Drone hits British Airways plane approaching Heathrow Airport | Hacker News Reader

Drone hits British Airways plane approaching Heathrow Airport

bbc.co.uk

111 pointsk-mcgrady99 comments

If you're a C-SPAN junkie like me you look forward with christmas-morning glee to the call-in episodes about drone laws.

There is exactly one type of person who wakes up at 5am to hold the line for 30 minutes to ask a question about drones, and it is (you guessed it) local yokels who are planning to shoot a drone down and looking for permission.

The anti-vaxxers know more science words but the anti-drone crowd is much more entertaining.

Please don't associate anti-vaxxers with the anti-drone crowd. People have actually gotten sick and died from preventable diseases caught from unvaccinated children.

And I can't imagine many people are suggesting drones be banned. But many including myself believe they do need to be regulated and situations like this are why.

All due respect, but I think op is accurate... I say this as an immunocompromised individual fully understanding the weight of your analogy.

Many of the recently enacted regulations are driven by fear and hyperbole, with very little understanding of the technologies and real risks involved. This is in fact the very same position from which the anti-vax crowd pleads their cause.

Further, drones are very capable of saving lives, and many recently enacted regulations are actively preventing their involvement in life-saving activities that would otherwise have been both safe and legal.

I could go on for paragraphs about how the current regulations in the US in particular are a complete joke that do absolutely nothing to improve the safety of drone operations - and in some cases actually encourage riskier ones.

"Regulated" can mean anything from "enforcement of reasonable precaution" to "banned on the basis of irrational fear." Existing regulations already meet the former standard IMO -- it's not like the drone operator was operating legally and will get away scott-free even if caught.

> A Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) spokesman said it was "totally unacceptable" to fly drones close to airports, and anyone flouting the rules can face "severe penalties, including imprisonment"

Calls to "regulate" are then actually calls to increase bureaucratic barriers and harshen penalties, which will likely have a disproportionately large impact on legitimate applications of the technology and a disproportionately small impact on those who choose, as this drone operator did, to break the rules.

> Existing regulations already meet the former standard

The article implicitly makes this point, too.

> Steve Landells, from the British Airline Pilots Association (Balpa), said it had been "only a matter of time before we had a drone strike". He called for greater enforcement of existing rules.

(Emphasis mine.)

I'd say it explicitly makes the point too :-)

> Flying a drone near an airport can already be punished with up to five years in prison, and rules also forbid taking them above 400ft (122m) or near buildings and crowds of people.

He was on BBC Radio 4 this morning, claiming that BALPA is setting up a project to do testing similar to that of bird strikes on aircraft, such as windscreens.

However, he did put emphasis on avoiding through education - rather than just testing impact.

A call to regulate can be understood both as asking for new law, and asking for a better enforcement of existing law.

Situations like what? An unidentified object may have hit Apache, doing no damage. Perhaps we should understand what Hartland before going on a witch hunt.

Weird. I do that, too.

The plane has been cleared for the next flight already.

https://www.aeroinside.com/item/7392/british-airways-a320-at...

This raises the very important question: is the fear of drones hitting planes completely overblown?

Given that the plane didn't have any trouble landing, and they hit birds all the time, I think that this might show that it's fine to hit a drone so long as it isn't sucked into the engine ;)

A canada goose can weigh from 7-14 lbs, ducks are much smaller (3.5lbs). We test planes against bird strike. However, birds don't have screws and batteries. Even with that, they bring down planes (AWE1549)

There is a reason why airports are very, very careful about the vehicles that drive onto runways - FOD (foreign object damage) is a very real thing with very severe consequences when a plane is on approach and take-off.

However, birds don't have screws and batteries.

This often gets mentioned (and is obviously true) but I'm doubtful (but not certain) that it makes that much difference. Things we think about as "soft" can be remarkably hard at high velocity. At 120 mph terminal velocity, water and concrete are similarly fatal: the incompressibility matters more than the hardness.

This isn't to say that drone strikes are not an issue, only that I don't think they are significantly more of an issue than bird strikes. And birds can do a lot of damage at several hundred miles per hour. When you are hit by one, whether it's filled with bones or metal probably isn't the biggest concern.

