On 8th August 2019 Simon Dale from Airprox Reality Check met with Steve Forward from the UK Airprox Board. The meeting was positive and productive.
Steve Forward accepted our point that the way the drone airprox reports are presented makes them appear like fully proven government reports, when in fact they are not. (They are raw, eyewitness reports which Steve described as “fuzzy”).
This leads the media to write things like ‘A report by the UK Airprox Board, the body responsible for investigating near misses in UK airspace, found that an airliner carrying up to X people came within Y ft of a drone‘. (And if it’s a tabloid they will add some words like ‘disaster’, ‘catastrophe’, etc).
Steve agreed to change the wording from ‘The drone was…‘ to ‘The reported drone was…‘ and that change will happen from the July reports.
Steve also agreed to send Simon the reports for comment one week before they are published.
We look forward to working together to further improve the way Drone airprox reports are published (and collected and collated too). We will next meet Steve Forward on 19th September.