I know in the past the news of sighting had been argued across multiple forums.
Past UK Drone Sightings
Past UK Drone Sightings
Past UK Drone Sightings
- Thread starter LINXXL
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Given that they are too small to show up on radar, eye-witness reports from the pilots is about all that's going to be available. Some of those reports are more credible than others, but some are very credible and, since direct evidence of these kinds of flights is not infrequently posted on YouTube and elsewhere (dismissed as CGI of course), it seems very unlikely that all the pilot reports are wrong. I wonder what kind of corroboration the obviously completely impartial "Airprox Reality Check" is pretending to expect?
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Interesting organsiation (Welcome to the UK Airprox Board | UK Airprox Board)
I wonder who founded it and who pays for it ?
Not all pilots would be wrong in sightings I guess, but my personal estimate when looking at many news articles, proven incorrect reports, and non substantiated reports, it would be a very high % of false claims, most likely from simple mistaken ID, or unknown flashes of an object past the cockpit window.
Of course no one ever want to see an incident proven by an actual impact or even a near miss etc.
Odds are it will happen sometime.
I'm sure there would be a few already that had no bad result of impact, but some sort of damage is likely to occur in the future unfortunately, just a matter of time.
All the new licencing and registrations in various countries is designed to mitigate the risk, how effective this will be is also unknown.
I wonder who founded it and who pays for it ?
Not all pilots would be wrong in sightings I guess, but my personal estimate when looking at many news articles, proven incorrect reports, and non substantiated reports, it would be a very high % of false claims, most likely from simple mistaken ID, or unknown flashes of an object past the cockpit window.
Of course no one ever want to see an incident proven by an actual impact or even a near miss etc.
Odds are it will happen sometime.
I'm sure there would be a few already that had no bad result of impact, but some sort of damage is likely to occur in the future unfortunately, just a matter of time.
All the new licencing and registrations in various countries is designed to mitigate the risk, how effective this will be is also unknown.
I would discount pretty much everything that comes out of Airprox.
With drone reports they dont verify, attempt to validate or in any means check if its even physically possible. They accept the report verbatim, classify it and report it as an incident.
That why we hae lots of "drone near misses" at altitudes of many thousands of even tens of thousands of feet. Absolutely no attempt is make to investigate or evidence needed for the event to be logged.
Airprox is not an impartial or investigative body.
With drone reports they dont verify, attempt to validate or in any means check if its even physically possible. They accept the report verbatim, classify it and report it as an incident.
That why we hae lots of "drone near misses" at altitudes of many thousands of even tens of thousands of feet. Absolutely no attempt is make to investigate or evidence needed for the event to be logged.
Airprox is not an impartial or investigative body.
In what sense not impartial? It's a reporting and analysis organization funded by the CAA and MOD to which airprox reports are filed. Are you suggesting that they should reject pilot reports, or not list them, or what?
Impartial is the wrong word but the Airprox reports hardly do any analysis of any reported drone sighting.
They simply publish sighting reports regardless of how ridiculous they might be and treat every one as if it was an actual incident.
They accept and report pilot airprox submissions - that's their job - not to decide whether they are correct and censor those that they don't like. Acceptance of an airprox not an endorsement of it. It's up to the reader to decide if the airprox is credible or, as seems to happen regularly on this forum, simply to assume that all UAV airprox submissions are incorrect.
The issue is that Airprox reports are reported by lazy journalists as genuine incidents like this: Near misses skyrocket as drone use increases
They believe they must be credible reports of dangerous flying since they come from an official source.
Even though some fraction of them are likely misidentified, the increase in UAV airprox reports almost certainly does correlate with an increase in real events. Currently the only metric is the number of pilot reports. If your complaint is that the media don't always stress the fact that these are all based on pilot reports and cannot be independently verified then that's fair criticism. Blaming the Airprox Board is misplaced though.
There is no analysis. Pilot reports are simply accepted verbatim and an incident logged. No analyis or investigation is performed to see if the sighting was actually real, a drone (as opposed to something else) or even physically possible or likely.
Its a publishing not an investigatory body.
It's probably not fair to say there's no analysis in Airprox reports.
When the incidents involve two manned aircraft, there's plenty to analyse and they produce detailed reports like this: https://www.airproxboard.org.uk/upl..._report_files/2018/Airprox Report 2018276.pdf
But when all they have is a sighting report, there are no details apart from what the plane was doing and what the pilot says he saw for a few seconds.
Here's the report of a typical dubious "drone" sighting report (where even the flight crew don't seem to believe it was a drone).
The incident was reported in November 2018 at an altitude of 11000 feet.
The A320 pilot reports he was descending into Belfast and passing FL111 when the FO spotted an object at 12 o’clock, low and appearing to move quickly towards them. They checked TCAS to see whether it was a military fast jet, but nothing was showing.
As it got closer the Capt had his hands on the controls ready to disconnect auto-pilot and take avoiding action and the FO covered the sidestick. The object passed down the right-hand-side of the aircraft and details were passed to ATC.
The Capt suspected it was a weather balloon, thought he saw a tethering line and described it as silver in colour.
The FO thought it was a drone, and described it as dark silvery blue, spherical with two small circular mechanisms on the top of the object, like drone rotors, although thought that on reflection a drone at that altitude was unlikely.
He noted that it was difficult to assess the size or the proximity to the aircraft, certainly it was very close to the wing-tip and within 75m of the cockpit. As it got closer they could see that it would pass clear although the time from first sighting to passing was only about 6 seconds.
Reported Separation: 50ftV/ 75m H
Reported Risk of Collision: Medium
Cause: The Board were unable to determine the nature of the object reported and so agreed that the incident was therefore best described as a conflict in Class D.
Risk: The Board considered that the pilot’s overall account of the incident portrayed a situation where safety had been much reduced below the norm to the extent that safety had not been assured.
And that goes into the summary that journalists keep referring to as evidence of a large increase in near misses with irresponsibly flown drones.
This then contributes to increase the number of reported "drone" sightings because it becomes a common perception that the sky is full of increasing numbers of irresponsibly flown drones.
That's what I said. So in what way is it not impartial?
its not impartial as it automatically assumes its a drone if a pilot says so, no questions asked. Which then gets written into a report stating drones caused an active threat to safety.
There is no impartial evaluation of the claim or attempt at verification. If pilot says its a drone, its a drone. Even at FL140 some 20km offshore.
This came out today:- The UK Drone Community Fights Back, Gains FOI Admission Of No Tangible Drone Evidence
At least via FOI people are taking airprox to task about their claims.
There is no impartial evaluation of the claim or attempt at verification. If pilot says its a drone, its a drone. Even at FL140 some 20km offshore.
This came out today:- The UK Drone Community Fights Back, Gains FOI Admission Of No Tangible Drone Evidence
At least via FOI people are taking airprox to task about their claims.
You are completely misunderstanding the meaning of "impartial". It does not mean "investigate" in any sense at all. They are a reporting agency. They get an airprox report. They publish it. That's their job. They are not "claiming" anything. What would make them not impartial would be if they selectively chose which to publish based on judgement about the credibility of the report.
You should make up your mind on this one.
As @Meta4 described in #11, they collate, analyze and summarize incidents with multiple data sources. When all they have is a pilot report there is no analysis to be done - all they can do is publish the report. And that still has nothing to do with impartiality.
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