The UK Air Proximity Board (UKAB) publishes a monthly report in which it documents its near miss investigations. The most recently published report lists four Category A near misses involving civil aviation and hobby drones in UK air space.
One of those incidents occurred on September 13th when a quadcopter came within 20 meters of an airliner carrying 76 passengers over central London, while it was over the Houses of Parliament on a descent path to London City airport. On the same day, a Boeing 737 missed a drone by three or four metres moments after taking off from Stansted. The UKAB also disclosed that on September 22nd, a quadcopter drone just missed the right wing tip of a Boeing 777 as it left Heathrow, and on August 27th, a drone came within fifty feet of a plane as it started its descent into Manchester airport. The Manchester drone was hovering at 2,800 feet and initially mistaken for a balloon. The legal height limit for a quadcopter is 400 feet.
But how do you counter the drone problem? Dutch police think they have a practical solution in the ancient art of falconry. There is plenty of video evidence on YouTube of wild birds of all sizes destroying drones, but the Dutch experimenters are training their birds to pluck the drone out of the air, as this video illustrates.
The beauty of this solution is that not only do the birds have excellent eye-sight and can find the airborne machines far faster than a human could, but by capturing the drone rather than knocking it out of the air, they avoid the risk of injury to people on the ground.
The Metropolitan Police have confirmed that they are looking at the work of their Dutch colleagues and considering deploying a squadron of drone busters in the capital.
About SKILLZONE News This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.