Masked Sabs Fly Drone Inside East Midlands Airport Restriction Zone
On 2 May, members of Nottingham Hunt Sabs, West Yorkshire Hunt Sabs and South Northants Hunt Sabs were active in the countryside near Kings Newton, where the Dove Valley hunt was meeting that day. According to a source familiar with the day's movements, the saboteurs were masked, their faces deliberately concealed, and were parked across fields from Lodge Farm where they were largely hidden from the road. At some point during the morning, they put a drone in the air, placing it well inside the Flight Restriction Zone that surrounds East Midlands Airport, one of the country's busiest cargo and passenger hubs.
The drone's launch point has yet to be pinned down, but the possibilities under discussion include a caravan storage site on Trent Lane, the lanes by the Donington Hotel and the village of Kings Newton itself, all within 5km of the airport. It is against the law to fly a drone within 5km of any UK airport without specific permission from air traffic control. Masked saboteurs from the group were seen at several of these points across the course of the morning, all sitting inside the airport's restricted airspace.
The Civil Aviation Authority is understood to have been notified, and there is a clear local precedent for what happens when this rule is broken. In 2022, drone activity by attendees at Download Festival, held at Donington Park next door to the airport, closed East Midlands' airspace at least four times across a single weekend, forced one runway to shut, and diverted six passenger flights and two cargo flights to Leeds and Manchester. The airport's managing director, Clare James, said at the time, "It beggars belief that someone would do this." A year later, in 2023, Derbyshire Police's counter-drone officers detected an amateur pilot who was attempting to film aerial footage of the festival. He was fined nearly £1,500 in court.
This isn’t the first time members of the hunt sabotage movement have been caught breaking drone law in recent months. In January, Anthony Robinson of Cheshire Monitors was reportedly stopped by police at Cholmondeley Park in Cheshire after allegedly flying his drone out of sight and over private property. He was unable to produce a valid drone licence when challenged by officers and was asked to leave the estate. UK drone rules require pilots to keep the aircraft within visual line of sight, to fly no higher than 120 metres, and to hold the appropriate registration.
Robinson, who in September 2025 was handed a 10-week suspended prison sentence at Wrexham Magistrates' Court for harassing an 18-year-old hunt member, was reportedly in breach of two of those three requirements on the day.
In the Download cases, the people involved were music fans with cameras. In Cholmondeley, it was a saboteur with a track record of harassment and assault who could not produce the paperwork to prove he was flying lawfully. At East Midlands on 2 May, it was masked individuals who had taken active steps to hide who they were, operating a drone in the protected airspace of an international airport, with the country on a heightened terror alert.
