Reports of drones at Jersey airport (British Channel Islands)

[John J.]

It worries me there is so much confidence and public money put into this response when there is a clear institutional bias towards drone existing. They've clearly taken a position here to dismiss any supposition of misidentification.

I'm not sure the Jersey / UK authorities could have done much differently to what they have done.
If there are reports of drones flying close to an airport, knowing that previous scares might have been groundless doesn't help much.
Hobby drones exist in large numbers, and some might be used irresponsibly.

It's a bit like bomb scares; the overwhelming majority are probably due to malicious hoaxers or misidentified items, and (thankfully) very, very few are ever associated with a real device (at least in the nations where most of us live, I hope). But a school principal receiving or being informed of a threat is going to evacuate their school, what else can they be expected to do?

An airport manager (or whoever) made aware of reports of a possible hazard to flights might feel compelled to act on that information.
The chance of a particular hazard (e.g. non-corroborated reports of drones) being real might be small, but if the hazard is real, the potential consequences of ignoring a warning could be serious- more serious than travel disruption and lost revenue.

The UK has some drone detection and neutralising kit; the service personnel who operate it are going to be paid whether they're using it for real or not.

I don't think any supposition of misidentification has been dismissed; it's more that the relevant authorities can't be confident that misidentification has occurred. Having a senior police officer or other official briefing the media that most such reports are mistaken might have a chilling effect on future reports from the public. It would also be embarrassing (maybe worse) for that official if it turned out the reports were accurate.

 

[Trailblazer]

I don't think any supposition of misidentification has been dismissed; it's more that the relevant authorities can't be confident that misidentification has occurred. Having a senior police officer or other official briefing the media that most such reports are mistaken might have a chilling effect on future reports from the public. It would also be embarrassing (maybe worse) for that official if it turned out the reports were accurate.

Well, I wonder if the police are actually seriously considering the possibility of misidentification. The one-line response I got to my email didn't really give me that feeling.

 

[UAV Hive]

It is probably worth being reminded that the term "drone" covers a lot of flying devices (and non-flying ones, though those are not relevant to this thread) of a variety of sizes and shapes. I hear the term, my mind pictures a consumer or pro quad-copter, but is that necessarily what somebody seeing and reporting a drone is thinking they saw?

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This is the reason why I'm concerned when authorities say a drone has been seen but can't describe it, even to say the kind of drone it is.

That's a sign 99% of the time that someone is simply reporting a light they perceived as hovering.

 

[UAV Hive]

I'm not sure the Jersey / UK authorities could have done much differently to what they have done.
If there are reports of drones flying close to an airport, knowing that previous scares might have been groundless doesn't help much.
Hobby drones exist in large numbers, and some might be used irresponsibly.

This is true to a degree, though staff could be trained about sightings at night and have a check list and an app like ATAK. Authorities could be trained to use Sitrec after an event to stop a repeat the following evening.

Plus there are airports that make enough profit where they could invest in counter-drone systems with EO/IR.

Eventually we will see a manned aircraft, most likely a helicopter shot at and hit. Even a jammer comes with risks even if kinetic isn't used.

 

[Trailblazer]

I'm told that's in use now but either way the PTZ for that tower was recorded as a redundant unit, telling you there's at least another one.

I've asked the airport and the DfT (the lead agency) if they even have a written description, neither will even confirm that which is not a good sign, Gatwick was the same.

Meanwhile ITV interviewed the police tonight and it's a contradiction, they are saying the drone was seen because they had "reports" but no one has even seen it clearly enough to describe which frankly is nonsense (especially over multiple reports), if I saw a drone at night generally I could at least say it was a multirotor and possibly give a colour or size.
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The full report is here: https://www.itv.com/watch/news/jers...one-activity-after-airport-disruption/dvmsqbj

I'm not sure if it will be available outside the UK, so here is a transcript of the interview with Detective Chief Inspector Chris Beechey of the States of Jersey Police.

It seems somewhat contradictory to me - as pointed out by @UAV Hive, he says he saw them but then refers to "reports". He also says that the circumstances were "very different" from previous occasions when known drones were identified.

CB: The disruption over the weekend was significant, was serious, and has led to a huge amount of activity since that time. We have had lots of police officers, partners, specialist support now that has arrived on the island, out on the ground, and considerable help from the public helping us to develop the lines of inquiry that we currently have.

Interviewer: Just take us through exactly what happened from the moment you knew to where we are today.

CB: We have had previous reports in respect to drones potentially flying unlawfully in Jersey, and have on all of those occasions been able to identify where the pilot is, but this is a very different scale we're talking about. These circumstances were were very different. They of course occurred first of all in the hours darkness, which makes it very very difficult to to track.

Interviewer: Did you actually see them? Have they been identified?

