As much as "it was all a false alarm" would make a killer headline (and clearly has, even in speculation), it doesn't seem that anyone actually believes that. Just a poor choice of works.
The Police in the UK often say the most ludicrous things in statements, and the basic public speaking skills of the people they choose to put out is often very limited. They always look like they're caught in the headlights while trying to sweatily stumble through reading some words off a page.
I'm not sure what institutionally causes this, but it must be something causing it as it's always the same.
Remember when recently a senior Police officer in a statement just decided to call some extremely serious allegations they were looking into 'true' as if they had already had the trial and preempting the whole judicial process? I can't understand how you can accidentally 'misspeak' like that.
They don't hire the brightest - recently I heard a former senior ex met natsec policeman who presented as very very stupid individual I would not trust to investigate a missing kitten.
There was also the scandal where a v senior copper on the Cyber side was found cheating.
This was literally a single court case of a single applicant of a single small department.
The ruling is that it is not literally illegal to refuse to hire someone for being smart. On an totally unrelated note, the applicant was an older fellow, and age discrimination is illegal.
The applicant was also hired as an officer in another jurisdiction.
Most departments that have more than 100 officers require a bachelor's or associate's degree. The department I worked for did not explicitly have this requirement, but I was the only person in our class of 96 hires that did not have either a college degree or military background. Most had bachelor's, a few had master's, some had doctorates.
On a completely separate tangent, law enforcement as a field is much like a skilled trade. To do it well you need a specific set of skills and the desire to learn them. Any high school graduate can do the job more than adequately if hes willing to listen and learn the stuff he needs to learn. At the end of the day a cop simply needs to be an honest person who understands the basic principles of the laws related to policing, and is willing to take calculated risks to help others.
You should cite a source for that. Where I live the cops are pretty on the ball. I recall one of them casually correcting my math on work-related problem when he was taking a report from me on another topic.
Where I live (Eastern Europe) the policemen are generally known as not being the brightest, there are countless jokes made about their intellect (or lack thereof) and propensity to generally follow orders without giving it a second thought. I've just checked and it seems that even the related Wikipedia [1] page has a section on this:
> Policemen: Most Romanian people are not fond of the law enforcement institutions and try to avoid contact with constables. Romanian public opinion about policemen says that they are primitive, uneducated and totally corrupt. Some of these police jokes belong to the absurd genre.
Q: How do you choose a stupid policeman from a group of
policemen?
To be fair, and I've come across this so many times, you can be good at your job and still have awful presentation skills. I don't think we get taught things like this in the UK and/or get practise in it, unlike other countries.
> Detectives were understood to have drawn up a shortlist of potential culprits after the pilot gave vital clues away by audaciously flying the drone right up to the air traffic control tower.
> In a move known as "buzzing the tower", it emerged the perpetrator had taunted airport staff by circling the drone around the building and flashing its lights, an industry source told The Daily Telegraph.
Yeah, considering they found a damaged drone near Gatwick airport... it is strangely possible with 67 witnesses that there is no video "proof", but unlikely there were no drones.
On the other hand, I won't be surprised if the couple that were released use the fairly strong libel laws to punish early press shaming.
I just still can’t wrap my head around the fact that in 2018, with a camera attached to every waking persons hand (and some sleeping people too), how is it that there is not a single public photo or video published of this specific drone. Kind of reminds me of when I found out that tipping cows wasn’t a real thing...
> I just still can’t wrap my head around the fact that in 2018, with a camera attached to every waking persons hand (and some sleeping people too), how is it that there is not a single public photo or video published of this specific drone.
I’ve been in many debates about this in the drone flying community (and with friends who know me and how much I fly) and I keep coming back to this point. I’d even take a blurry “UFO sighting” photo under consideration, but even that doesn’t exist.
Virtually every single “close call with a plane” has thankfully (thankfully both for the safety of passengers and for other UAV pilots who would be impacted by the irresponsible party’s actions) been proven later to not have been a drone.
