May 15th - Suspected drone disrupts and diverts Gatwick Airport flights
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 15 May 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Flights from Gatwick Airport were halted this afternoon due to reports of drone activity close to the airspace.
At least 12 inbound flights were diverted away from Gatwick for almost an hour while an investigation took place into the suspected drone.
Gatwick is the busiest single-runway airport in the world, with little slack in the system when schedules unravel.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Monday the 15th of May and already I'm droning on. Yes, about unmanned aerial vehicles, drones and whether they are flying illegally in the Gatwick area. |
| 0:22.6 | Let me take you back to December 2018, nearly five years ago. |
| 0:28.6 | It was the last week before Christmas. |
| 0:31.6 | There was a drone sighted. |
| 0:34.6 | Flight started to be diverted. Then the airport opened up again, but then the drone was apparently sighted. Flight started to be diverted. |
| 0:41.2 | Then the airport opened up again, but then the drone was apparently cited again. |
| 0:48.4 | By the end of the disruption, after three days, 1,000 flights have been cancelled. |
| 0:54.0 | 150,000 people had had their Christmas plans torn up and bizarrely nobody ever found out what the |
| 0:59.2 | cause was there was a celebrated case of somebody being arrested who was completely innocent but |
| 1:05.9 | the subsequent inquiry into it said well we simply don't know what it was. And some people say |
| 1:12.6 | that it was one of these collective things where people just decide there's a drone and |
| 1:19.7 | they act accordingly. I simply don't know about that. I do know, though, that a large number of passengers, certainly a couple of thousands, were extremely inconvenienced and thousands more were mildly inconvenienced. |
| 1:36.5 | Let me explain. The airport was closed for 51 minutes in early afternoon. |
| 1:43.8 | That might think, you might think, well, |
| 1:46.1 | hang on, surely pilots are going to allow a bit of extra fuel just in case, |
| 1:49.9 | and they can just circle around, can't they? |
| 1:52.3 | Well, the trouble is Gatwick is the busiest single runway airport in the world. |
| 1:58.4 | There is very, very little slack in the system. And once disruptions begins, |
| 2:05.1 | it's very difficult for that to be rectified quickly. And so you had the situation where |
| 2:13.8 | seven easy jet arrivals were diverted, five those to luten one to south end another one to |
| 2:19.7 | bristol then you also had british airways arrivals from faro and palmer they touched down at |
| 2:27.6 | stansted um a surprise there since b a doesn't have an operation at ststed, it does at Heathrow, but I presume they |
... |
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