> Things we think about as "soft" can be remarkably hard at high velocity. At 120 mph terminal velocity, water and concrete are similarly fatal: the incompressibility matters more than the hardness.

And yet planes fly through clouds and rain at several hundred mph without issue, though the same wouldn't be said about flying through concrete...

The issue here is relative hardness. Bone is relatively soft to titanium turbine blades, whereas screws and titanium turbine blades are in the same ballpark of hardness, so are catastrophic when they meet when spinning @ several thousand rpm...

I don't have any experimental data, but my mental models pull up:

1) chucking a chicken bone into an insinkerator vs a penny.

2) a hunk of wood vs a hunk of wood with a nail through a wood chipper.

Good examples, although I wonder if the relatively low speed makes a difference. The closest comparable that I can find is this: http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/videos/chicken...

They shoot a frozen versus thawed chicken out of an air cannon, and conclude that the impact force is identical for both. I'm pretty sure that adding some metal bits inside both chickens wouldn't make much difference.

Density would make a big difference though. A basketball and a 1.75" lead ball have about the same mass, but the lead ball is going to do much more damage. But not because it's harder, but because it's dense and cohesive.

I'd guess that a drone of comparable weight to a goose is going to have a greater impact area, even though some of the internal bits are much harder, and I'd guess this is going to be more important for the level of damage.

Here's an article that supports that view that mass is the main factor: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/drones/what-migh...

Here's more discussion (which I haven't read yet, and which may well contradict my instinct): http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/26223/would-a-dr...

> I'm doubtful (but not certain) that it makes that much difference. Things we think about as "soft" can be remarkably hard at high velocity ... I don't think they are significantly more of an issue than bird strikes.

Unlike birds, batteries by definition have a lot of stored chemical energy in them (1). in fact we want to put as much energy in as little weight as possible.

Violent disassembly by jet engine is not going to be a good combination with that.

1) https://www.google.com/search?q=hoverboard+catches+fire

https://www.google.com/search?q=laptop+catches+fire

https://www.google.com/search?q=phone+catches+fire

A GE90 jet engine like those used in a Boeing 777 can have a power output up to 75 MW. Let's take a fairly beefy phone battery -- 2500 mAh at 3.7 volts. Converting those units into something more useful we get 9.25 Wh. If we assume the entire chemical energy of the battery is converted into heat instantaneously, that's 33.3 KJ or .04% of the energy output of the engine per second.

It's possible that such a release could cause a catastrophic failure, but I have a hard time convincing myself that the battery poses a real risk.

I think the concern is more about the resultant chemical reaction of lithium: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gisdMQbtJqk than the total power of the pack.

Also, larger hobby aircraft (e.g. A 700-size heli) will be using battery packs on the order of 2x packs of 6 cells ("6s" aka 6 3.7v cells in series @4000-5000+ mah), so it's more like ~200-300Wh. Again though, doesn't matter, because even something like a 3s pack @2200mah can make quite a scary fire. This is why there are barrels of salt water at RC flying fields. An overheating lipo goes in the tank before it melts everything with hell fire.

Lipo fires are also why you can't take "hoverboards" on airplanes and why Amazon recalled them all: http://fusion.net/story/250086/airplane-hoverboard-ban-list/

http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10806816/amazon-hoverboard...

Not sure how this is affected by being struck with a blade rotating at tens of thousands of RPMs at hundreds of miles per hour, but my point is that lipos are nasty beyond just their specific energy density :)

The fire in the video looks kind of wimpy against a jet engine that burns a litre a second or so of jet fuel. The heat from the fuel is probably 1000x that from the battery

The problem though is that the violently combusting battery is also a chunk of metal that, after being struck by the blades, is going to be moving at high speed roughly at right angles to the expected airflow through the jet engine. Damage could ensue, that is not equivalent to bits of bird flesh and bone.

The heat and flow in a jet engine is also carefully engineered and directed so that the flame front stays beyond a certain point in the combustion chamber. You don't want any of that in the compression stage, for example.

Maybe there is no real risk, but I did want to point out that it would be a mistake to assume that drone strike to a jet engine would be roughly equivalent to bird strike of the same weight. A drone is unlike a bird, a bird does not have lithium batteries, bird strike will not spray fragments of burning or exploding shrapnel through the jet engine.

