The Gatwick incident was over 6 years ago now, and my view is that, while I completely agree with ARPAS’ stand on this and wish it success, the negative image in which the gereral public holds drones and dronery is too well-established to ever be eradicated completely, though I would argue that it has improved in the last 3 or 4 years.
Sadly, human nature is such that calls for responsible behaviour or anything else requiring acceptance of and compliance with rules depend on goodwill, and there are significant numbers of those flying drones that are unwilling to give this. You have a criminal element flying into prisons and presumably smuggling over borders & from offshore, who don’t give a flying fuck, and a sort of daredevil element who will fly without regard for rules or common sense because that’s the sort of twats they are. Appropos twats, don’t get me started on frauditors…
So there will always be examples of bad practice for the media to report on, and on top of that we’ve got the media keen to attach ‘illegal drones’ to anything that might concievably be drone-related irrespective of any evidence or reliable eye-witness account of such taking place.
We will never know what the security guy at Gatwick saw (though everybody knows what he thought he saw) and we’ll probably never get an expanation of the New Jersey drones beyond that the US authorities know about them and that they are not a threat. Should proper explanations of these events ever come to light, it will be given only a few column inches, about page 4 of most newspapers and down the bottom at that, so will have no effect whatsoever on the general public’s image of drones.
I believe the huge majority of us fly responsibly to the best of our ability, but we are not professional pilots and will make mistakes sometimes.