Drone brings airport to halt
A tourist using a drone to take a scenic shot of a vineyard halted operations at Blenheim’s main runway for 15 minutes.
The incident was one of eight rogue drones reported to authorities in Marlborough since the beginning of 2018.
Two of the drones were in Woodbourne, two in Blenheim and four in Kaiko¯ ura, according to the Civil Aviation Authorities (CAA) records released under the Official Information Act on website fyi.org.
Marlborough Airport Operations manager Steve Holtum confirmed that an incident involving a drone disrupted the Woodbourne airfield near Blenheim for 15 minutes in April.
Holtum said a tourist had sent up a drone for a photograph from a car park at a winery west of the airfield.
A passerby – who happened to be a pilot – noticed the drone at 200 ft (60m), Holtum said, and called the airport control tower.
‘‘Whenever the tower gets a call a call from anyone they halt operations for 15 minutes. In this case we were lucky because the tower said there was no aircraft going in or out anyway.’’
Holtum said drone disruption was not an ongoing problem in Marlborough, but there was always a risk if tourists did not understand the regulations.
Most drone users flew with permission granted through an Airways website called Airshare, he said.
People could apply for permission to fly their drones as Part 101 or Part 102 unmanned aircraft users, and most would be aware of the CAA rules.
For example, the regulations for Part 101 users prevented people from flying their drones more than 120 metres above sea level or within 4 kilometres of an aerodrome.
He said the CAA was working towards more ‘robust’ regulations, especially for international airports.
‘‘At the moment they’ve come up with something that’s working but it doesn’t reduce all the risk and doesn’t stop the tourists who don’t really know.
‘‘In this new age we need drones to be able to operate alongside and safely in the airways – we can’t pretend they don’t exist, that we can’t manage them.’’ Students have told Marlborough Mayor John Leggett they don’t want marine issues in the Marlborough Sounds ‘‘swept under the rug’’.
With a new term of councillors elected into office next month, the Marlborough Girls’ College marine team want to be assured that marine issues will be a focus.
Four students handed over their latest research to Leggett on Thursday, after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern requested a more detailed summary of issues facing the Sounds.
Leggett said he would pass the document, which outlines the effects of human activities on marine species, to councillors and staff.
The students’ research document outlined issues like dredging, overfishing, sedimentation and anchoring. They also touched on possible marine management strategies.
Leggett said he thought the issues would come up in the environment committee under the new three-year cycle of council.
He said conservationists with a more ‘‘aggressive’’ approach to environmental management in the Sounds had been bringing these before the council for about a decade.
The council was at a point where they had quality science to understand the issues in the Sounds, he said.
‘‘We’ve got these reports, now what we do about it, that’s becoming the critical point.’’
The council needed to ‘‘actually start doing some work’’ to deal with the issues.
Many of the marine team graduated from school in 2018, but met Ardern when she was in Blenheim in June this year.
Current students Georgia Waters, Sarita Sim and Amy Rowse stepped up to the plate and joined original member Baylee Mcconaghey.
The four met Leggett and Marlborough coastal scientist Oliver Wade last week.
They sent their research to Ardern and received a response which included a handwritten note saying, ‘‘Thanks again! I’ll ask Minister Sage (Conservation Minister) to copy me into her response to you so I can stay in touch’’.
Wade said the students shouldn’t underestimate how useful their work was.
‘‘I would rest assured that this won’t just disappear under a carpet somewhere, it will be used.’’