Depends on the size and mass of the drone(s) and where they impact the plane (fuselage, window, turbines, etc.)

Really hard to tell as we don't know enough about the incident.

We don't know how large the drone was or what part of the aircraft it hit, for example what happens if one of the larger commercial drones gets ingested into the engine.

If you want to an example of what even a bird can do to a plane see this picture - http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/03/13/12/3226FEF60000057...

Many plane's "noses" are non-metallic so that the front-facing radar can be placed at the front of the aircraft. The ones I've seen are often fiberglass and are pretty weak. Breaking the plastic has very little impact on the ability of the aircraft to fly (compared to sucking a bird into an engine for instance).

The USAir flight that ended up in the Hudson river was disabled by striking a flock of Canadian geese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesley_Sullenberger)

I never noticed that that guy's name is "Chesley". I wonder how often he gets people thinking that's a typo for "Chelsey" or something of that nature.

There are a few good shots of the Delta BOS->SLC flight that made an emergency landing in Denver after encountering a hailstorm en route: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3193043/Captain-s-co...

Wow! ... I'm assuming the pilot had no radar and (almost?) no visibility. The glide path antennas and receivers must have been intact but I'm not sure I'd have the nerve to trust a blind, hands-off landing in a damaged aircraft!

The way ILS is set up, all the delicate stuff is on the ground. Imagine two long, thin lobes of radio coverage (like two imaginary cigars) that overlap slightly in the middle. If you can pick them both up you are on the glide slope. If you can only pick up the top lobe you are too high, and if you can only pick up the bottom lobe you are too low. This means the equipment on the plane is very simple (fits into a single-engine aircraft) - if you can pick up the signal at all then you are good to go. In theory you could even use an omnidirectional receiver, although I would guess that they are somewhat directional just to enhance rejection of spurious signals.

But yeah, landing in a hailstorm with very little visibility is never real fun, but it's what instrument-flight ratings are there for.

With the disclaimer that I've only flown small aircraft, every flight I've taken in fog, snow, heavy rain, etc. has still had a small window of visibility before the wheels touched the runway. With that windshield, could he tell? It looks like the side windows might be less occluded, so I guess you'd still get some visual reference (though not whether you're "lined up").

I don't know the equipment nor Delta's Operational Specs, but Denver has Cat II, Cat IIIa and IIIb approaches to four of their northerly runways. Cat IIIb permits landing with an RVR (runway visibility) of 300 feet and an "alert height" (somewhat similar to a decision height, but not regulatory) of 35 feet.

If you're going to put an airplane down with no forward visibility, finding a 150' wide runway with CatIIIb/c minimums is probably the best you can do.

Links to KDEN's navigation data are on this Airnav page: http://airnav.com/airport/KDEN

Canada geese

I suppose intent matters too. A drone hitting a plane by mistake is apparently not unlike a bird strike, but how do you tell if a given drone has an explosive payload and is being aimed intentionally at an engine intake? It's only a matter of time. It makes sense to keep drones out of airport flightpaths. More sense than most of the post-911 security theatre, at least.

And do you think that somebody who packs his drone with C4 and aims it at passenger aircraft is going to care if he is violating a flightpath? Forbidden is not the same as impossible.

Right but 'it is illegal to put a drone in this airspace' gives us permission to shoot down anything in a flight path before impact, including the ones with C4.

What weapons does one use to shoot down a toy drone? You can't miss because on the other side, there are people, and if it hits, it shouldn't lead to dangerous parts all over the runway.

I think right now the idea is generally a bigger faster one with a net.

That's a clever one. More importantly, it makes for an amusing picture.

Not as cool as hunting birds though, which is being tried too. Drones are probably more practical, I guess.

Now you have two problems, as in "Engine 1 ate the drone, while Engine 2 ate the eagle."

I've seen that, but wouldn't a laser actually be more reliable / faster?

Well like arjie said, you don't really want flying debris near people/runways

And maybe the energy necessary to actually vaporise entirely would not be the kind of thing one would be wanting to punch up into the atmosphere willy nilly.

Not to mention that you actually need an actual cannon, not a pointer. http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/159... Yup, that's definitely something you want to mess with around an airport. "Wait, I was supposed to shoot down that other blip?"

Depends on how much C4 is attached to it.

