Did a drone hit a British Airways plane?

False alarm? ‘Drone’ strike on British plane that went viral may have been just a plastic bag.

It was the kind of news that went viral in a skinny minute, because it confirmed almost everybody’s worst fears: A drone had struck a British Airways plane Sunday as it approached London’s Heathrow Airport. That’s what the pilot of the Airbus A320 reported he thought had happened, and the rest of the world took his word as gospel. It even entered into the debate on the floor of the U.S. Senate this week, as an argument was made for increased regulation of drones. But a new possibility was aloft by Thursday: The object may have been no more than a plastic shopping bag. British Transport Minister Robert Goodwill told the House of Lords on Thursday that the investigation into just what the plane struck at an altitude of about 1,700 feet was open to question. “The reported drone strike on Sunday has not been confirmed it was actually a drone,” Goodwill said. “It was the local police force that tweeted that they had a report of a drone striking an aircraft. “And indeed the early reports of a dent in the front of the plane were not confirmed: There was no actual damage to the plane, and there’s indeed some speculation that it may have even been a plastic bag or something,” he continued. “I’ve not actually landed a 747 at Heathrow, but I’ve landed the simulator, and the pilot has a lot of other things to concentrate on. So we’re not quite sure what they saw, so I think we should maybe not overreact too much.” In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration said there were 764 drones sighted near airplanes last year, despite current guidelines against flying drones near planes or within five miles of an airport unless the control tower has been contacted first. Drones also are supposed to fly below 400 feet, stay away from stadiums and remain in sight of the operator.

Worried that drones might strike airplanes, FAA seeks airport detection system

The Federal Aviation Administration said Tuesday that it will explore ways to spot “rogue” drone operations that may collide with planes around airports. The agency said it has launched an initial research program to evaluate drone detection technology at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. “We face many difficult challenges as we integrate rapidly evolving [drone] technology into our complex and highly regulated airspace,” said Marke Gibson, FAA senior adviser on UAS Integration. “This effort at JFK reflects everyone’s commitment to safety.” The FAA said there were 764 drones sighted near airplanes last year, despite guidelines prohibiting flying drones near planes or within five miles of an airport unless the control tower has been contacted first. Drones also are supposed to fly below 400 feet, stay away from stadiums and remain in sight of the operator. (A report that a British Airways plane had been struck by a drone on approach to London’s Heathrow Airport was later discounted.) The FAA began evaluating a drone detection system being used by the FBI this month. The tests at JFK examined the ability of the system to identify five types of drones, including common rotorcraft and more advanced fixed-wing drones. “We applaud the FBI and FAA for their efforts to detect and track unmanned aerial systems” (or UAS), said Thomas Bosco, the aviation director for the Port Authority of New York. “We look forward to supporting continued U.S. government efforts to identify and deploy countermeasures to neutralize the threat posed by rogue UASs.” There has been virtual consensus in Congress that steps must be taken to prevent drone-airplane collisions. “Unless more is done, it’s not if an accident will happen, it’s when,” Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) said at a hearing of the House subcommittee on aviation last year. “We don’t really know what happens when you suck a quadcopter [drone] into a jet engine,” said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), who pointed out that a four-pound bird hits a jet moving at 260 mph with the force of 12 tons. The FAA last year released proposed regulations for drones weighing less than 55 pounds. They require that the devices remain within the operator’s line of sight, cannot operate above anyone not involved with drone operation, can be used only during daylight hours, must yield the right of way to other aircraft, cannot move faster than 100 mph or above 500 feet, and that an operator must contact air traffic controllers if operating in airspace they control. It is estimated that 700,000 drones were sold in the United States last year.

Drone downs triathlete

Australian triathlete Raija Ogden had finished a one-mile ocean swim, 27-mile bike ride and was just starting her-six mile run to the finish line when a drone fell out of the sky and whacked her on the head, she told reporters. “My hair was completely red with blood,” Ogden told The West Australian.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The drone was filming the Endure Batavia triathlon in Western Australia this weekend when the operator lost control of the remote-controlled device and it fell more than 30 feet, ABC reported.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The drone’s owner, Warren Abrams of New Era Photography and Film, told ABC that the video footage shows the drone fell behind Ogden, not on her. Abrams volunteered his services to provide a live feed of the race, The West Australian reported.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University “She looks over her shoulder and gets frightened, falling to the ground and bumping her head, but the drone didn’t actually strike her,” he told The West Australian. The seasoned triathlete was horrified at the suggestion that she fell because the drone scared her. “I have lacerations on my head from the drone and the ambulance crew took a piece of propeller from my head,” she told the West Australian. A spectator who spoke to Fairfax Media confirmed Ogden’s story, and another wrote on Facebook that she saw the drone hit Odgen.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Ogden was treated on the scene, then taken to the hospital where stitches were required to close a head wound, the BBC said. Meanwhile her wife Courtney, the event’s defending champion, crossed the finish line in second place.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University This isn’t the first time a rogue civilian drone has caused injuries at a sporting event. Last August, four or five people suffered minor injuries when a drone crashed into the stands at the Great Bull Run festival in Virginia.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Drone crashes mount at civilian airports overseas

