UK police admit some drone sightings during Gatwick closure crisis may have been of their own surveillance drones

Authored by businessinsider.com.au and submitted by Fr1sk3r

Jack Taylor/Getty Images Passengers wait in the South Terminal building at London Gatwick Airport on Friday, December 21, after the runway shut over drone activity.

Some drone sightings during the closure of Gatwick Airport before Christmas may have been of police drones, senior police officer says.

Speaking on Saturday, Giles York, the Chief Constable of Sussex Police said that he could not rule out the possibility that some sightings of drones reported during the incident were of drones that police had flown over the airport for surveillance purposes.

York said that there had been 115 reports of drone sightings during the incident, of which 92 had been confirmed as legitimate.

It is possible that some of the drone sightings that forced Gatwick Airport to close for nearly two days in the week before Christmas were of police drones which were themselves hunting the malicious drones which shut the airport, a senior police officer has said.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday, Giles York, the Chief Constable of Sussex Police said that he could not rule out the possibility that some sightings of drones reported during the incident were of drones that Sussex Police had flown over the airport for surveillance purposes.

“We will have launched our own Sussex police drones at the time, with a view to investigate, engage and survey the area. So there could be some level of confusion there as well,” York said after being questioned about a previous report that there may have been no drone at all.

Read more: UK police bizarrely saying Gatwick shutdown might not have been drones reportedly a failure to communicate

Last week Detective Chief Superintendent Jason Tingley said there was “always a possibility that there may not have been any genuine drone activity in the first place,” because police relied on human witnesses to the sighting.

That statement has now been dismissed by both the government and Sussex Police.

“I’m absolutely certain that there was a drone flying throughout the period that the airport was closed,” he said.

“I myself spoke to an eyewitness yesterday who was on the roof of the airport with four other people seeing it. What they saw was corroborated by two police officers near the runway. They saw the same thing, doing the same description at the same time.”

York added that two drones found near the airport in recent days have now been ruled out of the investigation.

More than 120,000 passengers had their flights disrupted in some way when the airport closed down last week. About 1,000 aircraft were either canceled or diverted, according to the BBC.

The British army, who was deployed to Gatwick to respond to the drone reports last week, used unidentified military technology to help airport authorities with the situation, the BBC said.

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sarandipity4 on December 29th, 2018 at 13:58 UTC »

Clearly most commenters haven’t read the article. Very misleading title

It seems like: Drones were sighted, calls came into police, police send their own drones to investigate, calls keep coming into the police. Therefore some calls could have been civilians reporting police drones HOWEVER those were there to investigate the other drones

chillhumanoid on December 29th, 2018 at 13:54 UTC »

Okay most of you aren't reading the article (or the headline even)

There were like 112 calls about drones.

The police were saying that some of those calls could have been made about police drones that were dispatched at that time. They aren't saying that the drone that caused havoc was their own, they're saying that "hey maybe some of these calls are coming because of our own drones, this could explain the high amount of calls we got about it"

Remember when it first started happening there was reports of more than one drone? Yea, this is what they're admitting. Some of them were their own.

Granted, yes they should have let people know at the time "well some of those are ours" but they probably didn't want people to feel like they didn't have to call because "oh it's probably just a police drone"

Stone-D on December 29th, 2018 at 11:37 UTC »

Sounds like a Monty Python sketch.