The drone problem could be just beginning

We’ve seen over the last 48 hours the disruption that drones can cause – and frankly it’s surprising it’s taken this long for it to happen. The UK Airprox Board, which monitors air safety, says these incidents are on the rise: from 29 in 2015, to 71 in 2016, and 92 last year. Among those recorded are serious incidents like near misses with commercial aircrafts.

This is largely because drones are becoming increasingly common. Having matured as a technology in the last decade or so, one unintended consequence of the mobile phone explosion making computer components smaller, cheaper and more powerful is that we’ve also made possible a world where these small, unmanned aerial vehicles are affordable to consumers, and genuinely useful or transformative for a wide range of commercial and industrial applications.

So what can be done about it? And why could it be taking the authorities at Gatwick so long to get things back to normal? The big problem is that drones are almost uniquely hard to detect and disable.