Dozen Drones Near-Misses Aircraft Around Heathrow Airport

Dozen Drones Near-Misses Aircraft

Dozen drones near-misses aircraft around London Heathrow Airport. Heathrow is apparently a magnet for drone pilots who love to fly their devices near aircraft. According to the latest report from the UK Airprox Board, three aircraft narrowly missed the remote-controlled aircraft flying the sky near the airport last year.

They are separate incidents from the British Airways plane that impacted what authorities believe was an unmanned flying vehicle in April. These near misses occurred in a three week period from October to November 2016.

Two of the three were classified as "category A" or the most severe of near misses. In one incident, pilots of an A320 passenger plane saw a UAV flying under the right wing of their vehicle, 10,000 feet in the air as they prepared to land at the airport.

That's approximately 9,600 feet higher than the legal altitude for drones in the UK. According to the researchers, the multi-rotor UAVs seem to be tailor-made and not something off-the-shelf. They also said that "providence had played a major role in the aircraft not crashing" with the device.

In the incident of the second category A, a pilot taking off from Heathrow saw a drone about 150 feet away from the wing of his plane at 3,000 feet in the air. Officials believe they "narrowly avoided" a collision, too.

The third sighting of unmanned drones at the airport within that three-week interval was less dangerous than the other two, but was still less than 200 feet from an airplane.

Overall, the report says there were 70 aircraft-to-drone failures in 2016 compared to 29 incidents in 2015. As more people begin to fly drones as a hobby or business, we will probably see the number grow Unless the authorities find a way to detect UAVs before they get too close to airports.