Airprox Reality Check was formed as a response to the misrecording of drone airproxes in the UK, and the resulting economic and societal damage this is causing. The intention of Airprox Reality Check is that it will provide a necessary filtering mechanism to ensure that drone airprox reports are subject to proper scrutiny before being recorded. Only then will the drone airprox figures move towards being a reliable indicator.

The vast majority of drone airprox reports are simply a pilot reporting that he/she saw something: an eyewitness account. There is usually no other evidence. But eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable – considerable research has been done on this (see Studies section). Despite this, at present the UK Airprox Board simply records and publishes every drone airprox report received – which results in massively inflated figures, and a resulting massively inflated sense of the scale of the problem.