London\u2019s Gatwick Airport reopened on Friday after a saboteur wrought 36 hours of travel chaos for over a hundred thousand Christmas travelers by using a drone to play cat-and-mouse with police snipers and the army.<\/p>\n
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After the biggest disruption at Gatwick, Britain\u2019s second busiest airport, since a volcanic ash cloud in 2010, Gatwick said 700 planes were due to take off on Friday, although there would still be delays and cancellations.<\/p>\n
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Britain deployed unidentified military technology to guard the airport against what Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said were thought to be several drones.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhat\u2019s happening on the ground is a mix of measures taken to give confidence that aircraft can be safe… Some of those are military capabilities,\u201d Grayling told BBC television.<\/p>\n
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Grayling said there was not yet \u201ca straightforward commercial, off-the-shelf solution that automatically solves all problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
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There was mystery over the motivation of the drone operator, or operators, and police said there was nothing to suggest the crippling of one of Europe\u2019s busiest airports was a terrorist attack.<\/p>\n
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Gatwick\u2019s drone nightmare is thought to be the most disruptive yet at a major airport and indicates a new vulnerability that will be scrutinized by security forces and airport operators across the world.<\/p>\n
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The army and police snipers were called in to hunt down the drones, thought to be industrial style craft, which flew near the airport every time it tried to reopen on Thursday.<\/p>\n
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Gatwick\u2019s chief operating officer Chris Woodroofe said the perpetrator had not yet been found.<\/p>\n
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Flights were halted at 2103 GMT on Wednesday after two drones were spotted near the airfield. The disruption affected at least 120,000 people.<\/p>\n
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After a boom in drone sales, unmanned aerial vehicles have become a growing menace at airports across the world.<\/p>\n
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In Britain, the number of near misses between private drones and aircraft more than tripled between 2015 and 2017, with 92 incidents recorded last year.<\/p>\n
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Flying drones within 1 km (0.6 mile) of a British airport boundary is punishable by five years in prison.<\/p>\n
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The drone sightings caused misery for tens of thousands of travelers who were stranded at Gatwick, many sleeping on the floor as they searched for alternative routes to holidays and Christmas family gatherings.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThere\u2019s no evidence that it is terror-related in the conventional sense,\u201d Grayling said. \u201cBut it\u2019s clearly a kind of disruptive activity that we\u2019ve not seen before. This kind of incident is unprecedented anywhere in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
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He said it was uncertain how many drones were involved but it appeared to be more than one.<\/p>\n
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\u201cIt\u2019s thought to be a small number of drones in the plural,\u201d Grayling said. \u201cIt certainly wasn\u2019t a lot, it was the same small number of drones seen many times.\u201d<\/p>\n
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It was not immediately clear what the financial impact would be on the main airlines operating from Gatwick including easyJet, British Airways and Norwegian.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
London’s Gatwick Airport reopened on Friday after a saboteur wrought 36 hours of travel chaos for over a hundred thousand Christmas travelers by using a drone to play cat-and-mouse with police snipers and the army. After the biggest disruption at Gatwick, Britain’s second busiest airport, since a volcanic ash cloud in 2010, Gatwick said 700 planes were due to take off on Friday, although there would still be delays and cancellations. Britain deployed unidentified military technology to guard the airport against what Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said were<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":16727,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16728,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16726\/revisions\/16728"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}