Flights restarted from Gatwick on Friday after drones brought Britain’s second-biggest airport to a standstill, creating chaos for at least 125,000 passengers in the lead-up to Christmas.
A Gatwick spokesman said the majority of the 837 flights scheduled for Friday would fly. A total of 150 flights had been cancelled, most of them before 8am. “Things are improving and the flow rate is increasing as the day goes on,” he said.
All flights in and out of Gatwick were stopped from Wednesday evening until the early hours of Friday morning.
Steve Barry, assistant chief constable at Sussex Police, said authorities had identified “persons of interest” who were potentially connected with the incident but that “it’s an incredibly difficult offence to detect and arrest the suspect for”.
Mr Barry said there was a “whole spectrum of possibilities from high-end criminals to individuals trying to be malicious” for flying drones in close range of the airfield.
He added that there was “no evidence” the drone attacks were state-sponsored.
The airport reopened because no drones had been seen since 10pm on Thursday, said Mr Barry.
Earlier on Friday, Chris Grayling, transport secretary, told the BBC that the attack was thought to have been carried out by “a small number of drones” that could have been operated by one person or a small number of people.
There had been “more than 40 sightings” between Wednesday night, when Gatwick was first forced to close, and Thursday night. But this was “the same small number of drones seen many times”, he said.
Mr Grayling said the government had “put in place every measure we possibly can to ensure this can’t happen again. What’s happening on the ground is a mix of measures taken to give confidence that aircraft can be safe . . . some of those are military capabilities.”
He added: “The reality is that this technology, the ability to stop drones, is really only just emerging. We are going to have to learn from this what the existing technology can do, what else needs to be done.”
Mr Barry said there had been “no opportunity” to shoot down the drones. “Had that opportunity presented itself and the threat assessment was appropriate, I’m confident the offices would have gotten the authorisation to do that,” he said.
But he added that tests had shown this would have been a “relatively inefficient” way to address the drone problem.
Mr Grayling said it was “clearly a kind of disruptive activity that we’ve not seen before” and that he planned to “con
Drones can pose a severe threat to aircraft. Government tests found that a 400g device could smash a helicopter’s windscreen while a 2kg drone could inflict “critical” damage to the windscreen of a passenger jet.
A popular hobby drone weighs 1.2kg; Sussex Police said the drones involved in the Gatwick disruption were believed to be of “industrial specification”.
Passengers continued to experience disruption to their flights on Friday. Ryanair said flights scheduled to and from Gatwick were instead operating from Stansted airport. Norwegian said it was operating flights out of Gatwick but warned that due to “our aircraft and crew being out of position, the return to our normal flying schedule will take some time”.
British Airways said it was offering customers due to travel to or from Gatwick a range of rebooking and refund options if they no longer wished to travel.
Alex Neill at consumer group Which?, said passengers affected by the Gatwick disruption were not entitled to compensation payments because the drone attacks qualified as “extraordinary circumstances”, along with severe weather or terrorism. She said passengers might still be entitled to meals, refreshments, hotel accommodation or transfers.
Many of the passengers progressing through the airport on Friday expressed optimism about reaching their destination.
Jane Fochtman from Michigan was due to board a plane to New York on her way from a trip around Europe and north Africa. She had been told to check in at midday for a 2pm flight that had been delayed from 10am, but said she feared the plane in question was still on the other side of the Atlantic.
“We were just told to come and wait in line,” she said. “We are doing our karma thing.”
The British Airline Pilots’ Association said detection and tracking equipment had been installed around the perimeter of the airport so that “if and when the drones reappear, they will be detected and the airport will close again”.
The union, which has long warned of the dangers to pilots posed by drones, said it “remains extremely concerned at the risk of a drone collision. It is possible that the rogue drones may go undetected around the perimeter or could obstruct the flight paths outside the immediate detection zone.”
Legislation was introduced in July banning drones from being flown within 1km of airports. The UK Civil Aviation Authority said possible penalties for flying the devices close to airports included imprisonment.
While the CAA said that there were no confirmed ownership or usage statistics for drones, the Department for Transport’s drones consultation response paper published last year estimated the number of drones operated by leisure and commercial users in 2018 to be 200,000 and 3,000, respectively.
It was not yet clear how much the disruption would cost airlines, said one airline analyst, who did not want to be named.
“Operational disruption of some sort happens every year. The question is if this turns out to be a one-off, does the cost exceed what is normally budgeted for? Probably not,” the analyst said. “Six inches of snow at Gatwick would have had the same effect on the airlines. But if drone attacks are to happen every week, it will turn into a problem.”
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