Errant drone briefly shuts down D.C. airport

An unauthorized drone briefly shut down air traffic at the airport closest to the U.S. Capitol building Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration said — raising fresh questions about airports' ability to deal with drones that fly too close, without grinding traffic to a halt.

The unknown drone appeared near a runway at Washington, D.C.'s Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, shutting down air traffic for about 45 minutes — though the FAA initially advised aviation officials to “expect holding for the next 2 hours." The airport said that normal operations resumed by 2:15 p.m., but the FAA told POLITICO that some residual delays will likely continue.

No information has been made public about who might have been operating the drone or if it was neutralized or otherwise found. The FAA did say it had reported the incident to law enforcement.

The airport experienced 70 delays and five cancellations among incoming flights and 74 delays and five cancellations of outgoing flights as of about 3 p.m. Thursday but it's not clear how many of those were caused by the drone activity, and neither FAA nor the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which operates the airport, would provide information about how many flights may have been affected.

The context: The United States, for the most part, has avoided prolonged airport shutdowns due to unauthorized drones, but other countries have seen nightmare scenarios. Perhaps the most disruptive was a 2018 incident at London's Gatwick Airport, where drones near runways forced flights to be grounded for three days as officials searched for the culprits. Some 1,000 flights had to be canceled or diverted and airlines operating at the airport lost millions in the ordeal.

After that incident, U.S. officials began drawing up plans for how to mitigate drone threats at U.S. airports, eventually landing on empowering air marshals to use DOD counterdrone equipment. But years later, those plans are largely still in the formative stages — it wasn't until March 2021 that the FAA chose five airports to test out counterdrone technology. (Reagan National is not one of them.)

Authority is expiring: Federal law enforcement's authority to counter malicious drones expires in October, and federal agencies have been asking lawmakers to extend it. DHS acting Assistant Secretary Samantha Vinograd recently told Congress that TSA has reported nearly 2,000 drone sightings near U.S. airports since 2021. Pilots had to take “65 evasive actions” after drones came too close or disturbed aircraft, she said.

Oriana Pawlyk contributed to this report.