The U.S. Air Force drone, on a classified spy mission over the Indian Ocean, was destined for disaster from the start. An inexperienced military contractor in shorts and a T-shirt, flying by remote control from a trailer at Seychelles International Airport, committed blunder after blunder in six minutes on April 4. He sent the unarmed MQ-9 Reaper drone off without permission from the control tower. A minute later, he yanked the wrong lever at his console, killing the engine without realizing why. As he tried to make an emergency landing, he forgot to put down the wheels. The $8.9 million aircraft belly-flopped on the runway, bounced and plunged into the tropical waters at the airport’s edge, according to a previously undisclosed Air Force accident investigation report. The drone crashed at a civilian airport that serves a half-million passengers a year, most of them sun-seeking tourists. No one was hurt, but it was the second Reaper accident in five months — under eerily similar circumstances. “I will be blunt here. I said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening again,’ ” an Air Force official at the scene told investigators afterward. He added: “You go, ‘How stupid are you?’ ” The April wreck was the latest in a rash of U.S. military drone crashes at overseas civilian airports in the past two years. The accidents reinforce concerns about the risks of flying the robot aircraft outside war zones, including in the United States. A review of thousands of pages of unclassified Air Force investigation reports, obtained by The Washington Post under public-records requests, shows that drones flying from civilian airports have been plagued by setbacks. Among the problems repeatedly cited are pilot error, mechanical failure, software bugs in the “brains” of the aircraft and poor coordination with civilian air-traffic controllers. On Jan. 14, 2011, a Predator drone crashed off the Horn of Africa while trying to return to an international airport next to a U.S. military base in Djibouti. It was the first known accident involving a Predator or Reaper drone near a civilian airport. Predators and Reapers can carry satellite-guided missiles and have become the Obama administration’s primary weapon against al- Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Since then, at least six more Predators and Reapers have crashed in the vicinity of civilian airports overseas, including other instances in which contractors were at the controls. The mishaps have become more common at a time when the Pentagon and domestic law-enforcement agencies are pressing the Federal Aviation Administration to open U.S. civil airspace to surveillance drones. The FAA permits drone flights only in rare cases, citing the risk of midair collisions. The Defense Department can fly Predators and Reapers on training and testing missions in restricted U.S. airspace near military bases. The pressure to fly drones in the same skies as passenger planes will only increase as the war in Afghanistan winds down and the military and CIA redeploy their growing fleets of Predators and Reapers. Last year, the military began flying unarmed Reapers from a civilian airport in Ethiopia to spy in next-door Somalia. In a Nov. 20 speech in Washington, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said the Pentagon would expand its use of the unmanned attack planes “outside declared combat zones” as it pursues al-Qaeda supporters in Africa and the Middle East. “These enhanced capabilities will enable us to be more flexible and agile against a threat that has grown more diffuse,” Panetta said. The Air Force says that its drones are safe and that crash rates have declined as the military fine-tunes the new technology. Mishap rates for Predators have fallen to levels comparable to F-16 fighter jets at same stage in their development, according to the Air Force Safety Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. In Djibouti, five Predators have crashed since the Air Force began ramping up drone operations there to combat terrorist groups in nearby Yemen and Somalia. Many of the mechanical breakdowns have been peculiar to drones. On May 7, 2011, an armed Predator suffered an electrical malfunction that sent it into a death spiral about a mile offshore from Djibouti City, the capital, which has about 600,000 residents. “I’m just glad we landed it in the ocean and not someplace else,” a crew member told investigators. Ten days later, another Predator missed the runway by nearly three miles and crashed near a residential area. The aircraft was carrying a live Hellfire missile, but it did not detonate and no one was injured. Another close call came March 15, 2011. An armed Predator came in too steep and fast for landing, overshot the runway and slammed into a fence. Investigators attributed that accident to a melted throttle part, but they also blamed pilot error. They said the remote-   control pilot was “inattentive” and “confused” during the landing. Because he was isolated inside a ground-control station, the report added, he did not notice the wind rush or high engine pitch that might have warned a pilot in a manned aircraft to slow down. In Djibouti, the Air Force drones operate from Camp Lemonnier, a fast-growing U.S. military base devoted to counterterrorism. The base is adjacent to Djibouti’s international airport and shares a single runway with passenger aircraft. That has led to miscommunications and tensions with Djiboutian civil aviation officials. One unidentified U.S. officer told investigators last year that he often had to sternly remind his fellow troops that civilians were in charge of the site. “There is a need to understand the urgency that this airport doesn’t belong to us,” he said. “Every time that we cause a delay or they miss flight times and connecting flights, there’s a big backlash and repercussion.” In addition to the five Predator wrecks in Djibouti, the officer said he had witnessed three emergency landings that narrowly avoided catastrophe. “I have no illusions that this won’t happen again, whether it’s an MQ-1 or otherwise,” he said, referring to the military code name for a Predator. Meanwhile, U.S. drone crews complained to investigators about the Djiboutian air-traffic controllers, saying they speak poor English, are “short-   tempered” and are uncomfortable with Predators in their airspace. According to the crew members, the Djiboutian controllers give priority to passenger planes and order drone pilots to keep their aircraft circling overhead even when they are dangerously low on fuel. In the Seychelles, an idyllic archipelago that lured Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, for their honeymoon, the U.S. military began flying Reapers in 2009. Crews set up shop at an unmarked hangar at the international airport outside the capital, Victoria, named after another British royal. The operation started with four Reapers that spied on pirates at sea and terrorism suspects on land in Somalia, about 800 miles away. It was also an experiment to test new technology for operating the drones. Normally, Reapers and Predators are flown through satellite links by pilots based in the United States, while local ground crews handle the takeoffs and landings. In the Seychelles, however, the flights did not require a satellite link; details of the new technology remain classified. Starting in September 2011, records show, the U.S. Air Force took the unusual step of outsourcing the entire operation to a Florida-based private contractor, Merlin RAMCo. By then, the Seychelles operation had dwindled to two Reapers after the other aircraft were redeployed. The military drew up the surveillance missions, but Merlin RAMCo hired its own remote-control pilots, sensor operators and mechanics, and dispatched them to the islands. The arrangement was overseen at a distance by the Air Force’s secretive 645th Aeronautical Systems Group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The unit, also known as Big Safari, develops and acquires advanced weapons systems — many of them classified — for Special Operations Forces. A spokesman for the Big Safari program declined to comment on the Reaper operations in the Seychelles or its contract with Merlin RAMCo, citing “security concerns.” Lt. Col. Brett Ashworth, an Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon, said the service does not “currently” use contractors to fly drones on “combat operations,” but he declined to elaborate. Merlin RAMCo, based in Jacksonville, Fla., is a privately held company that was incorporated in 2006, records show. The firm’s vice president and general manager, Robert A. Miller Jr., did not return phone calls or an e-mail seeking comment. The company supports Air Force missions and other government contracts with more than 80 employees at 14 locations in the United States and five sites overseas, according to the Air Force. The contractor was subjected to little direct oversight in the Seychelles, records show. The Air Force posted two officials on the islands to coordinate flights and serve as a liaison with the contractor, but neither had experience operating drones. Underscoring the secrecy of the operation, neither official was allowed to have a copy of Big Safari’s contract with Merlin RAMCo. “You can imagine it’s awful hard to hold somebody accountable for compliance with a contract that you physically can’t see,” one of the Air Force representatives told investigators. The other liaison officer told investigators that the whole idea of outsourcing drone flights made him uneasy. “In hindsight, it appears it may not have been the best way to conduct business,” he said. After Merlin RAMCo took charge, the two Reapers deployed to the Seychelles quickly became hobbled by problems. In November 2011, the Air Force liaison officers grounded the drones after discovering that they had not received required mechanical upgrades. Just days after the aircraft resumed flying, on Dec. 13, one of the Reapers ran into trouble. Two minutes after takeoff, the engine failed. The pilot was unable to restart it and tried to execute an emergency landing. But the aircraft, which was not armed at the time, descended too quickly and landed too far down the runway. It bounced past a perimeter road, over a rock breakwater and sank about 200 feet offshore. Investigators blamed the crash on an electrical short and concluded that the pilot made things worse by botching the landing. In February, the remaining Reaper was struck by lightning while in flight. The crew was able to steer it home safely, but mechanics grounded the plane for a month to make repairs. A few days after resuming operations, a different Merlin RAMCo pilot, with limited experience in takeoffs and landings, erred in every way imaginable during the brief flight before crashing the Reaper. Contractors worked for days to fish all the parts out of the water. The Seychelles and U.S. governments announced a suspension of drone flights afterward, but they didn’t mention that there wasn’t much choice — no intact Reapers were left on the island. U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who met with Seychelles officials a few days later, pledged a “thorough and fully transparent” investigation of the crash. The accidents, nonetheless, stirred worry among some islanders. In a letter to the Seychelles Nation newspaper, resident James R. Mancham questioned whether civil aviation officials had “seriously examined the implications” of allowing drones to fly from Seychelles International Airport. “What guarantee do we have that never will one of these drones crash upon or collide with an approaching or departing plane or crash on the air-control tower itself?” Mancham wrote. Tom Saunders, a spokesman for the U.S. military’s Africa Command, said the Air Force has not flown drones from the Seychelles since April. He declined to comment on whether it planned to resume the flights. Jean-Paul Adam, the foreign minister of the Seychelles, said the U.S. military has not shared the results of the crash investigations. He said the U.S. government has indicated that it would like to restart the operations but has not said when. Adam cautioned that the Seychelles Civil Aviation Authority would need to review the investigation results but said his government was amenable toward a return of the drones. “The two crashes were obviously of concern,” he said in a telephone interview. “But I would say the approach we’ve had with the United States has been one of good cooperation.”

Rogue drones a growing nuisance across the U.S.

