A German airliner heading into Poland’s Warsaw Chopin Airport from Munich nearly crashed into what appeared to be a drone Monday afternoon.
The Associated Press reported that a Lufthansa plane about three miles away from the international airport narrowly avoided a collision with what spokesman for the Warsaw airport Przemyslaw Przybylski presumed to be a drone passing within 300 feet of the aircraft.
Police are currently investigating the incident to determine the drone’s operator, as Polish regulations prohibit the unmanned flying aircrafts from cruising within the 12-mile radius surrounding most airports.
Despite the ban, Przybylski insisted that airport officials cannot check if "some idiot does not suddenly decide to fly a drone in front of a landing plane."
Drones, which are operated by remote control, have the potential to become wedged in a plane’s engine, causing it to stall. A collision with a drone could also do significant damage to a plane’s flight equipment. The aircrafts are cheap and easy to purchase in Poland.
Bettina Rittberger, a spokesman for Lufthansa, was not ready to confirm whether or not the object was, in fact, a drone, instead describing it as "a black object [that] appeared on the right side of the plane" at an altitude of 2,500 feet.
Rittberger said the flight crew "supposed that this object could be a drone."
After the incident, Polish Air Navigation Services Agency official Mikolaj Karpinski said the aircraft’s pilots reported the drone to air traffic controllers who then rerouted the plane and more than 20 others.
The incident recalls a similar near collision in May near LaGuardia Airport in New York City.
A commercial airliner was forced to climb 200 feet in order to avoid crashing into a drone at a height of 2,700 feet over Prospect Park in Brooklyn.