TALKING TECH

An attempt at a pre-Xmas short break goes disastrously wrong thanks to tech

Duncan Bell thinks the Gatwick drone palaver was a classic tech problem…

We now know that millions of pounds can be wasted by not flying a drone near a runway

When you spend your life immersed up to the waist in tech, it’s easy to forget that most people don’t really know all that much about it, and that includes the people running the country.

I think we all witnessed that when a drone or drones that may or may not have actually existed, caused the UK’s second biggest airport to shut for two days, just before Xmas. I certainly got to witness it, because I was meant to be flying out of Gatwick at the time.

It’s probably unfair to expect transport secretary Chris Grayling to know much about drones, because he seems like the kind of fellow who struggles just to walk and breathe simultaneously without his central nervous system collapsing. You can see the concern etched into his face every time someone tells him a trivial new fact, concerned that it may not leave room in his brain for how to speak English, or use the toilet.

It’s also not necessarily fair to think that the police could have reacted with a bit more alacrity to this autonomous flying assault on Gatwick. Anywhere else in the world they’d have shot the drone down within a few hours of the first sighting. In America, local radio would have put out a call and Gatwick’s car park would have been full of armed men, women and children barbecuing meats and having a ‘shoot down the drone’ party, within about 15 minutes.

Not here in Blighty though. That’s not how we do things. Foreigners may have their fancy ideas about a) making sure a drone actually exists or not and b) if it turns out to actually exist, getting rid of it, before ruining pre- Christmas breaks for important tech journalists. But we’re made of sterner stuff.

Grayling and the fuzz aside, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hope that someone, somewhere in the civil service or security forces should have an inkling about what a drone is and what harm it could cause. And not when it’s hovering in the flightpath of a jumbo jet, but when they first apply for clearance to be sold in shops.

Game of drones

In case you slept through the pre- Christmas period and have no idea what I’m on about, let me fill you in, mister Van Winkle. A drone was sighted over Gatwick, and since a drone may be able to destroy, or at least damage, a plane, they shut the airport. For two days. Supposedly while bringing in military hardware to jam the drone’s signals, or something.

Then, in a bizarre twist, the local plod said there might not have been a drone at all, and it was just someone seeing a pigeon and panicking, causing a wave of mass hysteria that led to thousands more ‘sightings’ of drones that were really sparrows, or clouds with rotors.

This doubt over whether there was or wasn’t a drone is what’s scary. No terrorist group claimed responsibility for this. Not even ISIS, a group of such malign boastfulness they once claimed online that they were responsible for me hitting a pothole on my bike and falling over.

But we and they now know that millions of pounds can be wasted – and thousands of people royally pissed off – not only by flying a drone near a runway but also, potentially, by not flying a drone near a runway.

This circles me back to my original point, which is that a lot of people, including those in government, don’t know a lot about tech. Who thought it was a good idea to allow something to be sold in shops that can bring down a 747? And if technology exists that can prevent a drone attack on an airport, why don’t Britain’s biggest airports have that technology?

I was only going to Malaga for a few days, and I got my money back. And I do completely understand the ‘safety first’ approach that Gatwick and the police took. However, the drone/imaginary drone that ruined Christmas is another example of how our world is now literally ruled by cool tech… that a lot of people don’t have any understanding of.