Airport reopens after disruption that saw about 800 flights cancelled, affecting 120,000 people
The first flights have resumed at Gatwick airport after a series of drone sightings caused days of disruption, affecting more than 100,000 passengers.
Airlines warned customers to continue to check their flight’s status on Friday morning as the airport worked to “introduce a limited number of flights over the coming hours”.
The runway had remained closed throughout Thursday night, forcing passengers to search for accommodation or shelter at the airport, and bringing demands for new aviation regulations to tackle the threat.
The airport’s chief operating officer, Chris Woodroofe, said 120,000 passengers’ flights had been disrupted by the incident.
On Thursday night police said there had been more than 50 sightings of the drone in 24 hours from when the runway was first closed. Night-flight restrictions had been lifted at other airports, so “more planes could get into and out of the country”, the transport secretary, Chris Grayling said.
“This is clearly a very serious ongoing incident in which substantial drones have been used to bring about the temporary closure of a major international airport,” he said.
“The people who were involved should face the maximum possible custodial sentence for the damage they have done. The government is doing everything it can to support Sussex police.”
Shooting down the drone was being considered as a “tactical option” after other strategies to stop it had failed.
Amid disbelief that the drone incident could be enough to bring one of the UK’s key airports to a standstill, the perpetrator or perpetrators eluded a search conducted by 20 units from two police forces in the surrounding area. Meanwhile, an emergency Whitehall meeting was called to decide on a response to the ongoing crisis and the airport warned that the disruption could mean further cancellations on Friday.
At least two drones, described as “substantial” by the government, “commercial” by the transport secretary, and “industrial” by police, were spotted repeatedly by staff in and around the airport perimeter from Wednesday night.Sussex police said they believed the incident was a deliberate attempt to disrupt the airport’s operations, but unlikely to be terror-related. However, despite increasingly urgent demands for information on the circumstances of the incident, the location, motive or identity of the drones’ operators remained unknown.
Det Ch Supt Jason Tingley from Sussex police said: “We don’t know what the drone specification is. Our working assumption is it’s larger than what someone might buy online, we think it may have been adapted and developed. We’re working through CCTV footage and trying to identify the make and model.”
With any airborne collision posing a serious risk to the safety of an aircraft, the police’s search for the operators became increasingly urgent. But Gatwick’s policing commander, Justin Burtenshaw, told the BBC it was a painstaking process because the bigger the drone the further away the operator could be. “Each time we believe we get close to the operator, the drone disappears,” he said.
Aviation bodies and politicians demanded tougher laws on drone use as the vulnerability of Britain’s second biggest airport became apparent.
About 800 flights have been cancelled so far since the first reports of drones at 9.03pm on Wednesday. The runway briefly reopened at 3.01am on Thursday morning but closed 45 minutes later after a further drone sighting.
Some passengers reported being stuck on the tarmac for hours, while inbound flights were diverted to alternative airports as far away as Amsterdam and Paris.
As the time of the airport’s reopening crept later and later and the number of flights cancelled continued to soar, Gatwick condemned an act that it said was designed to cause “maximum disruption in the run-up to Christmas”. It was not clear by evening when normal service would resume. Ryanair said all its scheduled services to and from Gatwick on Friday would operate from Stansted.
The transport secretary, Chris Grayling, who ordered night flying restrictions to be lifted across other airports “so that more planes can get into and out of the country”, said that the perpetrators should face a heavy custodial sentence.
No group has claimed responsibility. Climate protesters including Extinction Rebellion, which have been engaged in direct action to highlight climate change, denied involvement.
EasyJet, which operates almost half of all flights at the Sussex airport, announced at 5pm that it was cancelling all remaining flights on Thursday. It warned passengers not to travel to Gatwick on Friday until checking the status of the flight, adding: “At this stage there is no indication of when the airport might re-open ... We expect disruption to continue into tomorrow.”
Some customers have been rebooked on flights from other airports, while others were put up in hotels. However, many thousands remained at the airport terminals waiting for information as the reopening was repeatedly postponed by hours throughout the morning and early afternoon.
The uncertainty resulted in many having a fruitless wait at Gatwick. Zak Morgan, 20, a computer science student at UCL, boarded a flight to Paris on 8.45pm on Wednesday, but passengers were disembarked after several hours waiting on the tarmac. His journey was rescheduled, via Barcelona, departing at 3pm on Thursday, but cancelled again. “Every hour they have been changing the flight times, so instead of saying go home, they’ve been telling us to stay,” Morgan said.
