Here's a new threat for folks to get anxious about:
..."PILOT-OPTIONAL" AIRPLANE... Explorer Aircraft is no stranger to AirVenture, but the latest twist in its marketing efforts might raise an eyebrow or two. The Australian-based firm is pitching its big, powerful, bush-friendly single as a "pilot-optional" aircraft for military use. With a pilot, the Explorer is a 10- to 16-passenger workhorse that can get in and out of smaller airfields. Take the crew out of the equation and the company says it's an unmanned aerial vehicle that can fly as high as FL400 and accomplish a myriad of missions. While AirVenture is a showcase for all types of aviation, its roots are with homebuilts and kit plane manufacturers, like the New Glasair, which continues to innovate, announcing a super-fast-build option. According to the company, the pre-built components shave a total of 750 hours from the build time.
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But just because there are big guns out there, it doesn't follow that folks will leave us little guys in peace. We've still got to act as if we're responsible citizens and do our part to persuade people that, on the whole, we're not a major threat to the republic.
And last night some network channel (either Fox or ABC) had some total friggin' nitwit from the FBI who made it seem that your basic park flyer could carry a thirty pound payload...
Yeah, they did a story, and it could come back to bite us on the rear. Just what we need is someone tying RC airplanes to terrorist weapons. Yeah, this is some great publicity, all right!
Well the IRA routinely used to use RC transmitters to trigger bombs.. till british intelligence found the remains of RC kit in the blast debris, and took to touring the streets with a scanner and a few transmitters.
A couple of mysterious explosions and blown up IRA bombers later, the IRA cottoned on and dropped the idea.
Today you just buy a mobile phone and hook the detonator to he ring circuit, and hope the carrier doesn't send you a spam text message before you call it up yourself ;-)
An awful lot of us are pretty old. We recall the way the world was 50 or 60 years ago and forget to integrate how it has changed. For instance back then I once was no more then 3 meters away from an unfriendly world leader who was in an open car. There were probably
10,000 others in the same situation I was in that day. I look back on it and marvel that nothing happened. But back then such things happened regularly. That is how JFK got killed for instance.
The real lucky thing is the foriegn terrorists in general seem to have room temp IQs and execute remarkably poorly. If they had any brains they could do some real damage. We may not like it but RC planes are ideal delivery vehicals for some types of terror attacks. With the advances in GPS, gyros and on board puter systems such weapons are easy to fly and target and almost impossible to defend against.
We can expect the pressure on us to increase as a result. The first time an rc is actually used for such purposes the pressure will get real intense real fast. No point in denying the problem. Our only defense is to be proactive and make sure it does not happen. And the only way we can do that is by being careful who we give information to and if we run into someone who acts dodgy seeing that the law enforcement people know about that person.
The biggest problem with the media coverage is not that they single out various areas for their reports. The biggest problem is too often they put stuff in the reports that they are too stupid to realize are keys to making some things work. Without going into details the media has given enough clues on some terrorism issues that a smart person could go and duplicate the results fairly easily. This in spite of the media claims that there only were a very few in the whole free world that had the skills. They were probably correct that only a few had the skills prior to the report. But they give away all the key factors on how to do it giving thousands the capabilities. When you give out information to so many it is almost a sure bet that one of them is whacko. The US has a fine record of home growing whackos. So do European countries.
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