Drone It was a Ballon over Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport leads to runway closure
It was a balloon FFS
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Denmark has banned all drone-flying while they host a European Summit, 3 days and pergaps not unreasonable in any case. How effective this is remains to be seen; pilots who fly by the rules will conform, but those who don’t…
And that’s not just stupid/irresponsible hobbyists, but what the Danes describe as ‘professional agencies’, which I think probably really means what we referred to back in my 60s cold war childhood as ‘a certain power’. Bit like Voldemort, can’t be named, but it rhymes with ‘usher’. The description could also refer to terrorist and espionage activity; none of those people are going to take any notice of a 3-day drone ban.
Now, I know I’m pissing in the wind here, but in a democratic society I would like to see what actual hard evidence is available before agreeing to the blanket banning of a legitimate activity by those who partake in it within the rules, and especially when it comes to drones. The Gatwick, East Anglia, and Noo Joisey kerfuffles have shown that a)reports of ‘suspicious’ drone activity by untrained obseevers such as security staff, policemen, and residents in back gardens, however genuinely concerned, really have to be verified by trained aerial observers (this does not include airline pilots who claim to be able to identify an object less than a foot across at a couple hundred mph which *could * be a drone, or a bird, or a wind-blown plastic bag) with professinal detection equipment before blanket action such as the closing of airports is taken (I understand that airport authorities are under extrene pressure at such times).
And b)that reports of this sort of drone activity are never isolated incidents, they always lead to spate of similar ‘sightings. So, as if the pressure on airport authorities, security forces/police, and goverments was not already high enough, mass delusion, suggestibility, and paranoia have to be taken into account and properly discounted if there is no hard evidence.
Perhaps what is needed is an internationally agreed ‘best practice’ procedure to be followed when such a report comes in, with the aim of re-opening the airport quickly unless positive and ratified evidence of the presence of a drone is established. Currently, so far as I know, few if any airports have properly trained professional observers to hand that can identify with good evidential certainty what a dot in the sky half a mile away, or a point of lightbat night (of course, we all know that a drone pilot up to no good will always show their lights, won’t they) actually is, and most don’t have ATC radar that can pick up objects that small (or they’d be swamped with observations of flocks of birds!). But a drone’s electronic emiision are detectable and identifiable; if this is the basis of blanket knee-jerk panic banning of srone activity for an entire country, I’d want to know that up front.