Extending a recent series of media stories about close-call aircraft-UAV incidents that’ve been heavy on fear-generating speculation and lighter on supporting facts, a UK daily has raised alarms with its account of a Royal Air Force (RAF) jet used by VIP passengers that “came within 30ft of smashing into an illegally flown drone” – reasons for seriously questioning the threatening object identified by crew notwithstanding.
The report was published over the weekend by the Mail Online – the digital platform of Fleet Street’s Daily Mail tabloid, whose stories have never shied from using sensationalism (when not worse) to gin up reader interest. The recent piece used the news peg of a decidedly less alarmist report from the UK’s Airprox Board, which reviews all cases of reported near-miss incidents between aircraft – including those involving drones. The result was the paper’s evocation of midair disaster averted by the space of a mere 10 yards – a telling that dramatically contrasts the official document’s conditional and relatively staid observations.
Read: UK pilot heavily fined for drone flight during historic plane flypast
In case its scenario of drone-provoked calamity wasn’t enough to frighten potential readers into clicking on its own (de)merits, the Mail also conjured the presumably ultimate horror of suggesting the RAF plane could have – might have. Probably possibly feasibly should have! – been carrying members of the royal family while the jet’s pilots reported spotting an airborne object nearby during the June 21 flight.
“EXCLUSIVE: RAF jet used by royals including Kate and William came within 30 feet of smashing into an illegally-flown drone at 260mph,” the headline blared, mercifully refraining from putting either name into dread-boosting italics.
That four-alarm title set up reporting that went into far greater detail about past cases of UK blue bloods and members of government using the jet than it did facts of a UAV actually being involved – or, just as likely the case, not.
Because, of course, there may well have not been any UAV present “when the near miss happened at a height of 9,700ft.” Indeed, that altitude – the tabloid itself notes – is “more than 24 times the normal legal maximum height” of drone operation.
Yet despite the serious improbability of a small craft flying so high in flagrant violation of the law, that consideration was evidently discarded as incompatible with the heart-stopping reader response desired.
The report came hard on the heels of a wider-angle – but similarly sensationalist – piece run by rival UK daily Telegraph, whose theme was revealed in its quote-cum-headline, “‘It’s only a matter of time before a drone brings down a jet’.”
That hair-raising warning, meanwhile, followed international media coverage of damage suffered by an Emirate Airlines jet preparing to land in Nice on August 18 from an unknown object. Like theses of the the subsequent Mail and Telegraph pieces, stories on the Emirates plane leaned heavily on the presumption a UAV was the cause of the incident – despite numerous reasons to doubt that hypothesis.
“Nice airport and the entire coastline (east & west) is a NFZ,” noted drone show organizer, industry consultant, and frequent flier to Nice-Côte d’Azur Stephen Sutton, who went on to produce a video explaining why the basis for suspecting a drone for the Emirates damage is unconvincing at best. “There are counter drone measures in place, so why was this allowed to happen? (If a drone did come into contact with the airline).”
Sutton’s “Why The Press Always Get it Wrong” video theme regarding most air incidents blamed on drones was rendered even timelier by the later, unrelated Mail and Telegraph stories – treatment that other observers like @UAVHive quickly called out as sensationalist.
Virtually all the coverage cited accentuated the potential dangers posed to legacy aircraft by UAVs by piling on thesis-confirming details and sources, while largely or entirely dismissing contrarian considerations. In the case of the UK papers, that compositional practice – known in the sorely missed era of responsible journalism as “subjective cherry picking” – also did so with minimal inclusion of those vexing, credibility vouching fact-thingies.
“Most drones have software limiting the height that they can be flown, but updates can be illicitly purchased over the internet to cancel it out,” the Mail stated – without adding that, in statistical terms, evidence available indicates the ratio of such over-ride activity per active users nears absolute zero.
Instead, it rushed to suggest how keen many drone pilots are to put entire national airspaces at risk with dangerous, illegal behavior – according to, that is, someone or another.
“It is believed that some rogue drone operators load up their devices with extra batteries to try and fly as close as possible to planes and get dramatic videos of them in flight,” the story says, clearly believing what it was told it could believe was believable. “It is believed that the operator of the drone which threatened the Royal plane was never traced.”
That could because there was no drone – a possibility the Airprox Board’s report on the incident incorporates..
Airprox Board cites the captain of the RAF jet telling UK air controllers he passed a “drone” described as “a quadcopter type, silver/white with red flashes.” Elsewhere, however, the official report noted the object glimpsed “was either a drone or a weather balloon” – the latter being a more likely suspect at that altitude than a UAV.
Weather balloons, it may be recalled, were also responsible for previous aircraft collisions initially blamed on drones that– mea culpa – DroneDJ also reported. Those floating orbs were similarly belatedly identified as the cause for the halting of air traffic at Gatwick Airport in May, which was again first blamed on UAVs.
Read: Gatwick, once again, suspends flights following drone sightings [Update]
With the RAF jet blasting ahead at 260 mph at the time of the sighting, it’s surprising a human onboard was able to pick up a relatively small craft zooming past – even only 30 feet away – much less identify its type with certainty. Still, no one doubts the skipper or his account. Indeed, it’s doubtless for that reason the Airprox Board report determined the pilot’s “description of the object was sufficient to indicate that it could have been a drone,” while remaining open to other explanations.
As often in such cases, that official evaluation gave the RAF incident its highest “A” categorization reserved for those in which “a definite risk of collision had existed.” Elsewhere, however, it stated the “Reported Risk of Collision: Medium.”
The Mail‘s version notes those qualifiers further down in its story, though only after exhausting the fear-evoking potential of dramatizing the RAF crew’s sighting. Far more room is given to the presumably even more nightmarish consideration of royals having in the past been – and one day doubtless once again being – aboard the “but for the grace of God” jet involved.
Those efforts to project a set Mountbatten-Windsor buttocks closer to the aircraft’s seats at the time of the incident – even in temporally once-removed fashion – may have worked to traumatize royal loving readers. But they only earned the paper a brush-off retort from the palace that such speculative conjuring “would not be for us to comment on.”
The paper’s editors should have decided the same before publishing the, um, piece as composed.
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