CB: Yes, a number of official reports over the weekend, have absolutely led us to believe that there were a number of unlawfully flown drones over the island during the times that the airport was unfortunately disrupted.

Interviewer: Were you able to identify what type of drones?

CB: Unfortunately, not at this time. What we're hearing is that actually now we've got assistance from outside the island, strong assistance from the RAF. With one team actually up at the airport now, and two others outside of the airport, it would suggest that we are looking at perpetrators who aren't just a sort of a teenager on a whim sticking up a drone. We have a number of data sources. We have specialist equipment now on the island, and given the position that we have now put our operations in, we very much hope that should the drone activity continue, then we're in a very strong position.

Interviewer: Will the drones have to fly again for you to catch the perpetrators, or do you think genuinely that you may still catch them?

CB: The lines of inquiry that we currently have may very well lead to identifying exactly who was behind the disruption at the weekend. The operation is very much active. We have significant resources aligned to it. Other agencies have significant resources assisting us, and we very much hope that that combined effort will enable us to, at a point in the future, establish exactly what happened last weekend.

Interviewer: Are you looking at this from the point of view of the criminality of it, or are you looking at it in addition to that, to the physical cost to the island?

CB: This is all about public safety. Significant and serious criminal offences may have been committed over the weekend, and that is our priority now: to identify the persons that were responsible and to deal appropriately as and when we do so.

Interviewer: This all comes at a huge financial cost to you as the police force, to the other emergency services involved, but also getting in the expertise as well. Can we keep that going?

CB: The important thing is that we're in a very strong position now. Drones are not a new thing to the island, and of course, this technology changes all the time. The important thing is that I and we are now very confident in terms of the resources that we have available to us on the island to both investigate the events that have already occurred...

Interviewer: And you can keep those resources, can you?

CB: Absolutely, yeah. But also to prepare and ensure that the island is in the best possible position to the future.

Interviewer: People will no doubt say that we should have been better prepared. How do you answer that?

CB: From time to time, we have had to manage these type of incidents. What was very different here appears to be a very reckless or indeed coordinated event.

Interviewer: And for those islanders who this evening are worried or concerned, what would you say to them?

CB: Public safety is absolutely paramount. Using the specialist resources that we now have ensures that that public safety is right at the forefront of everything that we do.

Interviewer: We'll let you get back to work, but thank you very much indeed for your time today.

CB: Okay, thank you very much.

 

[John J.]

...staff could be trained about sightings at night and have a check list and an app like ATAK. Authorities could be trained to use Sitrec after an event to stop a repeat the following evening.

Agreed, but faced with reports of a drone sighting, they have to make a decision then and there about the safest way to continue operations.
They would have to be confident, perhaps within minutes, that what had been reported was definitely explained by (e.g.) misidentification of a scheduled aircraft. The relevant staff would have to interpret the report, which might not give precise location, direction of view or elevation of the supposed object.

Erring on the side of caution might be preferable, though there is a tension between being risk-averse and the costs of disruption.

 

[UAV Hive]

This worried me as I remember at Gatwick the CAA drone database was used to harass drone owners. We heard about the Gatwick couple but they weren't alone. Anyone with a drone living locally was treated like a criminal. The police took tire prints and even extracted data from people's satnavs, they just wanted someone, anyone to pin the incident on.

CB: The lines of inquiry that we currently have may very well lead to identifying exactly who was behind the disruption at the weekend. The operation is very much active. We have significant resources aligned to it.

 

[Trailblazer]

Just going back to the original sightings on Friday night trying to pin down timings, there were two other flights in close succession right over the airport shortly before the initial closure:

20:05 UTC: TAP Air Portugal TP1330
20:06 UTC: Jet2 LS2200

At 20:13 UTC, BA2525 took off from Jersey headed to Gatwick. It looks as though there was no delay caused to that flight:

It left the gate only 12 minutes after the scheduled time, and the taxi time was 11 minutes. This is exactly the same as the taxi time for the previous flight on Thursday, before the drone incidents. The slight departure delay on Friday appears to be simply down to a delay to the incoming flight, BA2524, which landed 19 minutes late.

So, there appeared to be no reported problems as of 20:13 UTC that prevented that flight taking off.

But the first inbound flight to be diverted was BA1356.

This is a normal inbound track, on Wednesday, two days before the incident:

The flight reaches an altitude of 1,440m just as it is passing Sark (the small island to the east of Guernsey), descending all the while.

On Friday, however, the flight levelled off at 1,440m (4,650ft) at that point - a behaviour not seen on any other days that I could find. See the green altitude line on the graph at the bottom:

That happened at 20:11 UTC, or very close to 20:12 UTC. About a minute before BA2525 took off, and just a few seconds before it started to roll.

So whatever report caused the closure, it must have occurred right around 20:11, but seemingly too late to cause BA2525 to abort its takeoff.