Rogue drone operators are rapidly becoming a national nuisance, invading sensitive airspace and private property — with the regulators of the nation’s skies largely powerless to stop them. In recent days, drones have smuggled drugs into an Ohio prison, smashed against a Cincinnati skyscraper, impeded efforts to fight wildfires in California and nearly collided with three airliners over New York City. Earlier this summer, a runaway two-pound drone struck a woman at a gay pride parade in Seattle, knocking her unconscious. In Albuquerque, a drone buzzed into a crowd at an outdoor festival, injuring a bystander. In Tampa, a drone reportedly stalked a woman outside a downtown bar before crashing into her car. The incidents are the byproduct of the latest consumer craze: cheap, easy-to-fly, remotely piloted aircraft. Even basic models can soar thousands of feet high and come equipped with powerful video cameras — capabilities that would have been hard to foresee just a few years ago. Reports began surfacing last year of runaway drones interfering with air traffic and crashing into buildings. But the problem has grown worse as drone sales have surged. “I’m definitely getting much more concerned about it,” Michael P. Huerta, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, said in a phone interview Monday. He said the FAA is particularly worried about a surge in reports of drones flying dangerously close to airports. The latest incident came Sunday, when four airline crews reported a brush with a drone on a flight path into Newark International Airport. Huerta added that the recent interference by drones with California firefighters was “really a wake-up call for a lot of people. This kind of thing has got to stop.” Most new drone models are aimed at novice fliers who are often “blissfully unaware” of aviation safety practices, said Michael Braasch, an electrical engineering professor and drone expert at Ohio University. “Unfortunately, there’s also going to be a small percentage of users who are just going to behave badly.” The Consumer Electronics Association, an industry group, estimates that hobbyists will buy 700,000 of the remote-controlled aircraft in the United States this year, a 63 percent increase from 2014. Although the vast majority of drone enthusiasts fly solely for recreation, authorities worry about the potential for a new airborne menace. In a July 31 intelligence bulletin, the Department of Homeland Security said it had recorded more than 500 incidents since 2012 in which rogue drones hovered over “sensitive sites and critical installations,” such as military bases and nuclear plants. In one well-publicized case in January, a drone crashed onto the White House grounds. Another unnerving scenario emerged last month when a Connecticut man posted an Internet video of a drone he had armed with a handgun, firing shots by remote control as it hovered in the air. Local police and the FAA determined that no laws had been broken. In general, drone misadventures are happening in a regulatory vacuum. The FAA has banned most commercial drone flights until it can finalize new safety rules — a step that will take at least another year. But people who fly drones for fun aren’t regulated. Under a law passed in 2012 that was designed in part to protect model-airplane enthusiasts, the FAA cannot impose new restrictions on recreational drone owners. As a result, they are not required to obtain licenses, register their aircraft or undergo training. To protect regular air traffic, the FAA has issued guidelines requiring that consumer drones stay at least five miles away from airports and below an altitude of 400 feet. Those standards are widely flouted, however; in the past month alone, airline pilots have reported close calls with drones near airports in New York, Charlotte, Minneapolis and Phoenix. In neighborhoods nationwide, the buzz of drones is becoming a common sound, as well as a source of conflict. Police blotters contain an increasing number of reports from residents complaining about uninvited drones hovering over their back yards. For the most part, such flights are legal — a fact that is prompting a backlash from anti-drone vigilantes. In Hillview, Ky., last month, a homeowner blasted a drone out of the sky with a shotgun, saying he was trying to protect his daughters from being spied on. He was charged with criminal mischief; police did not take action against the drone owner. Similarly, in May, a judge ordered a man from Modesto, Calif., to pay a neighbor $850 for peppering his drone with buckshot. In September, a man from Cape May, N.J., was charged with shooting down a neighbor’s drone as it filmed houses along Seashore Road. In other cases, however, authorities have been more sympathetic toward drone haters. In June, for example, prosecutors did not take action against a crew of firefighters in Orange County, N.Y., who used their water hoses to knock down a drone that had been filming them as they battled a house blaze. In California last month, state legislators introduced a bill that would grant immunity to emergency responders who damage a drone that gets in their way. The measure was prompted by several incidents in which amateur paparazzi drones swarmed around wildfires, crowding the skies and forcing firefighters to ground their tanker aircraft to avoid a midair collision. “Cars were torched on the freeways because drones made aerial firefighting efforts impossible,” state Sen. Ted Gaines (R-El Dorado), a sponsor of the measure, said in a statement. “This is maddening and I can’t believe that hobby drones are risking people’s lives to get videos on YouTube.” Although the FAA lacks the authority to license recreational drones, it does have the power to impose civil fines on anyone who recklessly interferes with air traffic or endangers people on the ground. Yet the agency has levied fines in only a handful of cases, saying it does not have the staff to investigate most complaints. Huerta, the FAA chief, said Monday that the recent spate of risky incidents prompted the agency to revisit its approach and that it will adopt “more stringent enforcement” measures in cooperation with state and local officials. For months, FAA officials had focused almost exclusively on trying to educate drone operators. The agency has partnered with the drone industry and others on a public awareness campaign aimed at hobbyists called Know Before You Fly. The FAA has also co-sponsored public service announcements to discourage drone use at special events and locations, such as the Super Bowl, the California wildfires and a no-fly zone that covers much of the Washington region. FAA officials said they are encouraging major retailers to provide drone-safety information to holiday shoppers this year. The agency also is testing a software application for Apple devices that would inform drone users whether it is safe or legal to fly at a specified location. Drone manufacturers have made it easy for consumers to fly the robotic aircraft right out of the box. But companies need to take more responsibility for educating their customers by adding warning labels, devising software fixes to limit where drones can fly and taking other steps, said James H. Williams, a former manager of the FAA’s drone integration office. “In a lot of ways, it’s up to the manufacturers to warn people about flying too high, flying too close to airports, flying too close to airplanes,” said Williams, now an aviation consultant for Dentons, a major law firm. “It’s important that they step up and do more than they are.” Brian Wynne, the president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry group, said that “there’s always room” for drone companies to expand education efforts. But he said there is only so much the industry can do to prevent reckless behavior. “I frankly just don’t think there’s any excuse for anyone flying a [drone] anywhere near an airport or near a runway,” he said. “We have got to enforce our laws.”

Pilot in White House drone crash is intelligence agency employee

The man who crashed a recreational drone on the grounds of the White House this week, causing a brief lockdown and exposing an unresolved security vulnerability at the compound, is a government intelligence worker, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) said Tuesday. In a statement, the NGA said an employee had reported his involvement in the incident and has been questioned by the Secret Service. The drone, a small “quadcopter,” crashed on the southeast corner of White House grounds about 3 a.m. Monday. “The employee was off duty and is not involved in work related to drones or unmanned aerial vehicles in any capacity at NGA,” the agency said. The NGA said it is taking the incident “very seriously.” The NGA, headquartered in Springfield, Va., provides geospatial and mapping information to the Defense Department and intelligence agencies. According to the agency’s Web site, the NGA helped track down al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was killed by U.S. special forces in 2011. The Secret Service is investigating the crash, which came days after experts warned lawmakers that the Secret Service’s inability to detect and neutralize drone flights in the area was a worrying security gap. It also follows a number of security lapses that have increased scrutiny on the Secret Service. It was believed to be the first incident in which a drone made it onto White House grounds, but not the first time that drones have flown within restricted airspace near the White House and U.S. Capitol.

Map: Where was the drone that Iran tried to shoot down?

