Nobody Has Actually Found This Drone

So the big story wrapping up my Christmas week isn't a product launch or a keynote, it's a drone that maybe existed at Gatwick Airport. Or didn't. Nobody seems totally sure anymore, and that's the part I can't stop thinking about three days after "case closed" turned into "actually, never mind."

Quick recap for anyone who spent the last week offline (lucky you): Gatwick shut its runway down starting the evening of December 19th after reports of drone sightings near the airfield. It stayed shut, on and off, for something like 36 hours, which doesn't sound like much until you remember this is the single busiest travel week of the year. Somewhere around 140,000 passengers got caught up in it, over a thousand flights cancelled or diverted, army units brought in with anti-drone equipment, the works. I had a cousin flying back from Faro who ended up sleeping on an airport floor two nights before Christmas Eve, so this wasn't some abstract news story in my house, it was a genuinely miserable few days for a lot of ordinary people trying to get home for the holidays.

Then on the 21st, police arrested a man and a woman from Crawley, a couple in their late 40s and 50s, and for about 36 hours the story had a shape. Suspects. Motive still murky, but suspects. Every outlet ran their names, their photos got splashed everywhere before they were even charged with anything, which already made me uncomfortable given how these things tend to go.

And then, on the 23rd, Sussex Police let them both go. No charges. Their own statement said there was "no evidence" connecting the couple to the drone activity at all, and there was something close to an apology in there too. So we're back to square one, except now two innocent people have had their faces attached to a national panic story for nothing, which strikes me as a much worse outcome than "airport closed for a day and a half."

Here's the bit that actually bugs me, and it's not really about the couple. It's that as of today, the 26th, nobody has produced a drone. No wreckage, no clear photo, no radar track released to the public, nothing you could point to and say "there, that's the thing that grounded 140,000 people's Christmas." Plenty of witnesses reported seeing something, sure, and I'm not saying they're lying. But eyewitness reports in the dark, in freezing weather, with everyone already primed to expect a drone because the news told them to look for one, are not exactly gold-standard evidence. I've read pilots quoted as being skeptical too, which is the part that made me sit up.

Meanwhile the response to all this uncertainty was to bring in military-grade counter-drone hardware at what's reportedly a cost running into the millions, guarding against a threat we can't even confirm we correctly identified. That's the bit that feels very 2018 to me. We had a scare, we didn't wait to actually nail down what happened, and we went straight to buying expensive tech to solve it. It's the same instinct as people panic-buying generators over Y2K, except this time the generator costs a few million pounds and gets parked next to a runway.

I don't have a tidy theory about what actually happened at Gatwick. Maybe there really was a drone, flown by someone who's never been caught, and the couple who got arrested were just spectacularly unlucky bystanders who happened to own a drone themselves (I believe that's part of why they were picked up in the first place). Maybe it was smaller and dumber than that. I genuinely don't know, and I'm suspicious of anyone on my Twitter timeline right now who's acting like they do.

What I do know is I spent way more of my Boxing Day than I meant to refreshing a live blog about this instead of returning a jumper that's two sizes too small, and that the whole saga is a decent little case study in how fast a story can outrun the facts holding it up.

Anyway. Back to eating leftover ham and ignoring my inbox for one more day.