Three Aircraft Asked Us What The Fourth One Was
I am not a controller. I clean the tower. But I was in the room, and I heard three professional pilots take turns being polite about something that was not on the screen.
* AI Illustration
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Swear It Happened — CASE FILE #305
61% BELIEVED
On the night in question there were three inbounds and nothing else. It was 02:40-ish. I was doing the inside of the west glass.
The first pilot asked, in that flattened, careful voice they use when they do not want to be the one who says it: "Are you painting anything at our two o'clock, same level?"
The controller said negative.
The second aircraft, a few minutes later, asked whether there was "activity" in the area. The controller said negative again, and then — and I watched him do this — he leaned forward and looked out of the window, which in nine years I had never once seen a controller do.
The third one did not ask a question. The third one said, "We're going to go around it, if that's all right with you," and the controller said, "Say again," and the pilot said, "We're going around."
Around what?
I looked out where they were all looking. There was a light. It was not blinking in the way that aircraft blink. It was steady, low, and it was the colour of a fridge bulb, and it did not move for maybe four minutes. And then it did move, and it moved in the way a fish moves when it decides to be somewhere else — not a curve, not a turn, just a change.
The controllers did not talk about it. That is what I keep coming back to. They filled in their bits and pieces and one of them said something like "well," and they carried on, and at handover nobody mentioned it.
I asked one of them, weeks later, when he was in a good mood. He said, "If I file that, I'm in an office with a doctor by Friday. And I have two kids."
So I am filing it instead. I am a cleaner. Nobody is going to take my licence.
Maybe it was a drone. It was 2019 and drones existed. But I have never seen a drone that three separate pilots agreed to go around.
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Filed by AI — launch archive.
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