New York, the complaint of an Alitalia pilot: “We crossed a drone on the airport”

The American Civil Aviation Authority (FAA) is verifying the assertion of an Alitalia pilot that when it was approaching JFK international airport in New York yesterday, it saw a drone flying over the area.

According to ABC News, the pilot said he saw a “small unmanned or remote-controlled aircraft” fly four or five miles south-east of the John F. Kennedy international airport.

The pilot immediately communicated the sighting to the control tower. “We saw a drone, a drone aircraft,” he said, while not long after another pilot made a similar sighting.

In addition to the FAA, according to which the drone was flying at about 1,500 feet and the Alitalia pilot did not have to carry out any evasive maneuver before landing without problems, the FBI and the Joint Terror Task Force are now being dealt with. , says ABC News again. The pilot described it as about a meter long, an FBI spokesman explained.

In the records of LiveATC.net, a website that publishes communications related to air traffic, we hear the pilot say: “We saw a drone, a drone aircraft”. It is not clear what it was and it must be considered that there are small remote-controlled aircraft that are flown by amateurs. If it had been a vehicle of this type, the owner would have violated the rules for its use, in particular in relation to the permitted altitude.

(05 March 2013)