I flew to Welshpool on Saturday 20th April. My route was via BNN to HEN and then to Church Stretton and direct to Welshpool.
In the region of HEN there is a notified drone area of surface to 1150 feet and another to the south of that of surface to 1300 feet. As I was in that area on my return to Lydd at around 2,300 feet I saw a drone above us. I dread to think the damage it would have done had we hit it. I informed Farnborough at the time but there’s very little that can be done to find out who was flying it.
My reason for posting is to let other pilots know about the added risks we seem to be facing.
You should see if you can find any info on the drone area, and see if it tells you who is in charge of the area.
You should report it to them, to the CAA and to the Airprox board.
If it’s not report, then as far as officialdom is concerned it never happened, and the trial was a perfectly safe trial (or if no trial, then the drone area is working perfectly to segregate traffic).
You need to let officaldom know that it’s not working safely.
Definately report it as an Airprox. As @dublinpilot says, if its not reported then it didn’t happen.
Scary. Please report!
I recorded 62 flight hours over Northern Europa since January, had 6 close encounters with drones the year so far, all at 3,000ft and above, reported every on directly to FIS when it occurred, never got a notice whether they did anything about it. Let’s face it – chaos is done.
MichaLSA wrote:
reported every on directly to FIS when it occurred,
I’m not sure that will achieve anything. It’s your job to report it and I don’t think you can rely on busy FIS doing that for you.
dublinpilot wrote:
I’m not sure that will achieve anything. It’s your job to report it and I don’t think you can rely on busy FIS doing that for you.
Yes that does it here in Germany. I do the same whenever I have a drone encounter and they tell me that they report to the police immediately to maybe be able to do something. They have a GPS position if you tell quick enough. However – we all know it. These drones (in particular bigger ones like the professional DJI Phantom) have ranges of more than 10 kilometers (and an independent GPS mode) so it’s close to impossible to find someone. It is scary when you’re less than 30 meters away. However, let’s face it, if it’s not the windshield there won’t happen a lot to the airplane in case of a hit. And there are maybe trillions of birds out there, still we’re flying relatively safe.
dublinpilot wrote:
I’m not sure that will achieve anything. It’s your job to report it and I don’t think you can rely on busy FIS doing that for you.
It will, as the radio is recorded. If there happens anything, FIS will be in trouble explaining if they did nothing.
FIS has no obligation to do anything whatsoever…
UdoR wrote:
However, let’s face it, if it’s not the windshield there won’t happen a lot to the airplane in case of a hit.
The challenge is that it’s difficult to see the drone so you may not be able to avoid a collision with the propeller or the windscreen. Wing collisions have so far not resulted in fatalities (that I could find), but even seemingly small touches between aircraft (such as for instance this incident https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5422ef7fed915d1371000269/dft_avsafety_pdf_502371.pdf) can result in fatalities if the wing is damaged in the wrong place.
