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Airline captain closes Stockholm/Arlanda with drone

You can’t make this up. Translated and slightly abbreviated from Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

A Spanish airline captain closed Stockholm/Arlanda for 20 minutes with a drone: “I didn’t know it was illegal.”

On August 25 the airline captain arrived in Stockholm/Arlanda having flown from Berlin. He was to have some time off. To keep occupied, he went into a shop at Arlanda and bought a drone for almost €1300. Then he should “just test it”. At a quarter to eight in the evening another pilot spotted what he thought was a drone flying over runway 01R/19L. He contacted the tower which rapidly confirmed the sighting.

All air traffic was instantly stopped and the Spanish captain could be arrested red-handed. The airport was closed for about 20 minutes and several arrivals were diverted.

When he was arrested he was quite carefree and didn’t really understand the reason. The thought that he was on an airport hadn’t struck him. He explained that as the drone had GPS, it should have warned him that he was in an area where drone flying was prohibited — and it hadn’t.

When he showed the police officers how to operate the drone, a warning message appeared on the display, says prosecutor Peter Claesson who is leading the case against the captain. “It is perhaps a bit odd that a pilot doesn’t realise you can’t fly a drone on an airport.”

The pilot now risks a fine. It is not known whether the airport or any airlines will sue for damages.

(An additional offence was photographing the airport using the drone. That is not permitted at Arlanda for security reasons.)

Last Edited by Airborne_Again at 11 Oct 20:38
ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Haha

ESSZ, Sweden

Then why they sell them at airport duty free shops :)

One day I flew kite at an airfield with airfield manager permission, many pilots who landed that day enquired about it, actually some found it too much distracting, one guy come around and told me all less known rules for flying Kites in UK (e.g max 60m, tallest building, permission above than that, lights for night, en-route notams), he was surprised that some pilots did not know about all of these (I did know some but not at all, the Kite user guide booklet had max 60m, samilar rule applies to permission for gliders winch cables)

But honestly, you have to be in a different planet not to know about drone rules these days? How do you expect an 8 years old to comply if a captain does not know?

Last Edited by Ibra at 11 Oct 20:34
Paris/Essex, France/UK, United Kingdom

Truth is stranger than fiction….

And they let this guy take responsibility for flying an airliner…? Clearly the required intelligence level to be a pilot is not set high enough…

Kent, UK

Ibra wrote:

Then why they sell them at airport duty free shops :)

They sell guns at malls, that is no good reason to use a gun at a mall.

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

Can’t find anything on the web other than the quoted newspaper. I would have expected this to be all around the (sensational) media by now, but it isn’t. Surprising.

Private field, Mallorca, Spain
7 Posts
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