Seriously, you're talking about hundreds of lives and a few hundred million dollars of equipment. Why do you want to take the one in a million chance?

Surely aviation safety is based on trying to eliminate or mitigate low probability threats. It may be irrational to worry about drone hits for a single flight, but across all flights everywhere it could contribute to a crash. This is well understood in areas like radio transmission where you need a licence to use frequencies. It would be nice if everyone could transmit at high power on any frequency, but we don't have the systems to deal with that safely so their has to be enforced regulation.

Surely aviation safety is based on trying to eliminate or mitigate low probability threats.

Yes, this is part of the equation, but you also need to balance your efforts based on the "risk landscape". Spending effort in one place generally means that less effort is spent elsewhere. I think it's a direct parallel to optimizing code: measure first, then optimize. Making your inner loop 10% faster will make a difference, while speeding up your logging won't. Or vice versa, if you have no single inner loop and your logging is abysmally slow: measure first!

If it turns out that drones have 1000x the per impact likelihood of causing a fatality than impact with a birds, but that you are 100000x more likely to hit a bird than a drone, then are you better off spending your efforts on reducing the risk of drone impacts or bird impacts? Or (seemingly perversely) is it better just to tolerate both risks as they are if measurements suggest greater return by concentrating your efforts on improving airport security (or mental health checks for pilots, or testing English proficiency, or even traffic safety on the way to the airport).

In this case, my guess would be that adding regulations to reduce the risk of accidental drone strikes by aircraft will have negligible returns, that common sense "don't fly near airport runways" is sufficient, and that there is lower hanging fruit that makes more sense to concentrate on. Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow is an excellent book if you are interested in this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents

It's really not clear to me that there's a trade-off between bird impact prevention and drone prevention (or anything else you mention) for two reasons.

First, effort allocation isn't really a compelling explanation -- most of the world just doesn't work in those types of zero-sum terms. Drones are sexy; just because government or industry is willing to fund research and development on safe drone-airplane regulations now doesn't mean it's willing to allocate those same resources to something else.

Second, even when resource allocation is strictly zero-sum, the sorts of calculations you suggest are mostly a matter of qualitative speculation about the future. Which means you're mostly just going through a number crunching process that "confirms" your prior beliefs.

> that common sense "don't fly near airport runways" is sufficient

I think the major challenge that incidents like this one demonstrate is that it might no longer be sufficient to assume pilots have common sense.

Even if the fear of bringing down a plane and killing everyone on board is overblown, what about doing thousands of dollars worth of damage and delaying a whole bunch of people in their travel plans? And what's tradeoff to this risk? A bunch of hobbiests who want no regulation of thier hobby? Who's going to compensate the airlines and the delayed passengers?

Have you read the article? There's regulations, what he was doing was illegal and as the article say, can be punished with up to 5 years in prison.

You can add as much regulation as you want, it won't change that it can be done the same way it already been done.

You can have mandatory registration. That seems to work pretty well for guns in the UK.

From the sounds of it they just don't know and need to fund some research.

"And pilots have also called for the DoT to fund tests into what would happen if a drone got sucked into an engine or crashed into a plane's windscreen."

"Last month, the British Airline Pilots Association noted that while the threat of bird strikes had been well researched there was little data about how much damage a drone could cause a plane."

I wonder if any other organisations have conducted any rigorous testing?

A British Airways spokesman said: "Our aircraft landed safely, was fully examined by our engineers and it was cleared to operate its next flight."

A large drone hitting the engine of a jumbojet during takeoff or landing would be very bad news. Not only would it cost maybe millions of dollars of damage it might down the plane.

Surely the main issue here is the risk of someone filling a drone with explosives.

Um, no. E=m*v^2, note that the energy rises with the square of velocity. Just hitting a quickly spinning blade on a fast flying machine is quite sufficient for massive damage. http://www.suasnews.com/2015/11/vt-researchers-study-jet-eng...

Who are these clowns flying drones near airports, anyways?

It used to be that incidents like these would be reported as UFOs. I wonder if someone had advanced drone technology 50 (ish) years ago? Or are some of the current "sightings" UFOs but there's now a plausible explanation (drones). The most curious report is the drone with the "balloon-like center" - might this have been reported as a weather balloon in the past?

