Lights in the night can be easy to misinterpret. Is it a shooting star, a satellite, a plane, or a drone? Not sure how to tell the difference? Here’s what you need to know in order to figure out if you’ve just spotted a drone or a plane.
Most of the time, if you head outside and see a light moving across the sky, it’s likely going to be hard to say definitively whether or not it was a plane or a drone. Usually, most people will just end up saying they saw a light in the sky. While that can leave room for interpretation—some might take it to mean you saw a UFO in the sky—others will pick up on what you mean.
One of the easiest ways to tell if something is a plane or a drone is to look at the type of light you see in the sky. For instance, airplanes and helicopters are typically required to have flashing lights and at least one red anti-collision light—though they often have two. They also usually have navigation lights, which are non-flashing red and green lights like those found on boats.
Some planes and helicopters will also have white strobe lights located on the tips of their wings, and bright landing lights that can be seen when they’re getting close to the ground. If you only see a single bright, anti-collision light that’s visible within three miles, then it is very likely you’re seeing a drone.
While drone owners are only required to have that one bright light on their drones, they do often add other lights to the body of their drones. However, because drones are much smaller than planes, those lights are usually much closer together. But that doesn’t really help tell the difference between a drone and a plane at night when you can’t tell how far lights are from each other.
Another thing to keep in mind is the sound that the object is making. If you’re close enough to hear it, a drone will make a higher-pitched buzzing noise, whereas jet engines and propellers found on planes are much louder. There are bigger drones that can be louder, though, like the mysterious drones seen over New Jersey recently, so the sound could still be hard to distinguish between from far away.
So, if the lights aren’t a clear differentiator between drones and planes, and you can’t tell the difference between the sound, what does that leave? The next thing to look at is how the light is moving across the sky. Planes and helicopters tend to move more smoothly in the air, with them following a stable trail across the sky. Drones, however, can pivot easily, reverse course, and even take on strange motions you might not expect.
Drones often operate well below the regulated 400-foot limit, so if something seems too close to the ground to be a plane, it’s probably a drone.
