A TAP flight, with 100 or more passengers on board, narrowly missed a drone on Wednesday evening as it was coming in to land at Lisbon’s Humberto Delgado airport.
The near collision was at 700 metres above the ground on a flight path taking the Airbus over the 25th April Bridge.
This is the second episode in Portugal in the past fortnight. On June 1st, a Transavia Boeing 737-800 that was coming in to land at Oporto’s Francisco Sá Carneiro airport, managed narrowly to avoid a collision with a drone. Disaster was averted due only to the pilot’s skill in taking evasive action at a height of just 450 metres.
The pilot of the TAP Airbus 319 from Milan to Lisbon reported the near miss as happening at around 21:00 as the aircraft was descending over the Alcântara area.
NAV Portugal, responsible for air traffic control, confirmed the incident in Lisbon.
After the June 1st drone incident in Oporto, the Portuguese Association of Unmanned Aircraft (APANT) again warned of the risks in flying drones near airports and the illegality of this practice.
The National Civil Aviation Authority confirmed the law prohibits flying drones above 120 metres above the ground, a measure that aims to "minimise interaction with general aviation." Drones also are banned from anywhere near an airport’s approach and take off areas.
This Lisbon near miss is the sixth known drone incident in 2017 in Portuguese airspace. Last year, there were 31 reports of illegal drone activity, most of them around Lisbon’s airport.