Note: I'm using the term UFO as it's original acronym and don't mean to imply they're flown by the proverbial little green men.

EDIT: I'm using the term "little green men" in the gender neutral form and am not intentionally impuning the flying capabilities of little green women.

I think its more interesting that UFO reports from 50 yrs ago never included drone size deployments, therefore the reports from 50 yrs ago are quite likely inaccurate, unless the visitors to Earth were somehow limited to pre-2010-ish era technology.

It's also interesting how many of them reported exactly the same "saucer" as the original publicized sighting, despite that sighting not necessarily involving a saucer shape!

Kind of like the mystery airships that were plaguing us at the end of the 19th century? But I think the OP was talking more about normal, mortal, earthbound humans having some garage-built technology that got classified as UFOs. Those would necessarily have to be made with the technology of the day.

Why don't they just shoot them down when they approach airports? Seems like a much more measured and appropriate response than "no drones anywhere without documents".

Routinely shooting down aircraft near a busy commercial airport. What could possibly go wrong?!

Well, not shooting them down seems like it could go much worse. I'd hate to get one of those in an engine.

Think what a terrorist could do with this though. Legislating it will only really stop people who don't intend to fly small aircraft into a no-fly-zone anyway.

> not shooting them down seems like it could go much worse

Sure. But a sensible policy would also minimize the amount of weapons that are deployed in heavily trafficked airspace. That is why the sensible approach is to heavily regulate or even by-default prohibit UAV traffic anywhere near airports or common commercial aircraft routes.

In other words, parent post is a false dichotomy. It's possible to design and enforce regulations that 1) minimize danger and 2) enable aircraft controllers and the military to address rogue UAVs before they enter heavily trafficked civilian airspaces. Those regulations should go far beyond "shoot-to-kill near airports", but also don't have to be as encompassing as current bans.

Simply deploying weapons in commercial airspace as a complete alternative to legislation and regulation is insane.

> Legislating it will only really stop people who don't intend to fly small aircraft into a no-fly-zone anyway.

I think you under-estimate the size of the group of people who do dangerous shit without malicious intent. Look at the list of incidents at the end of the article, for instance, and guess at how many of those were intentional.

Furthermore, even in the case of malicious intent, crafting regulation that clearly and unambiguously sets expectations can allow regulators and the military to deploy counter-measures long before doing so creates an unacceptable risk to surrounding civilians and infrastructure.

This is already highly regulated; the reason that harsher general legislation is sought is that the uninformed will nonetheless operate UAVs next to airports and endanger lives.

Hence, my tradeoff is between making it difficult to own or operate a UAV ANYWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES OR ADJACENT TERRITORIES; and making it incredibly improbable and difficult to simply ride one into an airport and cause a disaster, either by accident or on purpose.

My tradeoff also bears on the doubtful effectiveness of the legislative approach to prevent intentional violation of controlled airspace. In this case you require the sentries anyhow.

The point of my previous post is that your supposed trade-off is a false choice.

There's A LOT of middle ground between today's limitations on drone operators and a world where we expect to shoot down aircraft near crowded airports. If you try to sell that either/or to the public, you're going to lose. And rightly so.

FORTUNATELY, there's a lot the FAA could do to make the USA more drone-friendly while also ensuring the safety of conventional aircraft and critical infrastructure. Good drone policy, if ever enacted, will follow from this observation. It will not follow from a false choice between militarized anarchy and industry-crippling regulation.

(It'd also be neat if we could introduce technical solutions to the stupid/clueless person problem. For example, it'd be nice if the FAA funded the development of open-source, optional, and easy to disable software that warns the pilot (and only the pilot) before the drone enters a restricted area. It'd also be really nice if drone manufacturers voluntarily installed that software on capable drones. We're all better off if Johnny doesn't commit a felony and ground the next 30 minutes of take-offs while trying out his cool birthday present...)

Shoot them down as a backup but if you legislate it a lot of amateur morons will think twice before flying near an airport. There's no way to know if this was malicious. It was probably just an idiot who wouldn't do it if he knew it was illegal.

How about just jamming them?

Nobody needs to be flying drones near airports. Seriously.

I'm certainly not interested in pulling this off.. but how hard would it be to just simultaneously launch a swarm into a busy airport while planes are landing?

