![]() ![]() “It started to feel like a national emergency.”īy about 9.30 the following morning, Sussex police had called in officers from five other police forces to help with the search. “We were under siege,” the former employee told me. After the failed attempt at reopening, Sussex police alerted the Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism unit. It had been reported that Isis had used consumer drones to drop grenades in Iraq. In the previous two years, there had been multiple terror attacks around Europe, including the suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena 18 months earlier, which killed 22 people. “Drones can be transformed into flying suicide vests,” said David Dunn, a drone expert at Birmingham University. Some feared the drones were being operated by terrorists. Staff and police speculated that the drone operator had gained access to the flight radar system, or was somehow listening into police or airport communications. She was right: into the next day, every time staff prepared to reopen the runway, more sightings were reported. “We had the feeling that it was going to last all night,” I was told by a former Gatwick employee who did not want to give her name. And then, suddenly, the drones reappeared. But there hadn’t been any drone sightings for an hour, and Gatwick tried to reopen the runway. (He later won compensation for wrongful arrest.)īy midnight, 58 flights had been diverted or cancelled. His drone was confiscated and he was held for five hours. ![]() Four years earlier, in December 2014, he was trying to get aerial footage of a fire close to Gatwick when police arrested him. Fearing that he might come under suspicion, he rang the police: “I said: ‘I’m heading to Gatwick, please don’t think it’s me!’” Mitchell is licensed by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to fly drones commercially, sometimes in his capacity as a cameraman, sometimes for official bodies such as the fire brigade. Some were at the end of long journeys, and more than a dozen aircraft were soon dangerously low on fuel.Ībout an hour after the first sighting, Eddie Mitchell, a news photographer, was on his way to the airport to cover the shutdown when he remembered that he had two drones in his car. In the sky above, planes circled, waiting to land. Inside the airport, thousands of passengers waited to set off on their Christmas holidays. By 9.30pm, six more sightings had been logged by the Gatwick control centre, five of them from police officers. Over the next half hour, 20 police and airport security vehicles drove around the airport, lights flashing and sirens blaring, with the intention of scaring whoever was operating the drones. Within minutes, Gatwick’s only runway had been closed and all flights were suspended. Unauthorised drone activity is considered a danger to aircraft and passengers because of the risk of collision. The message was relayed to senior management. One was hovering above a vehicle inside the airport complex, and the other was flying alongside the nearby perimeter fence. He immediately called the Gatwick control centre and reported what he had seen: two drones. Soon after 9pm on Wednesday 19 December 2018, an airport security officer who had just finished his shift at Gatwick airport was standing at a bus stop on site, waiting to go home, when he saw something strange. ![]()
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