Kyle Ferriter
Senior Member.
Additional descriptions and timeline info was posted today from John at The Black Vault:
https://www.theblackvault.com/docum...ghting-to-wright-patterson-afb-drone-mystery/
Some of this, at least for me, further strengthens the idea that either all or almost all of this multi-day incident was a case of miscommunications and misidentifications. Maybe kicked off initially by a real quadcopter drone seen in restricted airspace (but this is also unsubstantiated, so maybe not), which then spiraled into more and more mistakes after the base staff had been primed even more to misinterpret things in certain ways.
The question remains whether there were any drones flying illegally over the base. There has still been nothing concrete to substantiate the idea that there was, and many conclusive examples of a witness misinterpreting a distant airplane as a very nearby drone flying illegally over the base. Plus other stuff like claims of radar hits. But these lack any detail indicating they were drones, and even the description of what the radar showed doesn't sound like the radar showed something actually in base airspace.
The first incident sounds like it was all visual sightings:
From there it spiraled, and more base staff, including radar staff, started seeing things and interpreting them, without good evidence, as being illegal drones.
An example. From the Black Vault article:
I also don't know how a security officer on the ground at night could possibly visually confirm that something 40 miles away was a drone. I don't think this is physically possible. But security staff did misidentify airplanes miles away as being drones low over the base. We know this happened. Mistakes were being made and recorded in the official incident log and then other people just took it as a given that everything that was written down was accurate. This employee identifying a Boeing 717 as an illegal drone, around the time that someone operating the radar saw some hits up to 40 miles away, gets written down as "security forces on the ground confirmed that the observed targets were drones".
Further, 40 miles is so far away that it is not really anywhere near the airspace of the base. There are ton of normal private/commercial flights through that region. And its even legal to fly recreational drones in most of that region. Even like 5 miles from the base, it is simply legal for recreational drones to be flown up to 400ft, with no prior authorization needed. So it is unclear how or why they thought something on the radar that far away was something operating illegally.
FAA UAS map:
The WPAFB restricted airspace is only 12.6 miles across in diameter, with the big runways near the middle of the circle.
As an example, this neighborhood ~5.1 miles from the big runway at WP AFB is just outside this restricted zone and it would be legal to fly a small recreational drone there without official authorization via LAANC or from the FAA or ATC.
https://www.theblackvault.com/docum...ghting-to-wright-patterson-afb-drone-mystery/
Some of this, at least for me, further strengthens the idea that either all or almost all of this multi-day incident was a case of miscommunications and misidentifications. Maybe kicked off initially by a real quadcopter drone seen in restricted airspace (but this is also unsubstantiated, so maybe not), which then spiraled into more and more mistakes after the base staff had been primed even more to misinterpret things in certain ways.
The question remains whether there were any drones flying illegally over the base. There has still been nothing concrete to substantiate the idea that there was, and many conclusive examples of a witness misinterpreting a distant airplane as a very nearby drone flying illegally over the base. Plus other stuff like claims of radar hits. But these lack any detail indicating they were drones, and even the description of what the radar showed doesn't sound like the radar showed something actually in base airspace.
The first incident sounds like it was all visual sightings:
From there it spiraled, and more base staff, including radar staff, started seeing things and interpreting them, without good evidence, as being illegal drones.
An example. From the Black Vault article:
From the FOIA response:External Quote:
0445Z is less than 2 minutes after the IMG_9511 clip above identified as an airplane was filmed, so "the targets were still occurring approximately 0445Z" very plausibly refers to that sighting.External Quote:
I also don't know how a security officer on the ground at night could possibly visually confirm that something 40 miles away was a drone. I don't think this is physically possible. But security staff did misidentify airplanes miles away as being drones low over the base. We know this happened. Mistakes were being made and recorded in the official incident log and then other people just took it as a given that everything that was written down was accurate. This employee identifying a Boeing 717 as an illegal drone, around the time that someone operating the radar saw some hits up to 40 miles away, gets written down as "security forces on the ground confirmed that the observed targets were drones".
Further, 40 miles is so far away that it is not really anywhere near the airspace of the base. There are ton of normal private/commercial flights through that region. And its even legal to fly recreational drones in most of that region. Even like 5 miles from the base, it is simply legal for recreational drones to be flown up to 400ft, with no prior authorization needed. So it is unclear how or why they thought something on the radar that far away was something operating illegally.
FAA UAS map:
The WPAFB restricted airspace is only 12.6 miles across in diameter, with the big runways near the middle of the circle.
As an example, this neighborhood ~5.1 miles from the big runway at WP AFB is just outside this restricted zone and it would be legal to fly a small recreational drone there without official authorization via LAANC or from the FAA or ATC.
