‘It’s only a matter of time before a drone brings down a jet’
Earlier this month, the right wing of an Emirates flight was seriously damaged after a suspected mid-air collision with a drone as it was landing at Nice Cote D’Azur airport. It’s one of many recent incidents that involve drones interfering with aviation – and experts warn that the situation is far from improving.
Though the latest incident is particularly worrying because it seems to have involved actual contact, the risk from drones to aviation is much more far-reaching than collisions alone.
The infamous episode at Gatwick in 2018, in which sightings of two – or possibly one, or possibly more – drones closed the airport for upwards of 30 hours, causing countless delays and plenty of Christmas heartbreak, at a reported cost of £55 million. Over the course of the resulting investigation, some 170 sightings were reported, with only 115 being labelled “credible” by police. A local couple were arrested, then released without charge (and with an apology). It was a dramatic and confusing episode – which one which put the drone issue front and centre.
While the cause of the Gatwick drone remains unknown, the only casualties, really, were delayed festive trips. But experts are mindful that the results can be a great deal more serious – incapacitating an airport, or indeed a plane.
“Gatwick was a crucial turning point,” says Dr Bruno Oliveira Martins, an academic at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo. “It exposed the safety risks, because obviously a drone can interfere with an aircraft that is landing or taking off.” That event led to a wave of both research into the effects of drones, and the hasty reinforcement of detection systems.
“Now, there are dozens and dozens of incidents per month at each airport,” he says. “And I don’t think it’s impossible that a big accident will happen.” If bird strikes can immobilise an engine, a drone can certainly cause significant damage.
The Aviation Safety Network database lists 23 reported collisions, although experts suspect the number of near-misses is much more substantial. In 2016, a drone reportedly collided with a British Airways flight at Heathrow Airport, although the pilot managed to land safely. Two years later, physicists at University of Dayton Research Institute modelled the impact of a high-speed collision. Though it’s yet to happen to a commercial aircraft, it allowed them to conclude that such an event could cause an aircraft’s wing to disintegrate, and that it is “only a matter of time” before it happens in real life. Earlier this year, a Russian jet collided with an American drone above the Black Sea, causing damage to both.
Professor David Dunn has written extensively about the security risk from drones, both in domestic settings and in international conflict. He believes the risk to airports from hostile actors, in particular, is under-researched. “The main problem is if you had a determined adversary,” he says.