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Langen (dpa) - In German airspace up to and including November, fewer dangerous drones were on the move than in the previous year.
In the eleven months, 90 obstacles to regular air traffic were registered, as the German Air Traffic Control (DFS) reported on Wednesday in Langen near Frankfurt on request.
At the same time last year there were already 120 incidents, most of which are reported by pilots of commercial aircraft and air traffic controllers.
In the record year of 2018, 143 dangerous drones were sighted.
Around 80 percent of the disabilities occurred in the vicinity of large commercial airports, which had to be closed in several cases for safety reasons.
The corona shutdown with significantly fewer passenger flights had positive consequences here, because after numerous drone cases in the first quarter, significantly fewer unmanned flying objects were sighted in the dangerous zones in spring and summer than in previous years.
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Air traffic control already assumes that regular air traffic will be hindered during a sighting because controllers and pilots could be distracted.
The by far most cases were again at the largest German airport in Frankfurt with 24. Hamburg followed with ten as well as Cologne-Bonn and Berlin-Tegel with eight cases each.
In Germany, drone flights are prohibited near the take-off and landing areas of airports - a distance of at least 1.5 kilometers must be maintained.
Drone flights at airports are prosecuted.
They are legally considered a dangerous interference with air traffic and are punishable by imprisonment of up to ten years.
Air traffic control has tested systems in Munich and Frankfurt in the current year to automatically detect drones.
German Air Traffic Control
German air traffic control on the rules for drone flights