At about 5pm, Mitchell was parked at the end of the runway with a colleague when something caught his eye: a red and green light, hovering in the distance. This was it. He reported the drone to police, before jumping out of the car to start snapping. “I thought, we’ve got it, and the idiot flying it,” he said. “That was the money shot.”
But when he opened up the image on his computer, ready to send to his editors, he realised he’d made a mistake. The image did not show a drone. It was a helicopter hovering 10 miles away; between the darkness and the distance, his eyes had played a trick on him. “If I’m making a mistake – and I fly drones two or three times a week – then God help us, because others will have no idea,” he said. He called police to retract his reported sighting.
At 6pm, military trucks arrived at Gatwick with an anti-drone system designed for battlefield operation, and installed it on the roof of the south terminal. This system can track and disable drones; it works by jamming the radio frequency connecting the drone to its controller. At 9.30pm, Gatwick’s chief operating officer Chris Woodroofe announced that the airport would remain closed overnight because of new drone sightings. The military system was operational by around 10pm. It did not pick up a single thing.