That seems too early to be caused by the easyJet flight (U28042) I mentioned in post 2 of this thread.

It also contradicts the police press release which said "The first report was received at approximately 8:20pm, with reported drone activity continuing until approximately 10.30pm." If the first report was not received until 8.20pm then why did the inbound flight stop its descent at 8.11pm? Perhaps they mean that's the time it was reported to the police.

This is a screenshot at the exact time that BA1356 stopped its descent and levelled out. BA2525 is on the ground in Jersey, and U28042 is still way off over France at the bottom left of the screen here, about 60 miles away.

But look to the north and the two earlier overflights (20:05 and 20:06) have not long since passed:

So was it actually those two flights, "hovering" and then flying over in quick succession, that caused the first report? And then the easyJet passed over a few minutes later and added to the confusion? Or was there really a drone flying around at 20:10 and then still being spotted at 22:30? How long do drone batteries last, anyway?

 

[UAV Hive]

So was it actually those two flights, "hovering" and then flying over in quick succession, that caused the first report? And then the easyJet passed over a few minutes later and added to the confusion? Or was there really a drone flying around at 20:10 and then still being spotted at 22:30? How long do drone batteries last, anyway?

A few things:

1. Drones are not heavily lit up, so at night after 120m you're typically not seeing one, which is a key reason incidents such as this raise concerns. The exception is where you have a strobe, but it's the last thing you're putting on to misbehave.
2. CISA have warned for years, drones committing mischief won't be lit up, Leipzig underlines that.
3. The FAA secretly tracked almost a year of flights by drone users in the US, they found very few flights happen at night or in bad weather, no one wants to freeze their balls off or just look at dark skies.
4. Most batteries last 20-40 minutes, that said there's the tedium factor, it's actually not that much fun flying a drone for a long time, after 15 minutes the novelty wears off.

This idea that someone wants to risk jail and has a bag full of batteries, just defies all the evidence.

My understanding is the Channel Islands doesn't have EO/IR police helicopters, the only aerial asset with EO/IR is the Channel Islands Air Search (CIAS), a fixed wing aircraft, that could certainly see a drone, but I imagine probably can't be utilised with little notice.

 

[Trailblazer]

While looking at the Jersey flight details I noticed a couple of other things:

The same flight BA1356 (Heathrow to Jersey) only made it as far as the Isle of Wight on Saturday before turning back due to the Jersey airport closure:

On Sunday it did make it to Jersey but didn't take off from LHR until almost an hour after it left the gate (which seems an unusually long time, it's typically 20-30 mins).

On Monday it arrived on time with no delays.

On Tuesday it had a go-around on arrival, but looking at the radar and the route it had to take looping around Guernsey, I suspect that was down to weather rather than drones!

 

[StaticDrift]

It is probably worth being reminded that the term "drone" covers a lot of flying devices (and non-flying ones, though those are not relevant to this thread) of a variety of sizes and shapes. I hear the term, my mind pictures a consumer or pro quad-copter, but is that necessarily what somebody seeing and reporting a drone is thinking they saw?

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All the wording used by officials so far suggests it was a consumer operated drone and therefore something small like a quad-copter - which raises huge doubts anything was seen, unless it physically flew low over the tarmac (if this is the case, why aren't they saying this?)

If it's anything other than a consumer drone, then identifying the civilian operating an industrial piece of technology in a community as small as Jersey would be incredibly easy.

That is to say unless somebody specifically got their hands on an industrial or military drone with the sole purpose of disrupting the airport on a cold autumn night - seems unlikely. Or, god forbid, there is organised crime / some foreign state has sent something over to try and disrupt Jersey's infrastructure…. See how I'm starting to sound like a conspiracy theorist? That's what we are supposed to be believing if anyone starts suggesting they saw anything other than a consumer drone, which brings us back to asking WHY is there no description that can be shared with the public from these "official reports"

 

[StaticDrift]

Agreed, but faced with reports of a drone sighting, they have to make a decision then and there about the safest way to continue operations.
They would have to be confident, perhaps within minutes, that what had been reported was definitely explained by (e.g.) misidentification of a scheduled aircraft. The relevant staff would have to interpret the report, which might not give precise location, direction of view or elevation of the supposed object.

Erring on the side of caution might be preferable, though there is a tension between being risk-averse and the costs of disruption.

I agree you have to take precautions if you are not set up to confirm or deny a drone sighting, and perhaps I was wrong, money should be spent to make sure drone sightings can be confirmed before action is taken.

But the problem now is that any lawful drone operator is going to vilified by this small island community and possibly restricted in the future all based on something that may turn out to be false.

 

[StaticDrift]

So was it actually those two flights, "hovering" and then flying over in quick succession, that caused the first report?

