A 10ft drone came so close to colliding with a passenger jet that it covered the plane’s windscreen.
The Airbus A320 had just taken off from London‘s Heathrow Airport back in May and was at 9,000ft when the near-miss occurred, The Sun reports.
A report into the incident by investigation bod UK Airpox Board said: ‘Both the Captain and First Officer saw a bright white object pass overhead from the opposite direction.
‘It appeared to be approximately two-three metres in size at the very least.’
The report added: ‘It may have been larger as it filled a good proportion of the windshield.’
The report added that the aircraft was spotted on radar by air traffic controllers.
The in-flight incident investigation body was told a suspected drone had been spotted near London’s City Airport prior to the incident.
‘The Captain only saw the object for a second or two in peripheral vision so could not reliably comment on the shape. No markings were identified.’
The pilot stated that the object ‘went over us, probably within about 10m’.
FILE PHOTO: Drone flying in Hanworth Park in west London, as a British Airways 747 plane prepares to land at Heathrow Airport
It is not clear which airline was operating the aircraft.
It comes after a drone came within 30ft of colliding with a Boeing 737 airliner as it approached Gatwick Airport in April.
In a separate incident, a suspected drone came within 10ft of crashing into a British Airways passenger jet flying over London.
The plane, operated by the airline’s regional carrier BA Cityflyer, was travelling at 3,000ft four nautical miles north west of London City Airport, when pilots noticed an object with lights.
The crew of the Embraer 190, which can carry up to 98 passengers, reported spotting the object at 6.10pm on October 31 after climbing out of the east London airport on a route used for domestic services to Edinburgh and Glasgow.
While the incident was reported to police, the nature of the object was never formally identified.
According to a report filed by the UK Airprox Board, which monitors and analyses near misses, said that both pilots ‘instinctively flinched’ as the object came ‘extremely close’ to the aircraft.
The report concluded the incident meant there was a ‘definite risk of collision’ and or required ‘providence’, an instinctive pilot judgement in response to an emergency situation.
In recent years, pilots have warned of the risk of drones causing potentially catastrophic damage if sucked into a jet engine or smashing into a windscreen.
Drones can only be legally flown to a maximum of 400ft in height – more than eight times less than the altitude the aircraft was flying.
