Re: Er, not quite!
As the person doing the FoIAs and delving into this, no one really knows if there was or wasn't a drone for the first sighting. But the first sighting is itself highly suspect. It was raining at the time of the first sighting and it had been raining for some time beforehand, so anyone flying a drone would have had to take off in the rain. Even these days IP rated drones aren't in most cases truly waterproof and they're big expensive and easy to photograph.
Add to this LED lights on drones are low powered, so a drone would have to be close for its lights to be seen, close means even easier to describe and photograph. Most commercial drone pilots have to manually stick a strobe on their drones to fly at night.
The weather data recorded at Gatwick is on Airprox Reality Check so can be downloaded and even used in a flight simulator.
The coincidence in all of this, was one of the few drones that could have flown in the rain is the SkyRanger, most police forces can't even afford this model, the police team stationed at Gatwick being the exception that do own them. So it could have been there was no drone, it could be the police drones were mistaken for rogue drones, we don't know.
We know the events after that don't add up and we know, thanks to the FoIA that the airport itself began to completely ignore the sightings of drones that were made 1 day after counter drone systems turned up, which were AeroScope, Skyperion & Falcon Shield.
Falcon Shield is especially interesting as it had an optical sensor with thermal that can visually track a drone 1km away at night, this never saw a rogue drone, yet managed to pick up each deliberate friendly drone sortie.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