PS, cow tipping is real (as in its “possible”, not that folks are successful), but it’s much harder than folks realize (I grew up in a farm state and have seen it done once with multiple big guys involved, but also seen many a drunken fool fall on their face trying too).
When you put military aircraft flying at high speed in class G airspace so close to the ground, crap like this happens. I know the Tornado was authorized, but as someone who grew up near a military base, it is abusive to those in the area. This is a sore spot with me, so apologize I’m a bit bitter on this.
To avoid situations like the above, I typically file a flight plan or at minimum contact nearby ATC if I know I’m going to be flying above 200ft much. That said, I’m not required too and neither was the drone pilot in this incident either. I wouldn’t be opposed to a transponder, if they were made on drones, but to date I don’t know of any major manufacturers providing that feature.
Cars don’t try to get away when you go to flip them. They also can’t widen their stance and counter your effort to flip them. Cows do both of those things. Cows don’t sleep standing up, so they definitely know when you are approaching and most will be at least walking away long before you get to them.
What cop car weighs 500 - 1800lbs? Even a Smart Car or VW bug (lightest “cars” I can think of that I’ve seen used as a police car) weighs double what an average cow weighs.
Human eyesight is much more acute than a phone camera, especially filming video at 1080p. The runway at Gatwick is two miles long, plus taxiways and the apron. To a passenger in the terminal building, a drone flying over the runway is likely to appear as little more than a tiny speck.
There is a daily mail video of a drone at the North Terminal Bus station. DM is hardly a good source, and I was sceptical at first but I'm 95% sure its the right location. The question is now, is the footage fake and is it from last week.
The U.K. papers had diagrams of this said drone, including speculation of the actual model, cost($8k+) , I even saw a diagram of a superimposition of the drone over a airplane engine to show the relative size. They also mentioned the drone must have been hacked to bypass the built-in blackout software for airports.
One UK precedent for reparation is the treatment of retired teacher Christopher Jefferies who was arrested for the murder of his tenant Joanna Yeates. His character was totally assassinated by the UK media before he was released without charge (Vincent Tabak was later convicted of the murder) [0]. Jefferies' only crime was to be 'unconventional' in the opinion of the media. He launched legal action against six newspapers and accepted substantial damages. His story was turned in a TV drama [1] in 2014.
The paper's that did that made clearly libellous claims - because the couple had not yet been charged with an offence when their names were published. Those paper's can now expect libel claims against them, although given the clear breach of libel law I expect they will wish to settle out of court rather than take on the extra expense of a court case they can't win.
I’m not too familiar with UK libel law. Is it not a defense that they were reporting on statements they were given? Is there a reasonableness question?
There's a difference between saying "Mr and Mrs Bloggs were arrested in connection to the Gatwick drone chaos" and "ARE THESE THE MORONS WHO RUINED CHRISTMAS?" in 144pt font on the front page with a fuck-off huge photo of them.
But this newspaper probably won't have to pay out anything. They've been careful with their wording; they do this a lot; they have lawyers on staff; and defamation is difficult in the UK.
Interestingly I heard that 'some media' had published their names yesterday and I thought that was pretty crass. I know several media organisations are that though so its not really a surprise, and I hope they manage to sue them for undue distress or whatever.
Today though, the BBC are saying "<full name> and <full name> from Crawley are saying that they feel completely violated by the media attention". I can't understand what is going through the editors mind when they approve sentences like that.. there is literally no reason any member of the public would need to know their names, and having the BBC repeat them on the hour every hour is just kicking them when they are already down.
Yep, UK and US are abhorrent when it comes to this. Where I'm from(Poland) it's literally illegal to print the full name and show the face of the accused until after the trial. Once someone is arrested all the newspapers can do is say "Arthur G. was arrested on suspicion of X" with a blurred out photo of their face. The penalties for breaking that law are substantial and newspapers have paid extremely heavy fines for breaking it so it's generally adhered to.