Another passenger, Mamosta Abdulla, was due to fly to Iraq on Wednesday evening before getting stuck on the plane waiting to take off for four hours. Passengers were given a voucher for food, he said, but were left to sleep “in a freezing place on uncomfortable chairs”. He added: “We are in Iraq with bombs going off nearby and the plane still lands. But here some drones have shut down the airport.”
The incident highlighted the authorities’ inability to stop illegal drones flying. Police said shooting down the drone might be possible. Tingley said: “One of the options is to use firearms officers if that presents itself – they have been out on the ground today and that’s a consideration … There are a number of factors in terms of range, the height of the drone and the likely impact on us firing at the drone but that is a tactical option.” The defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, said that the military was offering assistance, but did not specify how.
The pilots union Balpa, which has been campaigning for tougher laws after an increasing number of near misses between drones and commercial aircraft, called to extend the 1km drone exclusion zone around airports – introduced this year – to 5km (3 miles). Brian Strutton, general secretary, said: “It is now obvious that that must happen urgently. This incident also reinforces the need for registration and licensing of operators so that the police can track and trace drones.”
A baby on a small Pacific island has become the first person given a vaccine delivered by a commercial drone.
Unicef arranged for the drone to be flown some 40km (25 miles) across rugged mountains in Vanuatu that otherwise take hours to cross.
About 20% of children in Vanuatu don't receive important vaccinations because the supply is too difficult.
The UN children's organisation hopes that drone delivery will in future be of vital importance in remote areas.
"Today's small flight by drone is a big leap for global health," Unicef executive director Henrietta Fore said.
"With the world still struggling to immunize the hardest to reach children, drone technologies can be a game changer for bridging that last mile to reach every child."
While drones have been used before to deliver medicine, Unicef says this was the first time globally that a country had contracted a commercial drone company to get vaccines to remote areas.
Two companies competed for the project on Vanuatu, and it was Australia's Swoop Aero that won the bid after successful trials earlier this month.
Its drone carried the vaccines in a styrofoam box with ice packs and a temperature logger to a remote village on the island of Erromango, from Dillon's Bay on the west of the island to Cook's Bay on the east.
The medicine was then used by local nurse Miriam Nampil to vaccinate 13 children and five pregnant women.
Without the drone, Cook's Bay is only accessible on foot or by boat - both those options take hours compared to the 25 minutes it took for the drone to reach the village.
Medical supplies also have to be kept at a cold temperature.
"It's extremely hard to carry ice boxes to keep the vaccines cool while walking across rivers, mountains, through the rain, across rocky ledges," Ms Nampil said.
"As the journey is often long and difficult, I can only go there once a month to vaccinate children. But now, with these drones, we can hope to reach many more children in the remotest areas of the island."
1. The thing I like about our way of life is the fact that you can be yourself.
2. Yeah, but what concerns me is that people are losing touch with their roots.
3. In fact, one thing that frustrates me is the lack of social mobility.
4. It's not the government that should be doing / should do something, It's people's attitudes that need to change.
5. (The) One thing that gives me hope is the fact that young people don't seem all that interested in peoples's backgrounds.
6. All they want to do is go shopping.
In post-Taliban Afghanistan, the women's football team was hailed globally as a symbol of the new freedoms enjoyed by the country's women.
But now one of Afghanistan's top sports officials has admitted that female footballers - who defied hard-liners and militants by daring to take to the field in the first place - have been sexually abused. And it's not only football - he admitted the problem extends to other sports too.
Most women athletes are too frightened to speak publicly about alleged abuse by coaches and sporting officials. But several have now disclosed privately to the BBC what they have experienced.
The scandal has exploded in the last few days. On Friday, football's governing body Fifa said it was investigating claims made by women in the national football squad. The Afghan Attorney General's Office then announced its own investigation too.
On Monday, President Ashraf Ghani addressed the allegations head on, saying they were "shocking to all Afghans".
"Even if mere allegations cause our people to stop sending their sons and daughters to sports, we need to act immediately and comprehensively," he said.
Hummel, a Danish sportswear company, has pulled sponsorship of the Afghan Football Federation (AFF), which is at the heart of the allegations.
Sayed Alireza Aqazada, the secretary general of the federation, whose president Keramuddin Karim is among the accused, repeated previous denials. The women's stories aren't true, he said. No sexual harassment had ever been carried out against any female player.
But the furore is showing no signs of abating. Questions were asked in both houses of Afghanistan's parliament on Monday. Then Hafizullah Rahimi, the head of Afghanistan's Olympic committee, made a surprising statement to reporters in Kabul.
"Sadly, these sorts of concerns have reached us," he said. "Sexual abuse does exist, not only within the Football Federation but in other sports federations as well. We have to fight it."
It's the first formal acknowledgement that persistent allegations made by former members of the women's national football team of rampant abuse by male coaches and others in positions of power may be credible.
