"powers"
"Police will also have the power to order drone pilots to land their craft on request and hand over information such as names, addresses, insurance details and copies of licences"
Whoopy doo. Meaningless without the power to find the pilot in the first place.
I fly a paraglider, so I read the AirProx reports fairly regularly. Drone encounters are getting more and more frequent, and every single airprox report contains the line "The drone pilot was not traced", or similar. Almost all the cases I've heard of drone operators actually being traced (and there are very few) are ones where the idiot put the video on Youtube or similar. A minimum amount of discretion and it's simply impossible to find these people, so blustering about what you're going to do with them when you do is so much hot air.
It gets worse. Right now, the drones of concern (the ones that exist, that is...) are flown line-of-sight or FPV for shits-n-giggles by pranksters. In principle at least, a lucky cop could nab one of these idiots by catching them in the act or possibly following the drone back to the owner. However, if you really wanted to screw up an airport, it would be trivial to build a relatively cheap autonomous drone that you have no intention of retrieving, and simply launch it from the back of a van, have it go loiter visibly over the middle of the runway at the airport for ten or twenty minutes, then either land at a different, pre-arranged spot or for even less risk simply ditch itself in a nearby lake/pond/river. Chances of plod tracing the pilot when there is no pilot? And when the drone isn't heading back to the launch point and the builder/launcher has no intention to retrieve it? Nil.
If this is a power-grab by police, it's had the (presumably unintended) side-effect of demonstrating that it's possible to completely paralyse an airport for days for fairly little cost, zero need for risky things like explosives or guns, zero risk of injury and negligible risk of capture. Well done lads.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
