Drone Sightings, A New British Comedy Soap Opera

Author: Jenny List / Source: Hackaday

There’s a new soap opera that I can’t stop watching. Actually, I wish I could change the channel but this is unfortunately happening in real life. It’s likely the ups and downs of drone sightings would be too far fetched for fiction anyway.

If you aren’t British, maybe you will know a little of our culture through the medium of television.

We don’t all live in stately homes like Downton Abbey of course, instead we’re closer to the sometimes comedic sets, bad lighting, and ridiculously complicated lives of the residents of Coronation Street or of Albert Square in Eastenders that you may have flashed past late at night on a high-number channel.

Our new comedy soap lacks the regional accents of Emmerdale or Hollyoaks, but has no less of the farce about it. Here at Hackaday we’ve brought you news of the UK’s peculiar habit of bad reporting and shoddy investigation of questionable drone sightings several times over the last year or two. Most recently we covered a series of events before Christmas that closed Gatwick, London’s second airport for several days over what turned out to be nothing of substance.

Unfortunately it didn’t end there. We’re back once more to catch up with the latest events down on the tarmac, and come away with a fresh set of reasonable questions unanswered by the popular coverage of the matter.

Another Day, Another Police Helicopter

The Gatwick airport was closed over more than a day based on eyewitness reported sightings of a drone — which we take to mean a small unmanned aircraft. After much investigation (and the arrest and release of suspects) the embarrassing admission that it might all have been about nothing came just before Christmas, giving everyone a few weeks to forget about it in a haze of seasonal gluttony and bad jumpers. But the second week of January brought another story. This time it was London’s main airport, Heathrow, and yet again at dusk on a winter’s evening a drone spotting was reported. The airport was closed, and in contrast to Gatwick there were multiple reports of sightings. Surely with lights spotted over the runway there could be no doubt, we’d caught the pesky drone red-handed!

We’ve left reporting on this incident for a while on purpose, because our intent here is to present an informed analysis rather than breathlessly commenting on the news. There is little point in regurgitating what can easily be read in every newspaper, so instead we should be looking at what wasn’t in the newspapers.

In the coverage of those lights over Heathrow, we saw plenty of reporting of those lights in the sky, but what we didn’t see was any results of an investigation of them. We’re not aeronautical experts here at Hackaday, so we sought out some members of our community who do have expertise in this area. Asking them about the incident quickly revealed a verifiable culprit.

[Andrew Hyams] is both Chair of Team MiniAirshow and co-host of the Let’s Drone Out Podcast, and using ADSB tracking data he was able to demonstrate that there had been a conventional aircraft in the air over Heathrow during the time in which the lights had been spotted. G-MPSC is…

Click here to read more

The post Drone Sightings, A New British Comedy Soap Opera appeared first on FeedBox.