Flight Risk: Drones Near JFK Highlight Increasing Safety Concern
Drones are an increasing problem for airplanes; even if they’re flown with no malicious intent, they can still get in the way and cause damage. (Photo: iStock)
The scariest thing you can imagine seeing outside your airplane window is another flying object. It’s the stuff of Twilight Zone episodes. It’s also what happened this weekend at JFK airport in New York. Three times.
On Sunday, a pilot of a Shuttle America flight to Richmond, Virginia, saw a drone near the left side of his aircraft. This was the third drone sighting near JFK in three days. The first happened on Friday July 31 around 2:30 p.m., when the pilot of JetBlue Flight 18234 reported seeing a drone as the plane (on its way back from Haiti) approached the airport. Later that same day, around 5 p.m., Delta Flight 407 from Orlando spotted another one. Both report that the drones were within 100 feet of their aircraft.
The owners of the drones have not been identified yet — nor their reasons for flying them. The Delta incident took place near Floyd Bennett Field in New York’s Gateway National Recreation Area. A park ranger told CNN that many aviation enthusiasts fly radio-controlled gadgets in the park, and that there is a specific area where members of an aviation club are allowed to fly their own small craft, if they have a permit.
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Current law prohibits drones from flying above 400 feet when within five miles of an airport, but one of the JFK drones was sighted at 1,400 feet. This might not be so unusual: the FAA says it gets two reports a day about similar sightings. The proximity concerns aviation experts, who posit that a drone crash could be as dangerous for an airplane as a bird strike, like the one that forced hero pilot Sully Sullenberger to land US Airways 1549 in the Hudson River 2009.
Although the JFK drones did not seem to endanger the planes (all three flights landed without incident), the series of events has ramped up discussions among lawmakers and government agencies about terrorism and airspace safety. On Friday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin on drones, or Unmanned Aircraft Systems. It read, “The rising trend in UAS incidents within the National Airspace System will continue, as UAS gain wider appeal with recreational users and commercial applications. While many of these encounters are not malicious in nature, they underscore potential security vulnerabilities… that could be used by adversaries to leverage UAS as part of an attack.”
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While the Port Authority of New York and the FAA are investigating the incidents at JFK, New York Senator Chuck Schumer is calling for geofencing to be implemented around airports, a technology that uses GPS to create boundaries.
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