Update: The drone appears to have been even closer than I'd thought. The post is updated to incorporate reporting from the Post's Ernesto Londoño. Two Iranian jets fired on an unarmed U.S. predator drone over international waters, a Pentagon spokesperson announced on Thursday. The incident, which occurred last week but has just been reported, "raises fresh concerns within the Obama administration about Iranian military aggression in crucial Gulf oil shipping lanes," a CNN report said. Iran has previously threatened to shut down the nearby Strait or Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world's oil supply travels. Above, I've laid a small red line over where the drone might have been. U.S. officials told CNN the drone was over international waters somewhere east of Kuwait; Londoño reports it was 16 miles from Iran's coast. According to international law, Iranian nautical sovereignty extends 12 miles out from its coastline. A smaller blue circle indicates Bahrain, where the U.S. bases its Fifth Fleet, a substantial military presence in the Gulf. That red line is indeed international airspace, but it's also very close to Iranian soil. This of course doesn't make it okay for Iran to try to shoot the drone down, but it's worth considering how that proximity might be perceived by an Iranian leadership that already feels under siege and threatened by the much more powerful United States. Last year, a U.S. drone crashed 140 miles within Iran's eastern border.

Book review: “Sting of the Drone,” by Richard A. Clarke

In the decade I have been covering terrorism, the plot that seemed to inspire the most derision was one that involved some model airplanes and a Northeastern University graduate named Rezwan Ferdaus. Ferdaus planned to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol with radio-controlled planes filled with C-4 explosives. The FBI arrested him before any of his flights got off the ground, and in 2012 he pleaded guilty to two terrorism charges. In the end, he was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison. The joke making the rounds at the time was that the only things the tiny model planes could have destroyed were tiny models of the Pentagon and the Capitol. But terrorism expert Richard Clarke, in his latest novel, “Sting of the Drone,” will make naysayers reassess the model-plane attack. “At first it seemed like the B-52 was some distance away,” Clarke writes, as terrorists begin to take their revenge on the people involved with the drone program in the United States. “But her brain quickly flashed to the conclusion that it was just outside the window, a miniature B-52. In the nanosecond that her conscious mind understood what was happening, she saw a metal rod extending from the nose of the aircraft smash through the floor-to-ceiling glass window. As glass crashed into her suite, the B-52 erupted into a fireball that chased the glass inside, flash-burning everything in the room.” “Sting of the Drone” explores a premise that members of the intelligence community have been kicking around for years: What would happen if the targets on the receiving end of a killer drone decided to strike back? “Flies can be swatted. Men can be killed,” a powerful tribal leader tells a terrorist plotter named Ghazi, who lost his father in a drone attack. “These drones can be stopped. Ghazi, I want you to do this. You will understand how and I will give you all that you need.” Ghazi manages to assemble a terrorist dream team that includes not just a Pakistani clan that lives under the constant threat of drones in the tribal area between Pakistan and Afghanistan (a thinly veiled version of the Haqqani network), but also two Ukrainian hackers and various al-Qaeda sympathizers already living in the United States. Ghazi’s plot: to hack into the guidance systems of the Predator drones and turn them against the very people who fly them. The premise is not so far-fetched: Iran claims that it captured a CIA stealth drone in 2011 by spoofing the GPS signals it was receiving. Iranian pilots were able to land it safely in Iran. Clearly, Clarke is borrowing from real life. In fact, as you read “Sting of the Drone” you get the sense that it isn’t fiction at all. Clarke has written a classic in the genre of what is known as insider fiction — a novel or, more often, a thriller inspired by real episodes to which government officials were privvy when they were working their day jobs. Former CIA case officer Robert Baer (on whom the film “Syriana” is based) is probably the best known in this genre. He tried his hand at fiction in 2006 with a book about an alternate 9/11 scenario called “Blow the House Down.” Three years later, Nicolle Wallace, formerly of the George W. Bush White House and Sen. John McCain’s unsuccessful presidential campaign, wrote “Eighteen Acres,” about the first female president. Those fiction efforts — and a roster of titles from FBI agents turned novelists — have had little impact on the American literary canon. Rather, these books are successful when readers are left asking, “Could this really happen?” Clarke’s book, for its part, reads like a typical fast-paced thriller: It switches back and forth between discussions at the White House and terrorist meetings in the desert, and captures the banter between military officials and bureaucrats at the Creech Air Force base outside Las Vegas, where the drone pilots are based. The jump-cuts will feel familiar to anyone who buys Bond-like books at the airport. But where “Sting of the Drone” stands above the rest, and what makes it important for those who have a tendency to shy away from this genre, is in its level of detail. In Clarke’s hands, readers are taken through the entire bureaucratic process that governs the drone program. He writes about secure conference calls by a Kill Committee, in which officials from the Defense, State and Justice departments discuss targets and weigh the pros and cons of pulling the trigger. (We know that the Obama administration uses a version of this committee, and we may learn more about the legal justification of targeted killing soon, as the administration just announced that it will comply with a court order to release a crucial memo related to the operations.) Clarke writes about mistakes, judgment calls and the terrorists’ adaptations as they begin to piece together America’s rules of engagement. This, too, has been occasionally alluded to in the headlines. As a result, all this is riveting reading. There is also some rich detail to be gleaned about the drones themselves. Clarke discusses their ability to follow targets for hours (which we knew) and how the bottom of the aircraft can be programmed electronically to take on the color of the sky — blue on sunny days, grey on cloudy ones — which, if true, most of us didn’t know. These kinds of tidbits make it necessary for readers to remind themselves that this is fiction — or at least is billed as such. Clarke is better known as the author of the 2004 nonfiction bestseller “Against All Enemies,” in which, among other things, he says President George W. Bush asked him about Iraq’s role in the 9/11 attacks while the towers were still smoldering. The only thing that detracts from “Sting of the Drone” is what ails the insider genre more generally — the writing style. Clarke still needs to develop his voice and those of his characters. The men and women in the book sound the same. The dialogue is often hobbled by lame jokes and sexual innuendoes that sometimes fall flat. In one especially egregious example, one of the directors of the drone program walks into his wife’s office and confuses the receptionist when he says: “Tell her Mustang is here. . . . Go ahead. Ask her if she wants to ride a Mustang.” The receptionist is so uncomfortable that she can only tell the wife that a man named Mustang is there and he won’t go away. And the wife replies: “Oh dear. . . . Well, then ask him if I can ride him.” These kinds of clunkers, however, are more than offset by the meaty morsels about the secretive drone program. One also has to wonder how much of this book is a Washington confessional. Clarke, who served three presidents as a terrorism czar, bears some responsibility for the decision to use drones against terrorists in the first place. In 2000, he wanted to deploy Predator drones, unarmed at the time, to fly over Afghanistan to help in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. On its fourth flight, Clarke says in an author’s note, the Predator located the al-Qaeda leader. Clarke says he pushed to have the drones armed. The CIA and the Defense Department opposed it, he contends. “Finally, on September 4, 2001, the Principals’ Committee met in the White House Situation Room,” Clarke writes in his note at the end of the book. “CIA Director George Tenet and the DOD leadership both spoke out against the use of armed Predators to get bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership. They were not overruled. A week later we were attacked.” **Dina Temple-Raston** , NPR’s counter-terrorism correspondent, has spent the past year as a Nieman fellow at Harvard studying the intersection of big data and intelligence. She has written four books and will return to NPR in June. **STING OF THE DRONE** By Richard A. Clarke Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s. 294 pp. $25.99

Drone crashes into Virginia bull run crowd

An aerial drone, a pilotless aircraft of the type that has aroused intense public discussion in recent months, crashed Saturday into the stands at a public event in Virginia that has also aroused heated discourse. A drone crashed into the grandstand at Virginia Motorsports Park during the Great Bull Run, said Major W.B. Knott, of the Dinwiddie County sheriff’s office, reporting what might be described as the dramatic encounter between a controversial piece of hardware and a controversial spectacle. Knott said he was told that four or five people suffered very minor injuries. They were treated by EMS personnel at the event, and none was taken to a hospital, Knott said. The bull run was billed as a daylong festival featuring bands, drinking, games and a tomato fight. The highlight was to be four scheduled bull runs in which participants were to try to elude or outrace 24 hefty specimens of male livestock. Animal rights organizations have contended that the event endangered both people and bovines. A Richmond area television station, WTVR-Channel 6, said the drone was being used to capture video of the event, though it was not operated by or recording for WTVR-TV. In video posted on the station’s Web site, the drone was seen hovering above the stands. It appeared to be about four feet in diameter and reminiscent of a spider, with numerous appendages projecting from a central core. Then, it suddenly dipped and fell into the midst of about a dozen spectators. Others rushed toward the place where it came down. One picked it up and put it aside.

Man whose drone crashed at White House won’t be charged; fine possible

Federal prosecutors said Wednesday they will not charge the recreational drone operator whose device crashed onto the White House lawn Jan. 26, but the District resident and intelligence community worker may face a fine from the Federal Aviation Administration. The decision, announced by the office of the U.S. attorney for the District, Ronald C. Machen Jr., came after the security breach of the executive mansion grounds focused national attention on potential threats posed by the growing use of small, unmanned aircraft. Secret Service agents presented the results of their investigation of the case, but in a statement, prosecutors said a forensic analysis determined that the drone’s operator was not in control of the craft when it crashed. “The decision was made following an investigation by the United States Secret Service and a review of applicable law,” the U.S. attorney’s office said. “The Federal Aviation Administration has begun a review of the incident for possible administrative action.” The FAA bans flights by unauthorized drones within a 30-mile circle around Washington, a security measure implemented after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The aviation agency’s regulations do not make exceptions for a pilot’s lack of intent, officials said, and the FAA could propose a civil penalty of up to $1,100. Elsewhere in the United States, amateur pilots must keep aircraft at least five miles away from airports and below 400 feet. Shawn Usman, 31, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency employee who operated the aircraft, was unavailable for comment but is fully cooperating with authorities and wished to express his sincere apologies to all involved, especially the Obamas and security officials, his attorney said. In a statement, James M. Garland, a partner at Covington & Burling, added: “Mr. Usman is pleased and grateful that the U.S. Attorney’s Office has decided not to pursue charges in this matter. This entire incident, while unfortunate and understandably alarming, was totally inadvertent and completely unintentional.” In a statement, the NGA said that Usman faced no adverse action as a result of the off-duty incident, and that he remains employed as a research and development scientist who is not involved in any work related to drones. Authorities had said Usman contacted the Secret Service about six hours after a two-foot-wide DJI Phantom “quadcopter” landed on White House grounds early Jan. 26, triggering a lockdown. Prosecutors said the investigation determined that Usman borrowed the quadcopter from a friend. Usman told investigators he flew it around his Northwest Washington apartment and outside his window a few blocks from the White House the night of Jan. 25. About 3 a.m. Jan. 26, Usman said, he lost control of the drone and saw it climb to about 100 feet over 10th Street NW. “The man knew that the drone’s battery was nearing the end of its charge and expected that it would crash somewhere over the Mall. He went to sleep not knowing where the drone had gone,” prosecutors said. “After he awoke to news reports of the crash on the White House grounds, he self-reported the incident to the Secret Service.” President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama were visiting India at the time, and the Secret Service said the device did not pose a threat to the building or the first family. The incident follows a series of security lapses at the White House that triggered a shake-up of the Secret Service leadership. In September, a man with a knife in his pocket scaled the White House fence and ran through much of the mansion’s main floor. An armed private security contractor in Atlanta boarded an elevator with the president without authorization that same month, and new criticism surfaced over the Secret Service’s response to gunshots fired at the White House in 2011. Meanwhile, small drones have violated a three-mile, permanent no-fly area around the White House, called the P-56 zone, four times since July, according to FAA reports.

Amazon employee admits to drone fly-by at Seattle’s Space Needle

Trips to Seattle should probably come with a warning: _Caution, drones in use_.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday On Thursday night, security guards at the Seattle Space Needle called city police after tourists reported a drone buzzing outside the window of the attraction's observation deck -- a full 520 feet in the air. They claimed the drone crashed into the observation deck window. The white, camera-equipped, four-propeller device then glided back into the fifth floor window of a nearby hotel. When police caught up with the drone's owner, it turned out to be an Amazon employee who eagerly showed them video of the drone's flight, which didn't indicate that it had struck the Needle during its journey, according to a Seattle Police Department blog post.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday And, no, this wasn't a test-drive of Prime Air, which Amazon (whose chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post) recently announced it's working to develop. If the Federal Aviation Administration plays along -- and so far, it hasn't -- drone delivery service could offer same-day, human-free delivery to your front door.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered, has had a spate of drone-related incidents in recent months. Collectively, they suggest that the general population isn't quite ready for the drone-powered future.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Police say the Amazon employee (whose identity wasn't disclosed) has agreed to abide by Seattle's drone regulations and will no longer fly the drone in public. The Space Needle folks, by the way, couldn't resist cracking a joke about the situation:

Drone operator detained in front of White House

Secret Service officers stopped a person on Thursday who was flying a small drone over the park in front of the White House. The drone operator was taken into custody by U.S. Park Police. Park Police spokeswoman Lelani Woods said he would be charged with violating a federal order. The Secret Service first spotted the drone flying over Lafayette Square at about 1:09 p.m., then located the person who was operating it, Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary said in a statement. Woods said the drone operator was standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, just north of the White House. Leary said that Secret Service members told the person to land the drone and that the person did so. D.C. police inspected the craft and deemed it safe. In a photograph provided by Leary, the drone appears to be a Parrot Bebop Drone. According to the product’s Web site, it is just under a foot long, about 11 inches wide and weighs less than a pound. ****Roads were closed around the White House in the afternoon while police investigated. A day before this incident, the Federal Aviation Administration announced that it was launching a campaign to remind people that everything within a 15-mile radius of Reagan National Airport is considered a “No Drone Zone.” “Federal rules prohibit any aircraft from operating in the Flight Restricted Zone around our nation’s capital without specific approval,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement Wednesday. “That includes all unmanned aircraft.” The FAA declared the campaign a month after a Florida man piloted a gyrocopter to the lawn of the U.S. Capitol, causing a major security scare as he breached Washington’s highly restricted airspace without anyone appearing to notice. Last month, FAA Administrator Michael P. Huerta said the gyrocopter appeared on the radar as a small dot that was overlooked by air traffic controllers. “Anyone visiting the D.C. area should leave their drone at home,” Huerta said in a statement Wednesday. Carol D. Leonnig and Matthew McFarland contributed to this report.

