IT WAS last year that consumer drones really took off. Around the world, perhaps 1m of the unmanned robots flew off the shelves in 2015. Now, any visit to the park feels incomplete without high-pitched whining overhead.
So it was to no one’s surprise when British Airways reported yesterday that it believed that one of its planes had hit a drone as it came into land at London's Heathrow airport. Although not confirmed, the incident, which involved an A320 en route from Geneva with 137 passengers and crew on board, is thought to have been the first of its kind in Britain. Few think it will be the last. There have been seven “category A” near misses—those of a serious nature—in Britain in the past year.
Facts are currently thin on the ground. The culprit has not been found, so it is not known whether the person holding the controls was acting maliciously. But there are two distinct issues here.
The first is how to deal with owners who unwittingly endanger planes (or who believe that what they are doing is merely a lark, but don’t really harbour malice). The issue is not dissimilar to the problem of lasers being shone into cockpit windows, as we have discussed before on this blog. Flying a drone near an airport is illegal in Britain; those found guilty can be imprisoned for five years. Yet no one is yet sure of how much of a threat they pose to commercial airliners. This morning, Steve Landells of the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) told the BBC’s Today programme that there have yet to be rigorous tests to find out. His instinct is that drones are likely to be more dangerous than, say, the threat of bird strike if it hit an engine because of their battery packs. Even so, because it hit the nose, the plane involved in this incident had to be inspected. (It was cleared for its next flight.)
Many people believe that the bigger concern is the potential for a terrorist to use an unmanned machine to catastrophic ends by, say, attaching a bomb and intercepting a plane. One should not be blasé about such a threat, but it should at least be put into context. Currently, the payload on consumer drones is small, often just a couple of kilograms. If that were used for explosives, rather than a GoPro, it would no doubt be a serious concern. But it might still be difficult to bring down a plane. To allow for more chance of success, a military or commercial machine—or indeed an old-fashioned rocket-propelled grenade—would be a better bet than a consumer toy. (Cheap drones’ usefulness for terrorists probably lies elsewhere, like delivering a biological weapon or assassination. When the Pope visited America last year, a no-drone zone was established for this reason.)
None of which is to say that the practice of flying drones near airports should not be more effectively tackled. Finding and convicting offenders would help. A few stiff sentences would concentrate minds. So might a mandatory database of owners, as is already the case in America. And better “geofencing”—using GPS to limit where a drone will work—should be enforced. The risk might be small, but as drones become more popular, the chance of a nasty accident only increases.