There are for sure multiple problems with this.
One is that every country, that has a press, has some trashy press, and they pay people to leak stuff.
A lot of people, in every country, will sell out anybody for a few bob, so if you live in a street of say 20 houses and the police turn up outside your house, you can be sure that at least a few of those houses will call the trash media, to collect the say 10k reward, within minutes. Especially if your car is a nice one…
The police, in every country, leak like a sieve, so any information widely known within a police force is going to be public property in hours if not sooner. The “private investigator” profession is a popular channel and tends to be ex police (ex CID, in the UK) and they live off their old mates who are still employed.
And the police were under huge pressure in this case, to get somebody. I cannot think of any event in recent decades which created more pressure. It was an awful situation. The UK CAA is still reeling from things like the Shoreham Hunter crash and the legal fallout from that and I am sure it was only some kind of top-level govt signoff which enabled Gatwick to finally open despite nobody having been caught (at the time). The CAA would have never taken any risk on this.
And the police didn’t look great… they rarely do when they appear on camera, working at 99% CPU load just to regurgitate some painfully over-articulated institutionalised phrases. This was something which they just aren’t used to dealing with.
These two people will probably collect a few hundred k. But the newspapers knew this (nowadays they know exactly how the system works) and took the risk, and are probably happy overall because they sold way more newspapers, and way more advertising.
No doubt we will know more over the next few days.
For someone not watching British media all the time – what has come out of it, eventually ?
Nothing.
Cobalt wrote:
Nothing
Actually, not true – more limitations for law-abiding drone operators have been proposed recently.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46787730
As usual. Would it have helped in any way to resolve what was happenning in Gatwick?
No! As these people were (allegedly) rogue operators… But!
Government cannot be seen doing nothing.
Yes I think this is what I posted above, but indeed it won’t make any difference to the Gatwick stuff, or this new one at Heathrow.
To be fair, the old regs of 1000m and 400ft were way too close to the approach paths. An “honest” flyer could have made a mistake in such a situation and got too close.
And it will make it easier to prosecute somebody wanting to create havoc but who changes his mind (or his drone gets crippled by some countermeasure) very close to the airport, but still outside the old regulation limits. In the UK, one cannot convict someone just because they caused havoc (in terms of the airport deciding to shut down, etc) they do actually have to break the law.
Whatever was in Gatwick or not there are videos of drones chasing airliners and filming close to approach paths circulating on the interwebs already. Not. Cool.
I think it’s also a generational/societal phenomenon.
There are many people that (for whatever reasons) have such a pathetic life they consider shining high powered lasers at airliners entertaining. The bystanders are probably busy filming for youtube or whatsapp or whatever other social media instead of knocking them out for crossing a line. Meanwhile the financially more potent compete about whoever gets closest to an airliner in his new 4k toy and uplodads a video of a large airliner passing by at 100 feet – congrats to the hero of the week, posting anonymously under some internet fame name. It’s like throwing big rocks from highway bridges after smoking too much of whatever. People die because of that. It’s not funny. It’s so unbelievably stupid a sane person cannot comprehend it at all.
A small drone hitting an airbus might end with a quick landing and lot’s of paperwork, if luck plays along.
The same thing hitting a 4 seater sep will take you down. And we are much more exposed too as we fly low most of the time. Laws are not gonna fix this. Peer pressure and drastic consequences will help.
The issue that keeps being pointed out though is that the people who do this most likely do not care about acting legally.
There seems to be very little detail of anything that actually happened other than a drone(s) have been spotted. I would think the concern is that copycat activities will pop up all over the place as a relatively easy way to cause massive disruption without massive personal risk
It’s the same as with gun laws. Those who care about them don’t matter, those who matter don’t care.
EuroFlyer wrote:
It’s the same as with gun laws. Those who care about them don’t matter, those who matter don’t care.
That depends on what kind of gun laws you are talking about. It certainly does matter if gun laws restrict access to guns. Similarly, if access to drones was restricted then it would make a big difference.
