journalist Samira Shackle was half asleep as the plane started to descend.

It was mid-December, 2018, just a few days before Christmas.

And Samira had been out in Pakistan doing research for her book, Karachi Vice.

So I'd been interviewing people for like all day, every day for 13 or 14 days, and I just

wanted to go home and sleep.

She was on a flight home, looking forward to arriving into Gatwick, an airport south of

London, and just getting home as soon as she could.

I was exhausted and on night flight, obviously crossing time zones and so on, but I'd fallen asleep on the second leg of the flight.

So when the pilot came on, the in-flight speaker, to tell the passengers that drones had been spotted and they couldn't land, Samira struggled to take it in.

I was sort of half asleep and a bit bamboozled about what that meant and was kind of just really trying to get onto the flight Wi-Fi

to see if I'd actually heard what I thought I'd heard.

I mean, I couldn't get my phone onto the Wi-Fi.

I remember it's always so patchy on planes,

but on the back of the seat you can get the headlines

and it basically just said that to drone-sighted above Gatwick.

And I didn't really know what it meant.

Drones cited? What was going on?

All at once, Samira found herself at the centre of an escalating drama.

I'm Mave McClenigan.

This is the tip of.

Music McLanagan. This is the Tip-Oth. Eventually, Samira's flight was re-rooted to Heathrow. On the ground, more chaos awaited her and her fellow passengers.

So I got off the plane and then started looking at Twitter and looking at my phone

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