THE GAT W ICK DRONE ENIGMA
“Gatwick drone? There’s more evidence of the Loch Ness Monster” – drone enthusiast ( Guardian, 1 Dec 2020).
At 9pm on Wednesday, 19 December 2018, a security guard left work at Gatwick in Sussex, Britain’s second busiest airport. As he waited in the rain for a bus he saw two objects low in the sky carrying lights. One was hovering above a vehicle inside the airport complex and the other was flying alongside a perimeter fence. He called security control to report them and within minutes the main runway was closed to air traffic. As police and security patrols combed the area, further sightings of the ‘drones’ were made. Five police forces were now involved and Sussex constabulary sent up its helicopter and several of its own hitech drones in pursuit of the operators.
By daybreak, 58 flights into Gatwick had either been cancelled or diverted. According to a BBC Panorama investigation, 140,000 people were caught up in the chaos that followed the closure. 1 The 33-hour shutdown at Gatwick led 1,000 flights to be cancelled or delayed at an estimated cost of £50 million to airlines. Fearing further incursions, on the afternoon of 20 December Gatwick called in special military radar systems that can jam the signal between operator and the drone.
As the panic spread, there was much speculation about the identity and motives of the drone operators. Some media sources claimed airports were being targeted by terrorists or eco-activist groups with attacks using drones. Sussex Police continue to believe that a real drone or drones were involved in the Gatwick incident. But at an early stage in their investigation doubts were expressed by one of their own senior officers, Det Chief Supt Jason Tingley, who told the BBC: “We cannot discount the possibility that there may have been no drone at all.” 2 Indeed, the Gatwick case shares some similarities with the phantom helicopter scare of 1973-74 that began with a series of ‘sightings’ by security guards at quarries where explosives were stored. These convinced senior police officers in northern England that the IRA were using a stolen or unregistered machine to steal explosives or for use in a jailbreak (see FT228:30-31). As in the 1974 scare, the Sussex Police decision to launch their own helicopter to investigate the mysterious intruder at Gatwick triggered off a spate of further ‘sightings’ of the phantom drones.
Among the new witnesses was a Brightonbased press photographer, Eddie Mitchell, who drove to Gatwick with his cameras at the ready and two of his own drones locked in his boot. At 5pm on 20 December, Eddie saw and photographed what he believed were the white, green and red lights of the drone as it hovered above Gatwick airport. But when he downloaded the images he realised it was actually Sussex Police’s own helicopter. Eddie later told the Guardian: “If I’m making a mistake – and I fly drones two or three times a week – then God help us, because others will have no idea.” But the tabloids were less concerned about the identity of the object in Eddie’s photographs. As Ian Hudson who runs the UAV Hive website explained: “Some journalists just didn’t really care if the photos they were using were a drone or not.” One of Eddie’s images continues to appear on The Sun website captioned as “the drones”. Ian told me that “the idea a couple of drones were flying around in the rain for prolonged periods” seemed far-fetched. He also finds it “beyond credible” that not one single clear photograph or video of the intruder has emerged and “a number of camera operators that were at Gatwick have spoken out since on social media about their belief there was no drone.’
Even more persuasive is the evidence from the specialist counterdrone systems (known as C-UAS) installed at Gatwick airport in the hours after the first sighting. One arrived at 2.40pm on 20 December and another was in place by 9pm when visual sightings were still being reported. Both were capable of detecting both the
drones and their transmitter, but neither recorded anything unusual.
Despite these evidential problems, in April 2019 Gatwick’s chief operating officer, Chris Woodroofe, told the BBC the airport authorities had received 170 separate “credible drone sightings” from 115 people including trusted staff such as security patrols and police officers. “They knew they’d seen a drone. I know they saw a drone,” Woodroofe said. “We appropriately closed the airport.” At the time of writing the operators have never been identified. A married couple from Crawley were arrested by Sussex Police and held in a police station for 36 hours on the basis that they owned a collection of model aircraft. They were released without charge after questioning. In June 2020 Sussex police paid the couple £200,000 in an out of court settlement. No one ever claimed responsibility for the scare or claimed the £50,000 reward offered by Gatwick for information that might lead to those responsible. In the aftermath, the Government passed new legislation to widen the exclusion zone around airports from 1-5km (0.6-3 miles). Nationwide, police forces were given more powers to seize drones from their operators and prosecute those who break the strict regulations that prevent them from being flown in sensitive places.
Sussex Police formally closed their investigation of the incident in September 2019 after 18 months, having spent
£800,000, with no further “realistic lines of inquiry”. The force said it had ruled out a link with terrorists and there was no evidence “it was either state-sponsored, campaign or interestgroup led”. They believe it was a “serious and deliberate criminal act designed to endanger airport operations and the safety of the travelling public”.
