’s Gatwick airport was brought to a standstill for 36 hours after witnesses reported the presence of a drone nearby. In early January, departures at London Heathrow were briefly halted after a drone sighting. This week, flights in and out of New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International were disrupted after two drone sightings were reported by airline crews at 3,500ft.

Drones are everywhere, it's nearly 2020. The future is close!

In the case of the most recent sighting in New Jersey, 3,500ft is a long, long way above the legal altitude limit. And while it’s certainly possible to fly that high… at 4.45pm on a freezing Tuesday afternoon as the sun is going down? It seems unlikely to say the least.

Then you’ve got to factor in three more things about the reported sightings.

First, both flights were moving at close to 250mph. Assuming the drone was relatively stationary, that leaves just a split second for the crew to see, let alone identify any object outside. Second, the vast majority of drones are small – not much larger than a football.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it’s worth bearing in mind that aircraft crew are no more trained or qualified to spot drones in the sky than you or I. Their reports can (and have previously been found to) be mistaken and they, more than most, are predisposed to assume drones are involved whenever suspicion arises.

1. The Time It Was Actually A Bat

In South Australia, July 2017, the pilot of a SOCATA TB-10 Tobago aircraft reported that he’d collided with an object during his final approach to Parafield Airport. The encounter was widely reported as a drone strike, in part thanks to the pilot’s own report that there were no bird remains on the wing after landing. It must have been a drone, right?

2. The Time It Was A Plastic Bag

In April 2016 London’s Met Police reported that a drone had collided with a plane coming into land at Heathrow airport. A few days later, once the damage had effectively been done to the reputation of the drone industry and its pilots, the UK’s transport minister Robert Goodwill admitted to The Telegraph that the collision may actually have been with a plastic bag.

3. The Time It Was A Random Structural Failure

In January 2017, an LAM (Linhas Aereas de Mocambique) Boeing 737-700 flying from Maputo to Tete in Mozambique was on approach to Tete’s runway at 4,000 feet when the crew heard a loud bang. Suspecting a bird strike, they continued the approach and made a safe landing.

4. The Time It Almost Certainly Wasn’t A Drone

Back in November 2016, a Canadian airliner 9,000ft above Lake Ontario with 54 passengers on board went into a nosedive. The pilots went into the manoeuvre to avoid a mid-air collision with an unidentified object directly in front. Two flight attendants suffered minor injuries and a UAV was said to be responsible by several reputable media outlets.

5. The Time We Don’t Really Know What Happened (But a drone was blamed anyway)

In December 2018 an Aeroméxico flight from Guadalajara was on approach to Tijuana-Rodriguez Airport when crew on board heard a loud bang. It looks like a situation similar to what occurred in Mozambique. Images from local media outlets showed serious damage to the nose of the 737-800.

We still can’t say for sure what happened, but there is no evidence that a drone was involved.