Father Responds After Confused Bystanders Threaten His Son’s Plane

A Utah father is urging the community to handle the mysterious drone sighting frenzy more delicately. He spoke out after social media commenters suggested shooting down what they thought was a drone, but was instead his son on a training flight.

Federal agencies have recently been under pressure due to the unusually high number of drone sightings across several states, though New Jersey and New York have caused the most significant concern. Despite over 5,000 reports having been sent in, only around 100 have led to actual probes.

The government seems to have no true explanation for the strange sightings, yet continues to assure the public that there is no threat to safety. Drone detection and tracking systems are on their way to military facilities to hopefully bring in some more information.

“We assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircrafts, helicopters, and even stars that were mistakenly reported as drones,” stated White House National Security spokesperson John Kirby.

This confusion is exactly what led to social media users accidentally threatening Toby Hayes’s son. It began with a community member posting a photo of a small aircraft and claiming it was a drone, quickly turning into a craze of commenters encouraging shooting it down.

Hayes and his wife recognized the aircraft as the one his son, a student pilot, was using to conduct a training flight over southeastern Idaho. They then spent hours responding to comments, saying: "This was a plane. This was a four-seater aircraft. This was our son."

"It's scary to think that people are talking about shooting planes down," Hayes expressed. "They're really just people flying and doing what they're doing for training, for work. It's a scary time."

As an alternative to assuming anything in the air is an unauthorized drone, Hayes suggested that individuals utilize sites like FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange. Both of these are popular, accessible resources that help identify aircraft overhead and could keep pilots from being threatened by gullible netizens.

FMI: www.faa.gov