Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Heathrow Plane In Near Miss With Drone

Posted by samzenpus on from the close-call dept.

An anonymous reader writes with news about a near miss between a drone and a plane near Heathrow. "An unidentified drone came close to hitting a plane as it landed at Heathrow, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has confirmed. An Airbus A320 pilot reported seeing a helicopter-style drone as the jet was 700 feet off the ground on its approach to the runway at 1416 GMT on 22 July. The CAA has not identified the airline or how close the drone came to the plane, which can carry 180 people. It gave the incident an 'A' rating, meaning a 'serious risk of collision'. This is the highest incident rating the CAA can give. Investigators were unable to identify the drone, which did not appear on air traffic control radar and disappeared after the encounter."

6 of 325 comments (clear)

  1. An unidentified drone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    So, being that it is called "An unidentified drone", do we know that it was a drone and not a bird or something else?

    How about we just call it for an Unidentified Flying Object until we figured out what it was?

    1. Re:An unidentified drone by sound+vision · · Score: 3, Funny

      Aliens.

    2. Re:An unidentified drone by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 4, Funny

      And if a news story referred to "an unidentified car", you'd be asking if it wasn't really a freight train because, "unidentified". *eye roll*

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    3. Re:An unidentified drone by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Funny

      No, this is Slashdot so you would get a 40 count thread with various potential impact energies depending on whether it was an Audi or a Ford Truck. Somebody would bring up a DeLorean and somebody else would talk about 1.8 gigawatts. Then there would be another 40 replies about how the OP should not have used watts, but instead discussed energies in Coulombs/erg.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    4. Re:An unidentified drone by jeremyp · · Score: 3, Funny

      somebody else would talk about 1.8 gigawatts.

      Don't be silly, they'd talk about One point twenty one jiggawatts. Then there would be a flamewar on the correct pronunciation of "giga" and whether a lightning strike can deliver 1.21Gw.

      --
      All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
    5. Re:An unidentified drone by TangoMargarine · · Score: 3, Funny

      And somehow it was all systemd's fault.

      --
      Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF