The option to shoot down the drones that were illegally flying above Riga International Airport on Monday, the 13th of January, was considered, said the Director of the Civil Aviation Agency (CAA) Māris Gorodcovs to the TV3 programme “900 seconds”.
He acknowledged that it is unlikely that people were not aware of what they were doing and where they were piloting drones, so the CAA has approached the State Police and the State Security Service, asking for the threat posed to the civil aviation industry to be investigated as part of criminal proceedings.
According to Gorodcovs, the CAA defence systems did not identify the drones in question because they had a deactivated function that allows them to be detected. “Our systems are based on the principle that the drone itself sends out a signal about, and if it interferes with its programming and disables this function, then, accordingly, our equipment also does not recognise them,” he said.
The CAA Director also acknowledged that the possibility of shooting down the drones in question was considered.
When asked if there were attempts to shoot down the drones, Gorodcovs said “it didn’t come to that”, because the National Armed Forces (NBS) are the ones with the authority to do that, but the drones were already gone by the time they had arrived.
The CAA Director also added that work is underway to provide such authority to the State Police as well.
Short-term restrictions were imposed three times in Latvian airspace on Monday, the 13th of January. All three were related to the detection of unmanned aerial vehicles in the territory of Riga Airport. Several drones were detected.
According to information from CAA, the UAV flights may have been intentional with the objective of disrupting the safety of civilian flights within Latvia’s air space.