The Heathrow drone plan is a protest too far – even for Extinction Rebellion

Shutting down Europe’s busiest airport should be a walk in the park: that is the view of the Heathrow Pause group of climate activists.

Starting at 3am on 13 September, they plan to fly what they describe as “toy drones” within the 5km exclusion zone established by the Civil Aviation Authority.

The protestors say they will tell Heathrow an hour in advance that, for example, “a drone might be flown at around head height in a public park in West Drayton” – a suburb just north of the airport.

But Extinction Rebellion, from which Heathrow Pause has splintered, is distancing itself from the move. Since Extinction Rebellion itself floated the idea earlier this year, the protest movement has clearly had second thoughts, saying it “does not support an action at Heathrow as designed at this time”.

Stopping buses crossing Waterloo Bridge, Parliament Square and Oxford Circus while the Metropolitan Police stood and watched generated plenty of publicity for the climate change protestors. While hundreds of thousands of Londoners were inconvenienced by the protests, there was evidently a lot of support.

But as soon as a group of schoolchildren were dispatched to Heathrow airport to block traffic, the mood changed. Vanloads of police from as far away as South Wales were drafted in to prevent a shutdown.

The heavy response was partly because Heathrow is seen as a vital piece of national infrastructure – which, for campaigners concerned about the environmental damage caused by aviation, makes it a prime target. But the authorities know that Europe’s biggest airport is also a prime prospective target for terrorists.

Heathrow Pause insists: “We are committed to taking every possible step to ensure nobody is hurt or endangered, and have put stringent safety measures and protocols in place regarding the use of drones, to guarantee the action complies with our objectives and concerns.”

But there is alarm that a peaceful protest aimed at halting flights could be exploited by a terror group.

Letting fly a “swarm” of drones near Heathrow could divert resources away from policing the airport perimeter. And an event supposed to involve only “toy” drones could be used as cover for something far more sinister.

How, though, could the authorities hope to close down a mass drone attack when the person (or people) behind the 33-hour closure of Gatwick just before Christmas 2018 has yet to be found?

The perpetrator of that travel-wrecking episode may have been an environmentalist, but he or she was professional and sophisticated. The Heathrow Pause protest looks like being neither.

If drones do get off the ground in one of the open spaces around the airport at 3am on Friday 13 September, I do not expect them still to be flying by the time the first flight from the Far East touches down at Heathrow 90 minutes later.