Bear in mind
That the number of "drone sightings" around Heathrow and other UK airports has increased with a directly inverse relationship to the decrease in the number of "bird sightings"
And that at least one of those "drones" turned out to be a plastic bag.
The reality is that when you're on finals, you're concentrating on putting the aircraft on the ground. Birdstrikes (quite hefty ones) on the nose or windscreen are usually never seen until they're smeared all over the windscreen or have already put a large dent in the radome. There are a few gopro videos containing birdstrikes and I challenge anyone watching any of the civil airliner ones to see more than a couple of frames of the winged wonder before impact.
Personal experience at 70mph in a trainer climbing out at 500 feet is that you won't even see a flight of ducks until one gets macerated in the prop (thankfully it passed just over the the prop, but I never saw the one that left a dent in the leading edge of the right wing)
On that basis I'll challenge _anyone_ who claims to see a drone travelling at 200 knots around heathrow (lots of nice corner reflectors to bounceback radar signals) and can ID the model, or says they saw it for more than a fraction of a second to start stumping up evidence - and bear in mind that a drone large enough to be easily seen on inbound approach or powerful enough to keep up with an airliner on finals is going to stick out on the radar like a set of dogs balls.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