Many of the allegations have come from Khalida Popal, a former captain of the Afghan women's national football team who also served as its programme director. She risked her life as a teenager to play football in secret - when Afghanistan was still under Taliban rule. In order not to get caught she and her friends played in silence so the Taliban guards on the other side of the school wall wouldn't hear them.
Speaking to the BBC from Denmark, where she has lived since 2011, after fleeing death threats in Afghanistan, she said she had witnessed first-hand widespread physical and sexual abuse of girls and young women by coaches and federation officials. Girls complained to her about a range of abuse, from rape to sexual touching and harassment.
She says she almost lost hope of anything being done about it after she started to document abuse by two coaches. She took her findings to the Afghan Football Federation several years ago.
"Instead of removing them or punishing them", she said, "they were promoted."
Some of the key culprits, she claims, are powerful figures in Afghanistan with close links to government. Officials in the federation would tell players that they could get them on the team list and give them money if they had sex with them, she said.
The BBC has spoken to several young women still living in Afghanistan - including some athletes from sports other than football - who tell similar stories of sexual harassment and bullying. They say the abuse often happened when they were competing to get a place in the national team or for the chance to train or play overseas. One says she was told: "Show me how beautiful you are because only beautiful girls will get on the team."
She says she almost lost hope of anything being done about it after she started to document abuse by two coaches. She took her findings to the Afghan Football Federation several years ago.
"Instead of removing them or punishing them", she said, "they were promoted."
Some of the key culprits, she claims, are powerful figures in Afghanistan with close links to government. Officials in the federation would tell players that they could get them on the team list and give them money if they had sex with them, she said.
The BBC has spoken to several young women still living in Afghanistan - including some athletes from sports other than football - who tell similar stories of sexual harassment and bullying. They say the abuse often happened when they were competing to get a place in the national team or for the chance to train or play overseas. One says she was told: "Show me how beautiful you are because only beautiful girls will get on the team."
Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status. Human rights include the right to life and liberty, freedom from slavery and torture, freedom of opinion and expression, the right to work and education, and many more. Everyone is entitled to these rights, without discrimination.
Drafted by
representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions
of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General
Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 by General Assembly resolution
217 A (III) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all
nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be
universally protected. Since its adoption in 1948, the UDHR has been
translated into more than 501 languages – the most translated document in the world -
and has inspired the constitutions of many newly independent States and many
new democracies. The UDHR, together with the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights and its
two Optional Protocols (on the complaints procedure and on
the death penalty) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social
and Cultural Rights and its Optional Protocol, form the
so-called International Bill of Human Rights.
And here you can read the first 10 articles:
Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.
Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.
Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.
Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.
Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.
Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.
Government seeks to prioritise environment and end some of world’s worst traffic congestion
Luxembourg City, the capital of the small Grand Duchy, suffers from some of the worst traffic congestion in the world.
Fares on trains, trams and buses will be lifted next summer under the plans of the re-elected coalition government led by Xavier Bettel, who was sworn in for a second term as prime minister on Wednesday.
Bettel, whose Democratic party will form a government with the leftwing Socialist Workers’ party and the Greens, had vowed to prioritise the environment during the recent election campaign.
On top of the transport pledge, the new government is also considering legalising cannabis, and introducing two new public holidays.
Luxembourg City, the capital of the small Grand Duchy, suffers from some of the worst traffic congestion in the world.
It is home to about 110,000 people, but a further 400,000 commute into the city to work. A study suggested that drivers in the capital spent an average of 33 hours in traffic jams in 2016.
While the country as a whole has 600,000 inhabitants, nearly 200,000 people living in France, Belgium and Germany cross the border every day to work in Luxembourg.
Luxembourg has increasingly shown a progressive attitude to transport. This summer, the government brought in free transport for every child and young person under the age of 20. Secondary school students can use free shuttles between their institution and their home. Commuters need only pay €2 (£1.78) for up to two hours of travel, which in a country of just 999 sq miles (2,590 sq km) covers almost all journeys.
Now, from the start of 2020 all tickets will be abolished, saving on the collection of fares and the policing of ticket purchases.
The policy is yet to be fully thought through, however. A decision has yet to be taken on what to do about first- and second-class compartments on trains.
Bettel only just scraped back into government in the recent election. Opinion polls before October’s poll had indicated that the Christian Social People’s party (CSV) – led for 19 years by the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker – would end Bettel’s five years as prime minister.
The CSV, however, lost seats, while the Greens gained three seats. The result gave the coalition 31 seats in the 60-seat chamber.
The policy of the new government that has caused the most debate, however, has been that of legalising the purchase, possession and consumption of cannabis for recreational use.
