I have been thinking over the holidays about the incident earlier this month at Gatwick Airport which was closed for several days due to alleged drone sightings. Despite much police and military action and the high profile arrest of two innocent remote control aircraft enthusiasts, no drones nor operators were found in the vicinity of the airport. The incident was one that is extremely embarrassing for Britain’s airports and the nation’s security forces. Thousands of ordinary people had their travel plans disrupted and this incident has without a doubt cost airlines and the Gatwick Airport millions of pounds.
At the time of writing I am still unsure as to whether there really was any drones. Having thought about this incident a lot recently I have come to the conclusion that it is quite possible that what we have witnessed is a mass panic by airport staff, airline staff and members of the public.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Gatwick incident was a case of people seeing what they want to see or what they expect to see. To explain: It is well known among airport and airline staff that drones are a potential safety problem for airports. Couple that with the fact that airports are on the front line when it comes to Islamic terrorism and those who work in airports by necessity work in an environment where paranoia about terrorism is a good thing and you have a recipe for a panic about drones that weren’t there.
Here’s my view on how a ‘drone incident with no drone’ could take place. You have airport and airline staff who are highly focussed on matters of safety and security, they are constantly on the look out for things that are out of place or people who shouldn’t be where they are. They are, for want of a better description, behaving in a hypervigilant manner.
A worker, it doesn’t matter who or from what department of an airport, spots in their peripheral vision a white bin bag blowing over the top of a building in the wind. They may wonder for a fleeting moment what they’ve seen but then put it out of their mind. Someone else, either another worker or a member of the public sees this airborne bin bag and remarks about it, someone hears that remark and reports it. The report gets to the ears of the person who originally saw the bag and they wonder whether what they’ve seen is more to worry about than they initially thought. So this worker who originally saw the bin bag speaks up about it partially so that they can avoid getting into trouble for not reporting what they saw.
Airport security staff on hearing that there is a possible drone over the airport then start to panic about what may be an unplanned for threat and latch onto something that sort of fits the description of the flying bin bag, which could be an illegally flown drone. We then end up with drone panic on a grand scale as everyone who is scanning the sky with their eyes sees anything and everything, bin bags, litter, lights, a large bird or whatever as a drone. To the airport staff there starts to be no other reasonable explanation for the things spotted in the sky as a drone.
To put it bluntly, the airport staff, police and others involved in the Gatwick incident may well have seen drones because they expected to see drones. If you are told that there is the possibility of Drones then it’s likely that you would report anything unusual that is either moving or in the sky as a drone. This would account for the fact that there has been to my knowledge no published photographs of the alleged Gatwick drones, despite the fact that drones can be photographed from about a mile away with a modern smartphone as demonstrated recently by the You Tuber Brian of London in a recent video of a drone over Tel Aviv in Israel.
If you are told that there are drones over the airport then that is what you will be looking for and that is what you will call anything you see in the air that looks like it should not be there. There’s also a bit of a psychological reward for the person looking out for drones who reports stuff that looks unusual. This would increase the likelihood that a person looking out for drones would see one when it was not there.
It appears that the vast majority if not all of the reports of drones over Gatwick were eyewitness testimony. There appears to be no video of photographs of the drones and no other electronic evidence for said drones. Although eyewitness testimony can be good it also has problems. Eyewitness testimony can be affected by stress, ‘weapon focus’ and reconstructed memory. It can be reliable but it can also be monstrously inaccurate. According to a group called ‘The Innocence Project’ 75% of 239 criminal cases where conviction was mainly on the grounds of eyewitness evidence were shown to be flawed when DNA evidence was taken into account. If eyewitness evidence is so iffy in the world of criminal trials then it’ just as likely to be flawed in other areas of life, such as at airports.
The problems with eyewitness testimony leads us to the possibility that the whole Gatwick drone incident was nothing more than mistaken recall by eyewitnesses, coupled with panic and people seeing what they thought they were going to see. We may even have witnessed a giant airport centred example of Chinese Whispers where someone may have thought they saw a drone or something like one with the tale getting amplified in the telling to become a flock of drones.
The Gatwick incident has shown that it may not be entirely sensible for airports to put too much store on a ‘see and report’ policy when it comes to any incursions into airport airspace. If nothing else this incident makes the case for far better electronic monitoring of airports to prevent drone incursions which could include better low level radar and a more comprehensive CCTV system. Whilst I concede that drones are a problem that airport authorities need to protect against what Gatwick has shown us is the folly of relying on eyewitnesses and that much better electronic protection of airports from drones needs to be brought on line much quicker than they have been so far. We should be concerned if thousands of travellers have been inconvenienced and millions of pounds lost because people saw things that were not what they thought they were.
