The Mystery of the Gatwick Drones

In the context of what's happening in the Baltic, a thought provoking read.

What the situation we're in points out is the fragility of rules based safety systems when it comes to time dependent shared space behaviour: if something disrupts the rules, the system has few alternatives to a shut-down and restart. Crash through a safety zone boundary? The entire space may have to be purged and re-entered. That running kid scene in "love actually" has a different quality if you've ever been made to exit the checked zone at an airport because somebody triggered the entry alarm.

I think some of the belief around drones and drone users is not unlike how car drivers ideate cyclists, scooter drivers, or how archaeologists ideate detectorists. Ideally yes, all drone operators would read rules and respect rules. But, like bicycles and metal detectors there is no strong rule around getting one, only rules about using one, which may or may not be understood.

My friends who fly and fly drones (partially overlapping set) are perhaps exasperated by how misunderstood the things are. They can be tiny, and intrusive. They can be massive and not seen. The massive ones can kill. The tiny ones can kill. The risk does not scale linearly to size. It depends on context and situation. If a tiny drone makes a big plane abort a landing and this has knock on effects, is that "better" than a big drone?

The story arc of "those lights were a helicopter much further away" ring very true. Speed, distance and height are notoriously hard to estimate. This is why even experienced pilots report UAP from sightings of venus.

I liked the stuff about RF not being seen active at Gatwick. Sure, fibre optics would now be a risk, but they leave trails of a different kind. Gatwick won't be an RF quiet zone but you would think military security for an airfield could detect it, if it was there. Isn't that what anti missile tech has to do anyway?