from Hacker News

Gatwick drones pair 'no longer suspects'

by anon1385 on 12/23/18, 11:52 AM with 97 comments

• by dTal on 12/23/18, 7:03 PM

  Serious question - is there any actual evidence that there was ever a real drone? There are no available pictures of the supposed drone, which seems odd if it was 'buzzing the tower'. It also seems odd that it kept 'popping up' in random places, yet nobody managed to follow it with their own drone, or track it on radar. And now the police are arresting people with no connection to the incident and clearly still have no idea what was going on. The most parsimonious explanation would appear to me to be that somebody reported a drone once, possibly mistakenly, and once the extremely costly call had been made to shut down Gatwick, it snowballed into a mass hysteria / UFO sighting scenario, with everyone seeing 'drones' all over the place.

  Of course, it's possible there is in fact ironclad evidence for the official story that we're not being told. But it seems to me there's lots of incentive for the police to share all they know, and huge incentives not to admit that it was all a cock-up.

• by Normal_gaussian on 12/23/18, 12:18 PM

  I'm sure the two of them are enjoying having their faces plastered over the sunday news (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs/the_papers) and sorting through all the lovely messages they've received over the last day or so.

• by duaoebg on 12/23/18, 3:47 PM

  I assumed they were the wrong suspects as soon as I found out they were hard core hobbyists. Pulling a stunt like this would be social death and would kill the hobby for them. No-one would want to hang out or work with them again.

• by jstanley on 12/23/18, 1:05 PM

  There must have been some motive for whoever did this. AFAIK, no environmental or terrorist groups have claimed responsibility.

  Is it possible that this has been done by someone within the police or intelligence community in order to create a pretext for pushing through drone licensing laws?

• by jswizzy on 12/23/18, 2:56 PM

  I work with small drones, sUAS, and back in the day some of the guys were too lazy to go to the airfield to fly them and would just go to a beach park instead but it was close to an airforce base and an medium size airport. Anyways they were flying pumas and had the entire police force of the city show up. Luckily the drones they had were fixed wing and designed to just fall out of the sky so they brought them down really quick and got away. I'm sure no one ever figured out who was flying drones in their airspace.

• by lifeisstillgood on 12/24/18, 1:20 AM

  The front page of the Daily Mail was "Are these the Morons who shut Gatwick with a Drone?"

  I await the out of court settlement with interest

• by scottmf on 12/23/18, 4:07 PM

  Considering how well organized the attack seems to have been, I assume those behind it know a lot about airports/drones.

  I wonder if it could be a government researcher worried about a lack of funding/preparation for this kind of attack (similar to the FBI's conclusion regarding the anthrax attacks)?

  It doesn't seem like a protest, so unless it's economic terrorism or a state-backed attack, what else is it likely to be? A former pilot with a grudge?

• by pjc50 on 12/23/18, 5:18 PM

  Has this story been updated? There's now a "may not have been a drone at all" in the middle?

• by stackola on 12/23/18, 1:21 PM

  What if the while thing was a product demo? A group showing off their DDDOS (distributed drone denial of service) services?

• by chatterbeak on 12/23/18, 10:09 PM

  Also, the drones may never have existed.