Examining public-facing statements on airport websites related to unmanned aircraft

This study examines the public-facing statements that can be found on airport websites related to unmanned aircraft (UA). Data was extracted via manual web scraping from 288 different airports’ official websites across 69 different countries. To be selected, airports had to be one of the 100 busiest airports in terms of passenger numbers in 2017, and/or be one of the IATA slot coordinated and facilitated airports as at 10 November 2020. Manual web scraping was completed by using Google site searches for the keywords “unmanned”, “drone”, and “remotely piloted”. Phrases, sentences and paragraphs containing these keywords were collated for each airport and then thematic analysis was undertaken to identify themes within the data. Surprisingly, this study finds that 143 (49.65%) of the airports have no mention of the keywords on their websites. For those that did have statements, thematic analysis revealed 20 themes, of which the largest three were regulation, ensuring compliance, and enforcement (38.54%, 29.17%, and 25.35% of airports, respectively). There were significant differences in the number of statements overall and within specific themes based upon airport location, however, there were no statistically significant differences based upon how many passengers the airport handles.