Drone experts, including Ian Hudson, interviewed by journalist Samira Shackle for her Guardian investigation, remain unconvinced. 5 Probing more deeply, what exactly did the witnesses at Gatwick actually see? A moving object with bright lights attached that hovered and was seen fleetingly on a rainy night in darkness. In any other context this would be classified as a sighting of a UFO, but from the point of view of the airport authorities and police this must be a drone – because UFOs do not exist. But as Hudson told me, basic facts about the case don’t support this theory. “The first sighting was in the rain,” he said. “Drones tend to fail in the rain. In fact, there are few models that are capable of any kind of semi-reliable rain use.” Commercial drones also have in-built geofencing software that blocks them from flying near sensitive locations such as prisons, stately homes and airports.
If the operators were clever enough to hack the drone’s software and evade the regulations to fly them into Gatwick airspace, why did they allow the UAV to carry lights? “The normal lights on drones are low power LEDs that couldn’t be seen at a significant distance,” he said. “Also, drones aren’t equipped as standard with a strobing light. Any mischievous drone pilot that didn’t want to be caught wouldn’t use lights. You would turn them off in the software or tape them up.”
Hudson and fellow UAV operator Gary Mortimer filed Freedom of Information requests asking Sussex Police for basic information about the more evidential sightings. Their quite reasonable requests have been either rebuffed or ignored. Mortimer briefly flirted with the idea of the scare being a cover for some other covert operation. Now he feels the actual explanation is more prosaic. He told Samira Shackle that “one option is that something that wasn’t a drone was reported and then the next day, police flew their [copter] there and people saw that.” As UFO investigations have discovered time after time, ordinary objects can suddenly become extraordinary when people expect to see something unusual – or in this case threatening – in the sky. During the phantom helicopter scare of 1973-74 there was widespread anxiety about Irish terrorists and police confirmation of the sightings triggered a visual epidemic. Today, that anxiety has transferred to other terrorist groups and mysterious drone operators.
The 2018 scare was not the first cluster of mysterious aerial sightings in the vicinity of Gatwick airport. Earlier incidents were reported in 2017, and the MoD’s archived UFO files reveal how on 15 July 1991 the crew of a Britannia Airways Boeing 737 returning from Greece and descending into Gatwick at 14,000ft (4,300m) saw “a small, black lozengeshaped object” zoom past at high speed, 100 yards (90m) off the port side. Ground controllers confirmed a ‘primary contact’ was visible on radar 10 nautical miles behind the 737, moving at a speed estimated as 120mph (195km/h). The airport tower warned the captain of another airliner of the hazard and this made “avoiding turns to the left to avoid the object, which had appeared to change heading towards it, but its pilot reported seeing nothing”. The investigation report on this case, completed in April 1992 by UKAB, could not explain the incident. They suspected the object might have been a large toy balloon but were “unsure what damage could have occurred had the object struck the 737; the general opinion was that there had been a possible risk of collision.” Helium-filled toy balloons could potentially reach this height, but commercial drones cannot. More recently a series of airprox reports from aircrew involving close shaves with ‘unknown objects’ in Gatwick airspace have been investigated by UKAB including one from April 2018 that was placed in the highest collision risk category (see panel). On 28 April 2019 the runway was temporarily closed after a further “unconfirmed sighting” of a drone with three aircraft diverted to other airports.
UAPS IN THE UK
Towards the end of an interview for Radio 4’s Today programme in 2012, BBC business editor Simon Jack asked the Chief Executive of the National Air Traffic Control Services (NATS), Richard Deakin, a question posed by his children. They wished to know if the company, which runs the UK’s air traffic services, “have ever been unable to identify a flying object”. It was a good question, because since 2009, when the Ministry of Defence closed their UFO desk, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) that employs NATS became the only remaining public body that retains an interest in UFOs. Pressed for a yes/no answer, Deakin admitted his controllers often receive reports of flying objects “that don’t conform to normal flight patterns… not just in the UK but around the world, typically around one a month.” But he played down the significance of this admission, adding: “It’s not something that occupies a lot of my time.”
More than 10 years have passed and reports of unknown objects – or ‘drones’ as aircrew are encouraged to classify them – now occupy quite a bit more of the CAA’s time. All cases judged to have been a risk to aircraft and their passengers are reviewed by the UK Airprox Board (UKAB), which is sponsored by the CAA and the Military Aviation Authority (MAA). From 2017, the increasing number involving a close encounter with an object other than another aircraft led UKAB to launch what it calls SUAS or the ‘Small Unmanned Air System assessment’. Under this reporting system, incidents are placed in one of four categories: drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), balloons (including toys and meteorological/research balloons), model aircraft and “unknown objects”.
