“Drone Sighting” at Germany’s Airport is Apparently a Big Deal
Yesterday, while browsing TechCrunch I read a story about a drone sighting at one of Germany’s airport which grounded flights for around an hour (from 7:23am to 8:18am to be exact).
“Drone Sighting!” Means someone saw a drone and therefore all flights had to be grounded.
To understand how bad this is, the best number is that this particular airport served 14.8 million passengers for the first three months of this year.
The local press ‘suggests’ more than 100 takeoffs and landings were canceled.
“Drone Sighting!” I was scratching my head around the idea all morning to try to figure this one out…
Why would sighting a drone be so important? Then a friend of mine explained to me that in Europe right now they are on high alert with all the refugees they took in.
But again. That was a “Drone Sighting” which doesn’t mean there was a drone and it doesn’t mean anything about refugees.
Apparently, it is the second incident at this particular airport where another sighting created the same situation in March.
Last year, the same thing happened in London at Gatwick Airport.
The challenge for the authorities is not small. They mostly rely on high tech startups to come up with new technology to fight this problem.
FYI, when the Gatwick incident happened, the UK government was highly criticized for failing to listen to past warnings from specialists…
Let’s hope that someone comes up with a good idea because this is not going to end soon.
Just as a reminder, it took years for the airport to prevent bird folks to disrupt radars.
The difference being that a bird would try to avoid an aircraft and has no malicious intent.
Fun fact. Mexico is using falcons to prevent bird folks from entering airports.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-airports-shutdown-when-a-drone-is-spotted-but-not-a-flock-of-birds
The picture is from Von Benutzer JuergenG
