I think part of the reason is headlines and space.
Drone is a short word. Editors assume the public know what it means,
“Drone flew dangerously close to RAF trainer” is easier to understand and shorter than “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena reported in proximity to RAF aircraft on training mission” although the latter is probably nearer the truth.
The people who would object to the blanket use of drone for anything out of the ordinary observed by aircrew are a tiny proportion of the readers of the news item. The comments section may carry their protests but it will also carry the “Ban drones” / “Shoot 'em outta the sky” / “Send all drone pilots to the Ukraine” comments in greater numbers.
When and if the anomaly is determined to be a rogue party balloon, a lone migratory bird or a momentary oil droplet hitting and travelling across the windshield there is unlikely to be a retraction of the original statement. And the string 'em up brigade are very unlikely to read it
Trouble is where those sensational headlines lead - and not just with our hobby, but across the board these days.
Falling attention spans means the ‘news’ posts sensational headlines about The Thing to catch our clicks, and then the algorithms notice our clicks and start pushing The Thing, and then the ‘news’ notices the algorithms and they all fight it out to see who can say the most sensational thing about The Thing to keep our attention. And then a politician notices how much attention The Thing is getting and they start talking about The Thing to try to show that they’ve got their finger on the pulse.
And somewhere along the way everybody forgets that they don’t actually give two shits about The Thing and so the politician tells the ‘news’ that we must have urgent changes to legislation and the people shout “Hoorah!”.
And that, boys and girls, is why an idiot mistaking a light on a distant plane (or whatever they actually saw) for a drone over Gatwick in 2018 means a 750g drone now has to stay at least 150m horizontally away from my house but the pilots flying their several-tonne helicopters over to Prestwick can (and do) fly directly overhead so low as to make the windows rattle.
There’s an official DJI video out there showing one of their drones flying over Everest (8848m or just about 29 000’). I don’t recall which model it was - maybe a Matrice, or one of the Mavics - and there were no details about modifications that had been made to it, such as special high altitude props, etc, but it probably is the record for a commercially available drone
There are two major points here - the first being deflecting explanations of unknown objects in our skies and calling them ‘drones’. The second being to say that the technology behind these objects originates with hostile actors such as Russia or China. Although this has definitely happened - it couldn’t possibly explain all occurences and such explanations do not stand up to scrutiny.
The wider truth quite is that quite a large amount of these things cannot be explained easily - if at all. When your budget has been slashed by successive governments - explaining them as drones made by hostile actors makes complete sense for the armed forces and obfuscates the argument that they are in fact clueless as to their real origins. Ironically because they have no budget to investigate any further!
All in all - it’s maybe a bit short sighted too. The UK armed forces needs to encourage more people to fly drones - not less.