Best drone ever delivers barbecue to football game

Recently, a drone was spotted at the U.S. Open, near where a match was taking place between Serena Williams and Flavia Pennetta. The man operating that drone was arrested, which sounds about right. You just can’t have any old knucklehead flying one of those things into a sports event, or a lot of other unexpected places, for that matter.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico However, Friday brought us news of a drone barging into a sports event in a more benign way. A more delicious way. A more succulent, slow-cooked way. That’s Boise State Public Radio host Scott Graf with the mouth-watering update. A drone delivering barbecue to fans at a football game? Tremendous! In fact, that sounds too good to be true. Can you provide some evidence for this fantastical assertion?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Well, alrighty then. Props to Idaho high school football fans, for providing us with the as-yet best use for a drone. (H/T SB Nation)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

A drone crashes in the middle of a Capitol Hill hearing about drones

The debate about where aerial drones should be allowed is wide-ranging, but on Wednesday it included an unexpected site: a small, remote-control aircraft flew around a congressional hearing. The entire hearing was posted on the C-SPAN Web site, showing witnesses with the Federal Aviation Administration and NASA, among others, testifying before the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. But as The Verge notes, it was a presentation of a working Parrot Bebop drone by 3D Robotics that stole the show.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The drone hovered through the hearing room in the Rayburn House Office Building. But it also had a mishap: During one takeoff, it was brought about five feet off the floor, only to crash back on the carpet. “Whoops,” said a company representative, as those watching laughed. The craft wasn’t broken, and continued on with the demonstration. Colin Guinn with 3D Robotics said the drone used Thursday costs about $500.

Drone users’ duty in the sky

Regarding the Aug. 11 front-page article “Problems with rogue drones hit new heights”: We support unmanned aircraft technology and its safe integration. Helicopter operators fly at the same low altitudes as recreational drones. And they are keenly aware that recreational users need to understand that every time they launch — not just near airports — they become part of a system that has “rules of the road,” so to speak, that they need to obey. Commercial operators already understand the need for professionalism. As the article noted, even a two-pound drone can cause injury if it hits someone. A midair collision with a manned aircraft could be catastrophic. Understanding the rules and maintaining separation from manned aircraft are vital to protecting lives. Pilots of manned aircraft, whether recreational or professional, bear the ultimate responsibility for their and their passengers’ safety. Recreational drone users need to understand they share that responsibility when they fly. ****Matthew S. Zuccaro** , Alexandria** The writer is president and chief executive of the Helicopter Association International.

U.S. military drone surveillance is expanding to hot spots beyond declared combat zones

The steel-gray U.S. Air Force Predator drone plunged from the sky, shattering on mountainous terrain near the Iraq-Turkey border. For Kurdish guerrillas hiding nearby, it was an unexpected gift from the propaganda gods. Fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, filmed the charred wreckage on Sept. 18 and posted a video on YouTube. A narrator bragged unconvincingly that the group had shot down the drone. But for anyone who might doubt that the flying robot was really American, the video zoomed in on mangled parts stamped in English and bearing the label of the manufacturer, San Diego-based General Atomics. For a brief moment, the crash drew back the curtain on Operation Nomad Shadow, a secretive U.S. military surveillance program. Since November 2011, the U.S. Air Force has been flying unarmed drones from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey in an attempt to suppress a long-simmering regional conflict. The camera-equipped Predators hover above the rugged border with Iraq and beam high-resolution imagery to the Turkish armed forces, helping them pursue PKK rebels as they slip back and forth across the mountains. As the Obama administration dials back the number of drone attacks in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, the U.S. military is shifting its huge fleet of unmanned aircraft to other hot spots around the world. This next phase of drone warfare is focused more on spying than killing and will extend the Pentagon’s robust surveillance networks far beyond traditional, declared combat zones. Over the past decade, the Pentagon has amassed more than 400 Predators, Reapers, Hunters, Gray Eagles and other high-altitude drones that have revolutionized counterterrorism operations. Some of the unmanned aircraft will return home with U.S. troops when they leave Afghanistan. But many of the drones will redeploy to fresh frontiers, where they will spy on a melange of armed groups, drug runners, pirates and other targets that worry U.S. officials. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the U.S. Air Force has drone hubs in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to conduct reconnaissance over the Persian Gulf. Twice since November, Iran has scrambled fighter jets to approach or fire on U.S. Predator drones that edged close to Iranian airspace. In Africa, the U.S. Air Force began flying unarmed drones over the Sahara five months ago to track al-Qaeda fighters and rebels in northern Mali. The Pentagon has also set up drone bases in Ethiopia, Djibouti and Seychelles. Even so, the commander of U.S. forces in Africa told Congress in February that he needed a 15-fold increase in surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence- gathering on the continent. In an April speech, Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said the Pentagon is planning for the first time to send Reaper drones — a bigger, faster version of the Predator — to parts of Asia other than Afghanistan. He did not give details. A Defense Department spokeswoman said the military “hasn’t made any final decisions yet” but is “committed to increasing” its surveillance in Asia and the Pacific. In South and Central America, U.S. military commanders have long pined for drones to aid counternarcotics operations. “Surveillance drones could really help us out and really take the heat and wear and tear off of some of our manned aviation assets,” Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, chief of the U.S. Southern Command, said in March. One possible destination for more U.S. drones is Colombia. Last year, Colombian armed forces killed 32 “high-value narco-terrorists” after the U.S. military helped pinpoint the targets’ whereabouts with manned surveillance aircraft and other equipment, according to Jose A. Ruiz, a Southern Command spokesman. The U.S. military has occasionally operated small drones — four-foot-long ScanEagles, which are launched by a catapult — in Colombia. But with larger drones such as Predators and Reapers, U.S. forces could greatly expand the range and duration of their airborne searches for drug smugglers. In the fall of 2011, four disassembled Predator drones arrived in crates at Incirlik Air Base in southern Anatolia, a joint U.S.-Turkish military installation. The drones came from Iraq, where for the previous four years they had been devoted to surveilling that country’s northern mountains. Along with manned U.S. aircraft, the Predators tracked the movements of PKK fighters, sharing video feeds and other intelligence with the Turkish armed forces. The Kurdish group has long fought to create an autonomous enclave in Turkey, launching cross-border attacks from its hideouts in northern Iraq. Turkey has responded with airstrikes and artillery attacks but has also sent ground troops into Iraq, further destabilizing an already volatile area. The Turkish and U.S. governments both classify the PKK as a terrorist group. Turkey’s leaders had feared that U.S. cooperation against the PKK would wither after the Americans left Iraq. So they invited them to re-base the drones on Turkish soil and continue the spying mission from there. Neither side has been eager to publicize the arrangement. The Obama administration has imposed a broad cone of silence on its drone programs worldwide. Pentagon officials declined interview requests about Operation Nomad Shadow. The Turkish government has acknowledged the presence of Predators on its territory, but the robotic planes are a sensitive subject. A global survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that 82 percent of Turks disapprove of the Obama administration’s international campaign of drone attacks against extremists. Officials with the Turkish Embassy in Washington declined to comment for this report. The drones occupy a relatively tiny corner of the sprawling base at Incirlik, according to interviews with other officials and public documents that shed light on Nomad Shadow. The operation is staffed by about three dozen personnel from the U.S. Air Force’s 414th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron and private contractor Battlespace Flight Services. The drones, which began flying in November 2011, are sheltered in an unobtrusive hangar converted from an abandoned “hush house,” a jet-engine testing facility outfitted with noise suppression equipment. “It was tight, but we could fit four aircraft inside the hangar and close the doors,” said a former Air Force official involved in Nomad Shadow who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operation. For most of their time aloft, the remote-control Predators are flown via satellite link by pilots and sensor operators stationed about 6,000 miles away, at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. While in Turkish airspace, the drones cannot spy and must turn off their high-tech cameras and sensors, according to rules set by the Turkish government. It takes the sluggish Predators, with a maximum air speed of 135 mph, about five hours to reach the Iraqi border. The Iraqi government permits the overflights. Once in Iraq, the Predators usually fly a rectangular route known as “the box” for up to 12 hours each mission as they beam video and other intelligence to Missouri. U.S. analysts view and evaluate the footage before transmitting it to a joint U.S.-Turkish intelligence “fusion cell” in Ankara, the capital. There’s usually a built-in delay of at least 15 to 20 minutes. That would give a drone enough time to leave the vicinity if Turkish authorities decided to launch artillery rounds or airstrikes against detected PKK targets, the former Air Force official said. From the outset, some U.S. officials have worried about the potential for botched incidents. In December 2011, Turkish jets bombed a caravan of suspected PKK fighters crossing from Iraq into Turkey, killing 34 people. The victims were smugglers, however, not terrorists — a blunder that ignited protests across Turkey. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that American drone operators had alerted the Turkish military after a Predator spotted the suspicious caravan. Rather than ask for a closer look, Turkish officials waved off the drone and launched the attack soon after, the paper said. Turkey’s leaders denied the report, saying they decided to attack based on their own intelligence. The incident exacerbated simmering frustrations among officials in Ankara and Washington. The Turkish government has long pressed the Obama administration to devote more flight hours to the operation and to sell Turkey a fleet of armed Reaper drones. But U.S. officials and lawmakers have resisted both requests. The Pentagon has expressed concern that the Turkish military wants the fruits of the drone surveillance but has been unwilling to consult with Americans on the best ways to exploit it. “There have been a lot of U.S. attempts to help the Turks get better at fusing the intelligence with an operation,” said a former U.S. defense official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment. At the same time, the former U.S. official called Nomad Shadow an overall success. The constant stream of surveillance footage has prevented PKK attacks, he said, and has enabled the Turkish military to carry out more- limited, precise counterterrorism operations instead of sending large numbers of troops into northern Iraq. “It’s been extremely effective in preventing cross-border operations by the Turks,” the former official said. On Sept. 17, 2012, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Ankara to see Gen. Necdet Özel, chief of the general staff of the Turkish armed forces. As other Turkish officials had done in previous talks, Özel pressed Dempsey for more help against the PKK, including more drone flights, according to Turkish media accounts of the meeting. The next day, in a fit of unlucky timing, a Predator on a routine patrol experienced a sudden and complete loss of power. Drone operators at Whiteman Air Force Base could not communicate with or control the aircraft. The drone nose-dived, dropping 11,000 feet in about four minutes before crashing into an uninhabited region, according to a U.S. Air Force accident investigation report obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. Before releasing the report, the Air Force redacted all geographic references to the location of the crash or where the drone was based. But parts of the report contain clues that make clear that the drone was on a Nomad Shadow mission in northern Iraq. Transcripts of interviews with the drone’s ground crew mention that they were deployed to Incirlik with the 414th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron. Another document identified the lost aircraft as NOMAD 01. But the strongest evidence can be found in an appendix to the report with photographs of the accident site. The images are outtakes from the propaganda video that the PKK posted on YouTube the day after the crash. The photos show several damaged Predator pieces. U.S. military censors carefully blocked out the faces of guerrillas posing with the wreckage.

