Drones and commercial airlines don’t mix.
Heck, it wasn’t that long ago that we covered a story about how errant drones shut down air traffic at London’s Gatwick airport during the peak winter holiday travel season.
Today, it is being alleged, a drone flew underneath a JetBlue airlines passenger plane arriving from San Francisco into Boston’s Logan Airport in the United States while the aircraft was landing.
Aside from the obvious dangers of having a drone near an aircraft in general, landing an aircraft is a particularly vulnerable and fraught activity on its own without that added complication.
The sighting of the drone occurred when the plane was at 8,000 feet according to the witness. WBZ4 reports that the Federal Aviation Administration is already looking into the incident.
“The crew of JetBlue Flight 320, an Airbus A320, reported seeing a drone pass below the aircraft six miles northeast of Boston Logan International Airport yesterday at 7 p.m., local time. The flight landed safely and the crew did not take any evasive action.”
What’s scary is that this kind of thing keeps happening. One major accident and we are all going to wake up in a different world as far as drone piloting is concerned.
And it isn’t like efforts aren’t being made to register and drone people on how to be responsible pilots – we’ve covered many of those stories.
Plus, there’s the whole anti-drone weaponry industry which, we’re assuming, could become even bigger as time goes on if it seems like we can’t keep personal drones out of sensitive airspace.
We’re just glad no one got hurt.
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