An RAF crew spotted a drone cruising at 9,000ft, apparently trying to join the Red Arrows.
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Normally itâs spotted by a bloke in the back of an RAF Chinook 
To the RAF and the BBC:
Photos or it didnât happen!
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Kev Taylor
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perfect example of âfly highâ⌠Not to be mistaken with the mile high clubâŚ
I doubt the pilot of a prefect is messing around with a bloody camera!!! Why the cynicism???
Because crew in fast moving aircraft recognise a small object as a drone when there are several alternative explanations. And pilots at 9000 feet arehât necessarily looking out of the cockpit all the time.
Both aerial and ground âsightingsâ of rogue drones fail to be proven. The situation is becoming analagous to the spate of UFO sightings in the 1960âs. Because one person had confidently identified an anomaly as a UFO all sightings of aerial phenomema were classied as UFOs. Confirmation bias
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Ahh yes, itâs always a â drone â these days. I think there was a report the other week of a passenger aircraft reporting a âdroneâ at 3000 ft the other week. The description of the âdroneâ was a silvery metallic object. More than likely a helium balloon.
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The aircraft (Grob G120) cruises at 270mph. It is most unlikely that any hobby drone could be distinguished from a helium balloon or anything else of similar size at that speed - notwithstanding the unlikelihood of any such a drone attaining 9000â. Very surprised at the RAF for reporting such BS, but not surprised at all that the BBC would broadcast it.
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270mph is pretty much 400â per second. We donât know what sort of drone (or if it was a drone at all of course), but they saw something! We donât know what size the object was, but an Air series or a Mavic would probably not be clearly visible at more than about 200â, and closer than that woukd be moving too fast relative to the aircraft to be identifiable as anything; it would have been visible for less than half a second.
A Mini would be even harder to see definitively and a Neo, forget it! It does seem to me that the default of most civilian pilots who have near-misses with unidentified things assume that they are drones and report them as such because thatâs what all the recent reported events theyâve heard of are of claimed (but never proved) drone sightings, but Iâm surprised to see military pilots, who are trained to accurately identify friendly/enemy/neutral aircraft in combat situations, i.e. very quickly, being so quick to come to the same conclusions.
Ask any professional pilot what he thinks and youâre likely to be told that all drones are a menace and should be banned, and professional pride (âweâre the professionals, ergo we must be rightâ) will not allow them to consider that what they are seeing probably arenât drones in nearly all the cases. Civilian airliners fly at twice the speed of Prefects, meaning that an accurate identification of something they just nearly hit is twice as unlikely!
Thereâs stuff up there besides hobby drones. Birds, of course, wind-borne light debris, plastic bags, mylar party balloons, foliage, old newspapers, anything that can be picked up on a windy day. None of those are likely to respect a 400â AGL height limit!?
And not forgetting military drones, not necessarily belonging to the country whose airspace it is flying in 
Those tend to be quite big if they need to fly any distance, and (one would hope) detectable by radar. Something like a Shahed would announce its presence with a big bang at the end of itâs flight, but a stealth bird gathering intelligence prolly needs to return to base, so has to be big enough to carry fuel for the round trip.
A hostile country (letâs call it Russia, because thatâs itâs name) probably has other means of determining what it wants to know about us. It has civilian airliners overflying regularly which likely carry eqipment for this purpose. Spy drones are more likely when they are needed to monitor dynamic live battlefield information, such as on the Ukraine front line.
Not saying itâs impossible; Lincolnshire is a centre for military airbases, ours and the Yanksâ, just less likely than a mylar balloon or a plastic bag!
A Grob G 120TP Prefect T1 cruising at 270 mph 9000 feet could spot a 12" metallic party balloon 2 or 3 miles away if the sun happened to be reflecting off it perfectly into the cockpit giving the pilot just less than 30 seconds to spot it, identify it and react to it before flying past it.
If the balloon happened to not be reflecting the sun perfectly into the cockpit our distance reduces to 1/2 mile - 1mile giving about 11 seconds give or take 4 seconds or so either side.
Change that 12" balloon to a grey mini drone or something similar, the chance are pretty slim now of even seeing anything.
Unless that RAF pilot has bionic vision, if it wasnât a shiny mylar balloon catching the sun, someone in that cockpit deserves a massive promotionâand a lucrative sponsorship deal from Specsavers!
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As a matter of interest what is the height capability of a hobby drone?
Head to YouTube and search for âdrone altitude recordâ.
Some significant achievements.
Sorry John, no active American airbases here in Lincolnshire since 1958 when Scampton was handed back to the RAF.
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Waddington is used ATM
Waddington is not an American airbase; it is an active Royal Air Force station. It serves as the RAFâs main hub for Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) and is home to the RAFâs Red Arrows aerobatic team.
The base is British, it does work closely with the US Air Force and other NATO allies on shared missions, intelligence gathering, and multinational training exercises. However, command, control, and ownership of the facility remain entirely with the UK Ministry of Defence. Any American aircraft and personnel operating from Waddington are there for temporary deployments, joint operations, and multinational training exercises and are not permanent.
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You are right its not an American airbase but it is being used by them they are also classed as not being based there either
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First time poster on here and I am reading this post with some interest - I would love to know if anybody out there has a description of the âobjectâ in question???
Why? First - because the same thing happened to me. Second - because I am an airline pilot with nearly 30 years experience - but - I also have one foot in both camps as it were because I operate drones.
For the record - Iâve seen metallic balloons, weather balloons and quadcopters at various speeds and in various types of airspace. These occurrences are far more common than you think and I am not here to cast judgement on that. (One post on here is a bit disparaging of pilotâs views on drones - I think thatâs more of a media thing. Pilots get grumpy about a lot of things - drones arenât big on the list.)
The skies are very busy. Hate to say it - although these things shouldnât happen - they do. There is this very sticky category of things that cannot be explained known as UAP though. The key point being that the first word of the acronym UAP - is âunidentifiedâ.
What I saw was a UAP. It was a UAP because it was unidentified. If it was a drone - it was the slickest bit of kit Iâve ever seen - though I am definitely not ruling that out.
For some reason the media loves to call things drones. Itâs an interesting data point - I suspect thereâs a reason for that and that thereâs a lot more to this story than we are ever likely to know. (Steven Spielberg certainly thinks so !)
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