UK tabloid plays drone blame-game with jet ‘near-miss’ at 9.7K feet

Extending a recent series of media stories about close-call aircraft-UAV incidents that’ve been heavy on fear-generating speculation and lighter on supporting facts, a UK daily has raised alarms with its account of a Royal Air Force (RAF) jet used by VIP passengers that “came within 30ft of smashing into an illegally flown drone” – reasons for seriously questioning the threatening object identified by crew notwithstanding.

The report was published over the weekend by the Mail Online – the digital platform of Fleet Street’s Daily Mail tabloid, whose stories have never shied from using sensationalism (when not worse) to gin up reader interest. The recent piece used the news peg of a decidedly less alarmist report from the UK’s Airprox Board, which reviews all cases of reported near-miss incidents between aircraft – including those involving drones. The result was the paper’s evocation of midair disaster averted by the space of a…