London's Gatwick Airport has been closed since 9 p.m. Wednesday local time -- bar a brief reprieve of 45 minutes early Thursday -- after drones were spotted near the airfield. The latest drone sighting was more than 24 hours after the first, leaving hundreds of flights grounded. As of Friday morning, the airport is still non-operational.
Thousands of people are stranded at the airport, with 110,000 passengers on 760 flights due to arrive or depart Thursday. Many more were due on Friday, some of the 2.6 million people Gatwick was expected to handle over the Christmas-New Year period.
Passengers due to land at Gatwick were instead arriving in Manchester, Luton or Heathrow in the UK, or even as far afield as Paris and Amsterdam. According to the BBC, one flight from New York to Gatwick ended up landing at Doncaster Sheffield Airport, sparking amusement online from locals imagining Americans exploring rural Yorkshire.
"Regrettably we are still not in a position to say when it will be safe to reopen the airport. As soon as we can we will," Gatwick CEO Stewart Wingate said Thursday evening.
What's being done?
Sussex Police are leading the hunt to find the drone operator or operators, with 20 units from two forces deployed as of Thursday evening.
However more than 24 hours of searching has yet to turn up any leads, with Sussex Police Superintendent Justin Burtenshaw saying "each time we believe we get close to the operator, the drone disappears; when we look to reopen the airfield, the drone reappears."
The Ministry of Defence said specialist equipment had been deployed to assist Sussex Police in their efforts.
An emergency meeting has also been called at Whitehall, as the government tries to come up with a response to the crisis if the perpetrators cannot be found.
The BBC reported Friday that police are considering shooting the drone down, a "tactical option" previously ruled out over concerns for stray bullets.
Sussex Police spokesman Jason Tingley said the force would "do what we can to take that drone out of the sky."
How many people are affected?
At Gatwick itself -- which does not usually operate overnight -- passengers described scenes of "total chaos," with staff unable to offer much information.
Eddie Boyes, who was due to fly to Odessa in Ukraine, was stuck at the terminal with his wife and four-year-old son for nine hours. He told CNN they had received "no information from the airport -- any information I have managed to get has been from social media.
"We have been given food vouchers totaling £30 ($38), offered a hotel room initially but very shortly afterwards this was retracted.
"People are sleeping on the floor in south terminal."
Passengers due to fly to Gatwick have ended up stranded all over the world, with some tweeting about waiting to hear if they can fly to the UK from as far afield as Taiwan and Las Vegas.
Who's behind this?
Sussex Police said the disruption was deliberate, but unlikely to be terror related. Beyond that, the motivations of the perpetrator or perpetrators remain unclear.
While some UK media has reported that environmental protesters may be behind the incident, no group has come forward to claim responsibility, nor has any manifesto or explanation been released.
According to the Guardian, groups including Extinction Rebellion -- which has previously carried out direct action to highlight the pressing need to tackle climate change -- have denied involvement in the Gatwick incident.
What appears clear is that the perpetrators were well prepared. Police said the drone or drones being used were of "industrial specification."
"Our working assumption is it's larger than what someone might buy online -- we think it may have been adapted and developed. We're working through CCTV footage and trying to identify the make and model," Sussex Police spokesman Jason Tingley said Thursday.
Lewis Whyld, a CNN drone operator and photojournalist, said the drone was likely not an off-the-shelf model, but something bigger or more complex, perhaps expertly homemade.
He added that drones can have huge ranges, with some of the more powerful ones controlled from up to 10 miles (16 kilometers) away.
Drones have limited battery power, however, suggesting more than one is being used over Gatwick.
What will happen to the perpetrators?
If and when the people behind the disruption are caught, they could face up to five years in prison for endangering the safety of an aircraft.
"The people who were involved should face the maximum possible custodial sentence for the damage they have done," Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said.
Transport and aviation bodies have called for the laws on drone use to be tightened in the wake of the incident, with pilots union Balpa saying an exclusion zone around airports should be extended from 1 kilometer to 5 kilometers (3 miles).
"It is now obvious that that must happen urgently. This incident also reinforces the need for registration and licensing of operators so that the police can track and trace drones," spokesman Brian Strutton said.
Opposition lawmakers criticized Grayling for not acting on this issue earlier. Shadow aviation minister Karl Turner told the BBC "the Government should have brought this legislation forward, it's been an abject failure and I blame Chris Grayling."
In his statement Thursday, Gatwick CEO Wingate said "these events obviously highlight a wider strategic challenge for aviation in this country which we need to address together with speed."
"It cannot be right that drones can close a vital part of our national infrastructure in this way. This is obviously a relatively new technology and we need to think through together the right solutions to make sure it cannot happen again," he added.
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