> Nobody needs to be flying drones near airports.

But who defines 'near'? At present, this is defined by the industry with a vested interest in passing the costs onto regulators and law enforcement. Not in investing in drone detection or mitigation technology.

CTRs around airports already deprive residents of their airspace rights, often to a radius of 5nm from an airport. In many cities that means no drones in a large chunk of residential area.

> How about just jamming them?

The time window in which that's a valid option is closing fast. Autonomous flyers that don't need an external signal are already pretty good and after a few more years of iterations, they'll be even better and available to everyone. Not to mention air traffic requires lots of radio communication of its own, along with radar and GPS, and jamming equipment would need to be guaranteed not to interfere with any of that. It's a non-solution.

"Return-to-home" functionality is quite common. The GPS knows where it took off, and where it is now, and in the event that it loses the control signal it'll (try to) navigate back home.

Having a drone under control is almost always preferable to having a drone out of control, particularly in the pattern of a major airport. If you're going to take it down, it needs to happen in a way that gives you control of the drone, not just messes up their control.

People live near airports. You can't simply vaporize a drone; whatever you do to arrest it in the sky is going to cause drone pieces to hurtle towards the earth.

Same goes for jamming them.

>>> You can't simply vaporize a drone <<<

Challenge accepted.

A lot of modern UAV platforms have a 'failsafe' mode if they lose the transmitter signal.

which might include flying across the run way to the coordinates it took off from.

As others have pointed out, the last thing you want is some object flying over the airport that is not under your control.

Taking LAX for an example... It has a perimeter of 4ish miles. Assume one sentry with a shotgun, loaded with birdshot every 300ft to give decent coverage of the perimeter, that gives us about 60 sentries. At 15 $/hr, 24/7, that gives a minimum cost of about $7M/year, ignoring any overhead for management, training, firearms, secure storage, etc.

All that achieves is to secure the airport, poorly, against a very unlikely threat, and one that is unlikely to down a plane even if an intrusion occurs.

Title makes it sound like a US military drone shot down a passenger plane.

"Toy airplane seen near passenger plane" doesn't bring in the ad views.

Neither does anything else on BBC websites (acknowledged that outside the UK, ads are present, but BBC Worldwide is so divorced from the BBC News website journos that it is irrelevant)

"$1500 'toy' hits passenger plane". Yours is a little dismissive.

I love drones, though I don't own one, though I do have two RC helicopters (the 'proper' ones, like an Align Trex, not a $20 mall toy) but your interpretation isn't the greatest.

My complaint is the word "drone". It's designed to sound scarier than it is. The previous generation called them "model airplanes".

Language evolves and all that, but also introduces bias. The "done scare" would never be a popular thing if someone hadn't come up with a scary word for model airplanes. (But I agree that "model airplane" isn't that great of a term for some of the higher-end photography drones. It's more than just a toy, it's an interesting tool for filmmaking. I'm still not all that afraid of them, however.)

That's because model airplanes tend to model an airplane. Quad copiers don't model anything. Drone is a fine word.

In most cases, there's a legal distiction between "looks like an airplane but smaller" (model airplane) and "looks like a bunch of sticks and propellers" (drone). The rules for both tend to be similar, but not quite the same.

I call total bullshit.

How could a pilot even tell? There was no damage. Did they hear it hit over the engine? Ha.

The first time a drone hits a plane it's going to be from terrorist activity.

They don't accidentally hit planes as we see from the 1000s of 'near misses' but not a single hit.

What are you on about ?

I think we can safely assume that British Airways pilots/officials have not fabricated this report and genuinely believe a drone has struck the aircraft. And why would you think it would have come from a terrorist. Far more likely to be some kid who got a drone for Christmas and interested in visiting an airport.

To be honest, the article is thin on details and full of speculations. The pilot thinks he struck something resembling a drone but I doubt he would be able to tell the nature of the object from a moving plane.

The reason I greatly doubt it is a drone is that the number of drones is relatively low while the number of birds is high. There are economic and legal incentives for _not_ flying close to airports so I think the number of possible accidents is massively overblown. In light of these facts, I await more proof of the fact it was a drone, because now, I see none.

I don't believe that the British Airways have fabricated this report, it's just that they don't seem to be sure of if being a drone themselves.

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