I've made a Sitrec for these two flights. From the approximate airport viewpoint I've used, they appear relatively slow-moving before 20:00. If that apparent motion prompted a report, the observation would need to fit that earlier window. We don't yet know when the original sighting was made.

In the reconstruction, both aircraft then pass close to or over the airport area between roughly 20:00 and 20:08.

There were reports of more than one drone on Friday, although I haven't found a clear description of how many objects were in the initial report, or whether they were seen simultaneously:

• Police: The BBC reported that Inspector Rob McCallum believed "two or three" drones had been in restricted airspace. The report doesn't specify whether they were seen together.
• Passengers: Channel 103 reported on Friday night that one passenger had been told the number had gone "from two to four". Another said their pilot announced there were four. These are second-hand accounts of what passengers were told, rather than independent observations.

If two objects were reported at the relevant time and in the same part of the sky, that would be worth comparing with these flights. Equally, a single reported object could potentially be compared with either aircraft.

It would also be interesting to check whether any aircraft could account for specific later sightings, including those reported towards 22:30

Disclaimer: Please correct me if I've made a mistake here, I'm new to sitrec and using this data!

 

[Trailblazer]

It would also be interesting to check whether any aircraft could account for specific later sightings, including those reported towards 22:30

There were six aircraft flying on that track or very close to it between 22:19 and 22:33 alone. So if it was planes you'd expect there to be more sightings, really. It doesn't add up but we don't know how many reports there were and when.

One strike against the plane theory is that there was a plane flying on the exact same "drone path" and passing over the airport at 23:40, just three minutes before the first flight landed following the closure. So that light in the sky clearly wasn't deemed suspicious.

Of course that doesn't necessarily mean the earlier sightings weren't planes. They could have been called in by the public, and by 11.30 whoever made the sightings had got bored or gone to bed, and only people who would recognise a plane were searching for drones.

But that does leave a two hour period where you would hope that if someone said "Look, there's another drone!" airport staff would be able to say "No, that's just easyJet coming back from Lanzarote."

 

[wdejager]

It is probably worth being reminded that the term "drone" covers a lot of flying devices (and non-flying ones, though those are not relevant to this thread) of a variety of sizes and shapes. I hear the term, my mind pictures a consumer or pro quad-copter, but is that necessarily what somebody seeing and reporting a drone is thinking they saw?

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You are absolutely right. The term "drone" covers a huge variety of flying devices, ranging from small consumer quadcopters to much larger professional platforms. Their operational capabilities and limitations also vary considerably. Small multirotor drones may have a flight time of around 40–50 minutes, while larger electric VTOL or fixed-wing platforms can stay airborne for several hours and cover considerable distances.

There is one important aspect that is often overlooked in discussions about alleged drone sightings, though: how visible are these devices actually at night?

In most cases, you simply cannot see the drone itself in darkness. You can only see its lights. And here's the thing: the LEDs fitted to most consumer and professional drones are relatively low-intensity. Depending on atmospheric conditions and the viewing angle, they might be visible from a few hundred metres, perhaps 400–500 metres under favourable conditions. Beyond that, identifying a small drone visually becomes increasingly difficult.

Unless a drone is equipped with high-intensity, aviation-grade navigation lights, it is unlikely to be clearly visible from a considerable distance. But even then, you have another problem: identification.

Imagine seeing a few red and green flashing lights, perhaps accompanied by occasional bright white flashes, moving across the night sky. You might be looking at a drone, but you could just as easily be looking at a helicopter, a conventional aircraft, or something else entirely. Without being able to make out the actual shape of the object, there is often no reliable way to establish that it is a drone based on visual observation alone.

So, when authorities report that drones were "seen" – meaning visual sightings by eyewitnesses – I think it is important to ask what exactly those witnesses observed. Were they relatively small drones flying close by, with their relatively dim LEDs visible? Or larger platforms with powerful navigation lights, observed from a greater distance? And, perhaps most importantly, what evidence was used to distinguish them from conventional aircraft or other light sources?

Some time ago, I wrote an explainer about the differences between drone lighting and conventional aircraft lighting on Dronewatch, because precisely this issue contributed to numerous false or unconfirmed drone sightings during last year's wave of drone panic across Europe.

Hopefully, the Jersey authorities will eventually provide more details about what witnesses actually reported seeing, including the apparent size, colour, movement and configuration of the lights. Without that information, it is difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions about whether these were actually drones.

 

[StaticDrift]

But that does leave a two hour period where you would hope that if someone said "Look, there's another drone!" airport staff would be able to say "No, that's just easyJet coming back from Lanzarote."

Well, yes, but then they did close the airport the following day for supposed drones too.

Without a way to verify a drone is there or not, misidentification theory would suggest they were just being cautious with whatever, whoever, says they saw