A 47-year-old man and a 54-year-old woman from Crawley in West Sussex – just a few miles from the airport – are being held on suspicion of disrupting an airport after being arrested at 10pm on Friday.

The arrests were part of “ongoing investigations into the criminal use of drones which has severely disrupted flights in and out of Gatwick Airport”, Sussex Police said.

“We continue to urge the public, passengers and the wider community around Gatwick to be vigilant and support us by contacting us immediately if they believe they have any information that can help us in bringing those responsible to justice,” Superintendent James Collis said.

“The arrests we have made are a result of our determination to keep the public safe from harm. Every line of enquiry will remain open to us until we are confident that we have mitigated further threats to the safety of passengers.”

He added that police are deploying tactics to “build resilience to detect and mitigate further incursions from drones”.

Many flights are still being delayed after three days of disruption, which began at around 9pm on Wednesday night.

Hundreds of flights were grounded and more than 100,000 Christmas travellers were affected.

Services resumed on Friday morning but had to be temporarily suspended on Friday evening after another drone was spotted near the airfield just after 5pm. Flights resumed again on Friday night.

By Saturday, the airport’s timetables were slowly getting back to normal but long queues and some delays were still seen as airlines attempt to clear the backlog.

A Gatwick spokesman said: “Broadly, things are going in the right direction. By the end of the weekend, things should be back to normal.”

The airport had earlier said that military measures in place meant it was safe to fly.

Equipment deployed to stop further drone chaos is believed to be capable of jamming signals to the rogue devices as well as tracking them.

The Shorrock family from Oxford was hoping to travel to Austria for a skiing trip on Saturday.

As they waited in the departures queue, Vivienne Shorrock said she was “relieved” to have avoided the disruption earlier in the week.

But she described the possible loss of their skiing holiday as a “middle class problem”, adding: “In perspective some people have suffered real losses by not getting where they want to go to be with family.”

David Shorrock joked the drone drama was a “nice distraction from Brexit”.

The airport faced a total shutdown on Thursday and part of Wednesday night when drones repeatedly violated its perimeter.

Some passengers described freezing conditions as they slept on benches or on the airport floor.

Conservative peer Lord Ashcroft offered a £10,000 reward for information that led to the arrest and charge of the drone operator.

Gatwick is Britain’s second busiest airport and serves more than 43 million passengers a year.

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