When I read about this, the intense pressure the police were under, that they arrested two people then released them due to iron clad alibis, it makes me wonder if they panicked and tried to pin it on the first couple of people to pass within their sights. Reading about English police corruption recently, this doesn't surprise me if it were true.
Could it have been a mass psychosis? First a real drone sighting and the closure of the airport; then when the news spread, tens of people reported more sightings. There are two densely populated towns on both sides of Gatwick airport, within a couple of kms from the runways. After the first sighting, any other within that range must have been considered a risk worth closing the airport for. A drone is just a black dot in the sky, I wouldn't be surprised by false reports.
"Despite going down the wrong avenue with the arrest, investigators do have more to work with after they recovered a fallen and damaged drone from the north side of the airport. It is being tested for clues on who piloted it, according to The Guardian."
“always a possibility that there may not have been any genuine drone activity in the first place.”
Don't these two contradict? The best consistency possible between them is that the damaged drone was placed there rather than flown, at a different time. In all likelihood it probably did crash, though. Given the timing of finding it, it would seem related to this incident. Perhaps there should be some skyward-facing CCTV-like cameras at airports to remove some ambiguity in situations like this.
Indeed. If they can't link it to anyone or even any time, then it can't be used as evidence. Although it may be a fruitful line of enquiry if was one of the problem drones from last week. E.g. tracing sale of parts from serial numbers.
The suggestion is that the airports were under major terrorism threat, which is why the army was involved.
They didn't say this to avoid spooking the public, and having a whole lot of people cancel their flights and holidays (plus it would have been major fuel for the Yellow Vests).
So Brexit supporters are copying French fuel protesters even though we have a different fuel duty regime that isn't set by Europe, and they want to leave Europe (and by extension, France) anyway?
For a real head twister: the various 'exit' and 'anti-eu' groups have tried to unite EU wide... That one still has me wondering if they realize what they are doing.
This isn’t an “anarchists unite” situation though.
That people in a group would unite to leave that group once they feel it has been corrupted or no longer serves their interest isn’t hard to predict or understand.
Many of them may be in favor of a common currency and free trade, while disliking the swift ramp up of military spending, austerity policies, etc. enough to leave and build something else.
I mean, it’s likely you were just making a joke, but... There are currently protests heating up to riot point across Europe over these issues, and I’m not laughing.
This country ( UK ) is highly prone to mass psychosis. Not really ascribing anything negative there, just an observation.
A few winters ago there was minute by minute updates on Bird Flu.
The press was covering swans and ducks found dead on the ground. Each individual fowl corpse was covered in breathless detail amongst infographics and timelines
The government was manoeuvred into buying close to a billion pounds of Tamiflu treatment. Some of that was returned, but £500m wasn’t (thanks to commentators below )
This isn't mass psychosis because 'seeing a drone', even when mistaken, is not a symptom of anything. 'Mass delusion' may be closer to what you're referring to. But there's a certain aspect of fear or panic in the concept that just doesn't fit here: presumably, nobody would feel panic at the sight of a far-away drone unless they were about to board a plane?
In general, I doubt the UK is any more susceptible to such phenomena (cf Americans and their panic at the sight of a turban, or beard). You may also just be profiting from the benefits of hindsight, and throwing in a conspiracy theory for what exactly?
I think it maybe that you're watching certain TV and reading certain newspapers?
I remember coverage. And no doubt the Sun had one of their helpful infographics, and the Mail blamed immigrant birds etc etc. Meanwhile most of us got on with our lives.
This is a terrible, terrible example. Tamiflu is not a vaccine, it’s a treatment. It’s use is recommended in some cases according to clinical best practices, and purchases were not due to the government being “manoeuvred”. And further, the fact that an outbreak didn’t happen doesn’t mean that planning for an outbreak is bad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18745624