Stunning ‘fireball’ video captures the moment a plane clipped a power line and crashed

The video shows a small, single-engine plane drop down from the sky, clipping power lines and leaving a fiery plume in its path before crashing into a highway near Seattle. The plane, a Piper PA-32 Cherokee Six that had taken off from a nearby airport, went down Tuesday afternoon at an intersection in Mukilteo, Wash. The crash along State Route 525 was no doubt terrifying.  But police said there were no serious injuries, even though the plane “struck the light pole where it erupted a fuel cell,” Mukilteo Police Officer Myron Davis told KING. “It spilled fuel onto the roadway, onto a vehicle which ignited.” Mukilteo police later posted pictures on Twitter showing firefighters working near a mangled aircraft and at least one charred car. National Transportation Safety Board investigator-in-charge Eliott Simpson told The Washington Post that the agency is looking into the crash.  The pilot also told authorities that he was flying toward Harbour Pointe Boulevard, searching for a place to set the plane down, when it snagged power lines and then wiped out a traffic signal, according to the newspaper. Fuel showered the vehicles below and caught fire. “We definitely felt the fireball as it went over the van,” Amanda Hayes, who said her vehicle was scraped by a wing of the plane, told KING. “I’m just thankful to be here.” Other motorists said the same thing. Juan Teran told the Herald he recalled thinking to himself: “Man, I think we are not going to make it.” “I didn’t know what to do,” another motorist, Steven Welch, told the newspaper. “I saw so much fire I just got out. I felt the heat go right by.” Khal Nouri, who was stopped at a red light with his family, told KING the plane zipped over them. “I thought it was the end of our lives,” he said, praising the pilot. “He didn’t want to hit a building obviously, he didn’t want to hit an area where people are, and he saw this street was empty. He did a fantastic job.” The Herald reported the pilot, from Oregon, was in Washington to get seats for a Falcon 50 flown by Emergency Airlift, an air ambulance service.

Drone attacks kill civilians, too

It was good to see The Post calling in an editorial [“Drone war,” Nov. 2] for the U.S. government to bring its drone wars out of the shadows. But having just returned from Pakistan, where I saw the effects of drone warfare, I disagree with The Post’s characterization of drone aircraft as a more “humane way” to combat an irregular army. People we met from Waziristan talked about how drones, constantly hovering overhead, terrorize the local population. Parents fear sending their children to school; people are afraid to attend weddings, funerals or other community gatherings. They talked about widespread psychological trauma, especially among the children. The editorial also played down the extent of civilian casualties from drone attacks, mentioning “scores — maybe hundreds — of civilians being killed.” According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, whose count of drone- strike victims is widely acknowleged to be the most accurate, the total ranges from 546 to 1,105. The bureau recently examined The Post’s reporting and concluded that “the paper frequently omits credible reports of civilian deaths in US covert drone strikes.” Giving a more accurate picture of these deaths would give the public a better understanding of not only the tragic human costs of drone warfare but also why it is creating so much anti-American sentiment around the world. ****Medea Benjamin,** Washington** The writer is co-director of Codepink.

Plane blows tire during takeoff at Philadelphia airport

A plane was in the process of taking off from Philadelphia International Airport on Thursday night when one of its tires blew out, causing it to skid to a stop nose-down on the runway after its front landing gear collapsed. Passengers were evacuated from the US Airways flight originally bound for Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and would be booked onto new flights, the airline said. One person requested medical attention, according to US Airways. The incident was understandably upsetting for people on the plane, who had to climb out onto the wing and use emergency slides after the plane skidded to a halt. “The flight kind of shot up and then bounced down,” Christopher Teaney, 33, told the _Philadelphia Inquirer_. “Bounced real hard. Shot up again, and then nose-dived.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University And, of course, there was the requisite selfie (sorry) spreading like wildfire across social media not long after this happened. Similar things have happened before. A flight from Boston in 2012 had to make an emergency landing at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York after its front tire blew out shortly after takeoff. And a jet leaving Denver last year blew three tires during takeoff.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University There have also been problems while planes have landed. Last year, a flight landing in Newark blew some of its tires and veered off the runway. Flights landing in Chicago and Los Angeles also had blown tires. In 2010, a JetBlue was landing in Sacramento when its landing gear tires blew out. A Royal Air Moroc plane in 2012 was landing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, when the pilot had problems steering because one tire had burst.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University All flights to or from the Philadelphia airport were halted for more than two hours on Thursday night, airport officials reported. They resumed shortly after 8:15 p.m., but considerable delays remained. By Friday morning, three of the four runways were open and being used, but the damaged plane still sat on the fourth runway. It was removed and the fourth runway reopened just before 8:25 a.m. Travelers should still expect to encounter delays Friday.