UKAB says most airprox reports “usually involve only a fleeting encounter” where aircrew are able to give no more than an outline description of the other air vehicle they saw. As a result, “the distinction between a drone, model aircraft and object is often down to the choice of wording by the reporting pilot”. If a crew member has clearly described something with “drone-like properties” (e.g. four rotors), then it is categorised as a confirmed drone. But “if the reporting pilot can only vaguely describe ‘an object’ then it is classified as unknown object”. In plain English, an unknown object is a UFO: it is unidentified, flying and an object.
As David Hambling notes ( FT392:14) the dividing line between elusive ‘drones’ and UFOs has recently become wafer-thin from the perspective of both the aviation authorities and the police. The mutability can be traced in calls made by members of the public to various UK police forces during 2020 collated by the newspaper. Using Freedom of Information requests, reporter Dean Kirby analysed 128 separate calls that mentioned ‘UFOs’. Several were obvious UAVs, including one reported by a caller to police in Bangor, Northern Ireland, who described a “flying object that appeared to have solar panels”. Drone flaps have replaced epidemics of Chinese lanterns as the latest hybrid-UFO category, with mass sightings reported to police in north-eastern Colorado during the last two months of 2019 ( FT391:17). Analysis of these identified the most likely explanations as the same that apply to UFOs: “planets, stars or small hobbyist drones”.
Statistics from UKAB’s log reveal a dramatic increase in “unknown objects” reports, from just seven in 2018 to 31 in 2019. A further 17 were logged last year as the Covid-19 lockdown reduced the numbers of aircraft in operation. One of the most recent involved a Boeing 737 crew who reported a “bright light and an object” approaching them head-on as they prepared to land at Leeds Bradford Airport on the evening of 1 September 2020 (see panel). This object “appeared without warning and there was no time to act”, leading UKAB to place it in the highest risk category where “a definite risk of collision had existed”. Ten of the cases reported to UKAB in 2019 were placed in this category. In one example, a pilot climbing out of Gatwick saw an object pass below the aircraft and under the right-hand wing just 30-50ft (9-15m) below. The small object “was contrasted against the clouds and appeared dark green in colour with a white light on top” and “may have been hovering”. Four months earlier, on 30 December, the crew of a passenger plane on approach to Glasgow airport saw a long object “lit up in various places” pass between three and 10ft (0.9-3m) of the aircraft at 600ft (180m). Ten days earlier, a spate of drone reports brought flights from Gatwick airport in Sussex to a grinding halt for 33 hours (see panel).
In eight out of nine cases reported in 2017-19 where UKAB could not determine the nature of the object, the close shaves occurred at altitudes ranging from 5,000 to 16,000ft (1,500-4,900m). Drone experts say it would be a struggle for a commercial drone to reach 6-7,000ft (1,800-2,100m) as their power source would fail at this height. Misperceptions of ‘hobby’ UAVs, balloons and other man-made and natural phenomena probably account for many of the reported drone sightings, in much the same way as with UFOs – but could some of the more baffling incidents have been caused by covert military drones that have strayed from their testing grounds? It stretches the bounds of credibility that such incursions would have been allowed in the vicinity of a busy airport like Gatwick.
But if a mistake had been made, at huge cost to the police and civilian authorities, would it be admitted?
NOTES
1 New York Times, 26 May 2019: www.nytimes. com/2019/05/26/us/politics/ufo-sightings-navy-pilots. html
2 The War Zone 12 May 2020: www.thedrive.com/ the-war-zone/33371/here-are-the-detailed-ufo-incidentreports-from-navy-pilots-flying-off-the-east-coast
3 Tyler Rogoway,15 April 2021: www.thedrive.com/thewar-zone/40054/adversary-drones-are-spying-on-the-u-sand-the-pentagon-acts-like-theyre-ufos
4 Kevin Rose Show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/ podcast/ufos-advanced-navy-fighter-pilot-ryan-graves/ id1088864895?i=1000458559014
5 UKAB’s monthly SUAS log: https://www.airproxboard. org.uk/Reports-and-analysis/Monthly-summaries/Monthly-Airprox-reviews/
6 Dean Kirby, The I, 1 Jan 2021: https://inews.co.uk/ news/uk/reports-ufo-sightings-new-heights-lockdownexplained-aliens-801069?ito=twitter_share_article-top
✒ DR DAVID CLARKE is an Associate Professor at Sheffield Hallam University, a consultant for The National Archives UFO project and a regular contributor to Fortean Times.