Airport drone detection turns a pilot's report of a drone into facts an airport can act on: a confirmed track, the drone's position relative to approach and departure paths, and in many cases the location of the person flying it. With that picture, operations teams can make the hold-or-continue decision quickly and confidently, and police can respond to a location instead of a description. The goal is simple: keep flights moving safely.
This guide follows that path from the first sighting to the runway decision. For how a full system is composed and how coverage is designed across an airfield, see our companion guide to anti-drone systems for airports. At AirSight, we build drone detection for airports and the agencies that protect them.
The FAA says it receives more than 100 reports of drones near airports every month, and its public sightings records show the pace rising. Reports went from 319 in the first quarter of 2026 to 600 in the second. From July through September, the records list 568 reports, up from 531 in the same months of 2025, for a total of 1,487 in the first nine months of the year.
Behind those numbers are real operational moments. On September 17, the FAA paused departures at Reagan National Airport for about 20 minutes after two flight crews reported a drone near Runway 19, and ABC News reported it was unclear whether a drone was located. On October 8, federal prosecutors in Dallas announced an indictment alleging that a man flew a drone across an active runway at Dallas Love Field in June 2025 and into restricted airspace around DFW the following night. The FBI and the Federal Air Marshal Service investigated with help from the FAA. An indictment is an allegation, and the defendant is presumed innocent.
Each of these moments starts the same way: someone sees something. Detection is what turns that sighting into an answer.
Visual reports capture a fraction of the drone activity around an airport. When the TSA tested detection technology at Los Angeles International Airport in 2022, it said there had been about 90 visual drone sightings and roughly 5,200 technical detections within three miles of LAX since 2021. Sensors that run around the clock register far more activity than people ever report.
The reverse is true as well: a sighting without detection leaves an airport with a description and a decision to make. Gatwick learned this in December 2018, when reports of drones near the runway led to the disruption of more than 1,000 flights and 140,000 passengers. Responders had sighting reports but no way to track the drones. Detection closes that gap in both directions, revealing the activity no one reports and confirming or clearing the reports that do come in.
Detect. Radar senses drones by their physical return, including drones that transmit nothing, as our drone detection radar guide explains. Radio frequency sensors and Remote ID receivers pick up drones that do transmit, as covered in our RF drone detection guide.
Separate manned traffic. An airfield's sky is busy with airliners, helicopters, and general aviation. Correlating detections with ADS-B transponder data keeps manned aircraft out of the drone picture, as we describe in bringing manned aircraft and drone insights into one view.
Track and identify. The system holds a continuous position on the drone: altitude, heading, and flight path. For drones that broadcast under the FAA's Remote ID rules, it also receives an identifier and the control station location or, for add-on broadcast modules, the takeoff location.
Assess against the airfield. The track is placed against what matters: approach and departure corridors, runways, and the zones the airport has defined. A drone transiting well clear of the airfield and a drone holding near a final approach call for very different responses.
Decide. Operations, working with air traffic control, makes the hold-or-continue call with a live track on the screen rather than a description over the radio.
Respond and record. When pilots report drone activity, the FAA has said that controllers contact local law enforcement to try to locate the operator. Detection gives those officers a location to go to, and recorded tracks give the FAA and investigators a flight history to work from.
An illustrative example, not a real incident:
It is the evening arrival push. A crew on final approach radios that they may have seen a drone off the right side. Within seconds, the operations screen shows a single track east of the approach corridor, holding at low altitude and clear of the arrival path, with the drone's Remote ID and the operator's location attached. Operations confirms with air traffic control that arrivals can continue while the track is watched, airport police head to the operator's location, and the complete flight record is saved for the FAA. The report is resolved with facts, and the flights keep moving.
Airport operations get the information they need for confident hold-or-continue decisions.
Airport police get a location and a live track to respond to, rather than a description.
Security leadership gets the pattern over time: which days, which hours, which approach corridors, and which aircraft return. Our guide to drone monitoring covers turning that record into planning.
The FAA and investigators get a complete, timestamped flight history to support enforcement.
Every airfield is different, so strong programs start with the airfield itself: the runways and corridors that matter most, the neighborhoods where operators tend to launch, and the systems operations already relies on. From there, coverage is designed around the corridors, alerts are integrated into the tools teams already watch, and escalation is agreed before the first alert arrives. Our guide to anti-drone systems for airports covers system composition and coverage design in depth. You can also explore our page on drone detection for airports.
Publicly owned airports may also be able to fund detection through the FEMA Counter-UAS Grant Program. Applications run through each state's administrative agency, so an airport authority that is a unit of state or local government should check eligibility with its state.
Drones near airports are not going away, and the reports keep climbing. Airport drone detection gives operations the certainty to keep flights moving when the airspace is clear, the confidence to act fast when it is not, and a record that turns every incident into knowledge for the next one.
Ready to see your airfield's airspace clearly? Talk to our team about airport drone detection.
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