What a near-miss with a helicopter taught one aviation student about drones

A few weeks ago, Owen Ouyang was piloting a small drone near his Martinez, Calif., home when the screen on his iPad went black. His DJI Phantom III had lost its signal near some power lines, so a safety feature sent it soaring.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Federal Aviation Administration guidelines specify that hobbyists’ drones should stay below 400 feet. But Ouyang, who lives on a hill, with homes, power lines and antennae towers nearby, had programmed his to fly to around 750 feet to avoid any collisions during a signal loss. The problem: a California Highway Patrol helicopter searching for a stolen vehicle was in the airspace where the 23-year-old aviation student’s drone was seeking safe haven. The two aircraft nearly collided. News reports say the pilot suddenly spotted a drone right in front of the helicopter, forcing the chopper to veer right and avoid crashing into the drone. Ouyang’s drone returned home, but about 10 minutes later, a police car showed up. An officer told Ouyang he was “in big trouble.” “And they said, ‘this is very serious. You almost hit a helicopter,’” Ouyang said in an interview. Ouyang wasn’t charged, but he said the incident was a wake-up call for anyone who thinks drones are toys akin to remote-controlled cars. He has flown a Cessna 152 and other propeller planes, but the incident that landed him in hot water involved a miniature aircraft being marketed to the masses. He’s alarmed by the treatment of drones by big retailers who pitched them as consumer products that can be flown by anyone, making them one of the hottest Christmas gifts of the season. At one point, the FAA expected more than a million to be sold in the holiday season.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “They were advertised to be a toy, something that you can fly out of the box without any training,” Ouyang said. “People should know that a drone is definitely not a toy … There’s a lot of potential problems for those people who have no experience in aviation to get this kind of drone.” Ouyang’s was one of a catalog of near-misses experienced by drone pilots in the past year. Earlier this month, the International Ski Federation banned camera drones at World Cup races after a drone crashed onto a course in Italy, nearly hitting an Olympic silver medalist. _[Camera drones banned by ski federation after close call]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico In August, the pilot of an Allegiant Air flight on approach to Los Angeles International Airport reported a smaller drone under the airliner’s wing “almost hit us.” That same month a United Airlines pilot said a “pizza-sized” drone passed just under his plane.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Recent Post coverage shows pilots have reported a surge in close calls with drones. Nearly 700 incidents of this nature have occurred so far this year, according to FAA statistics, about triple the number recorded for all of 2014. _[FAA records detail hundreds of close calls between airplanes and drones]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Ouyang’s attorney, Joseph Tully, said it is disconcerting that thousands of kids likely had the same model drone as Ouyang’s under their Christmas trees last week. “My client is a student pilot. He’s flown six or seven different aircraft on his own. He went to Google and researched all the FAA guidelines for drones. He went into the setting and made some adjustments which he felt would provide for safer flying,” Tully said in a recent interview. “And despite all that, he had a near miss with a CHP helicopter. He could potentially have been in hot water. Despite somebody with a background, training, willingness, the right attitude, sort of the perfect person we would want to be out there piloting drones, we almost had this calamity.” Ouyang apologized for the incident, but faced criticism from some who said it was irresponsible to let the aircraft fly above the FAA’s ceiling. Tully, his attorney, says the FAA guidelines simply aren’t clear enough for fliers, and drones aren’t equipped with technology out of the box to prevent accidents. Gregory S. McNeal, an associate professor of law and public policy at Pepperdine University whose area of focus includes drones, said it is Ouyang who was in the wrong. Ouyang, he said, “chose to knowingly disable a safety feature, allowing his drone to fly at twice the legal altitude, and now he wants to blame his choice on the device and have government impose greater burdens on people who don’t make decisions to operate unlawfully.” McNeal said the existing FAA guidelines “have teeth” and are sufficient for regulating drone operation. The FAA announced new regulations in December requiring drones to be registered and marked with registration numbers in order to fly; criminal penalties for failure to do so include fines up to $250,000 and imprisonment up to three years. _[That drone under your Christmas tree will have to be registered with the FAA] _    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico McNeal said the potential for safety issues is minimal, especially given that millions are flying daily, and few incidents are reported. He added that drones “make a great Christmas present,” by empowering people to gather information and imagery in a low-cost way and encouraging children to pursue STEM careers. Often he said, drones take the place of more hazardous activities. “An important thing that people forget is that drones replace much riskier activities, like people climbing telephone poles, or manned helicopters filled with fuel, flying at low altitude,” he said. But Tully, Ouyang’s attorney, said it’s only a matter of time before hobbyists’ accidents begin piling up, and the law and market are forced to adjust. He believes drones should be equipped with technology to detect nearby vehicles and move to a safe distance, like collision detection systems in some cars. He also thinks a body of new laws should be created to regulate drones. “When the automobile first came out, we didn’t have vehicular manslaughter laws, we didn’t have drunk driving laws, so society had to create a body of law to deal with this technology,” he said. “A drone is the same thing. It’s very similar. We don’t have a body of law that’s been developed around it yet to deal with it.” McNeal, however, believes the regulations currently on the books are enough. In Ouyang’s case, he said, the pilot simply should have known better. “We have enough laws for drones,” he said. “We just need people to start making smart decisions.”

Drone crashes into largest hot spring at Yellowstone National Park

Drones are banned from all national parks. On a related note: Someone may have crashed a drone at a national park.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday A drone appears to have crashed into Grand Prismatic Spring, the largest hot spring at Yellowstone National Park, according to a park official.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Al Nash, a spokesman for Yellowstone National Park, said that eyewitnesses reported seeing the drone crash into the spring Saturday. Authorities haven’t found it yet, he said, and they are considering using a helicopter to see if they can see the drone from above. If the drone is found, though, that raises the issue of how to remove the crashed device from the spring. Park officials will figure out how to remove the drone — if they need to do so at all — if they are able to locate it. The entire episode is under investigation, Nash said. The National Park Service announced in June that it was banning the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in the parks because of concerns the agency had about the impact drones were having.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday [H/T Reuters]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

Why pilots couldn’t stop a Marine Corps drone helicopter from crashing

It was a routine evening in Afghanistan when Marines and contractors with Lockheed Martin launched an unmanned K-Max drone helicopter from a major base in Helmand province to carry food rations to a smaller outpost.  The aircraft had made hundreds of similar trips for the Marines since first being deployed in 2011, and it looked like this would be like any other. Something went seriously wrong the evening of June 5, 2013, though. As the helicopter closed in on its destination, the Marine lieutenant commanding the mission and Lockheed contractors operating the aircraft remotely expected 15 mph headwinds. Instead, it got a tailwind, shaking up the drone. The pilots employed a technique known as the “weathervane” effect in an attempt to gain control, allowing the pilots to turn the aircraft into the wind and gain control. But it didn’t work. The oscillation of the 2,000-pound load swinging beneath the helicopter in a cargo net grew increasingly worse, bringing the 52-foot-long helicopter, valued at $11.1 million, down in a heap on the landing zone. No one was injured, but the laptop computer collecting information about the flight was ejected out the left cockpit window, and the tail burst into flames. The crash report, released to The Washington Post through the Freedom of Information Act, illustrates the dangers that can occur when a drone operator does not realize the peril their aircraft is in. Military investigators found that the mishap was preventable and occurred because the pilots did not intervene quickly enough when the helicopter experienced unexpected wind, according to documents released by the Marine Corps. Accident investigators also determined that U.S. personnel on the ground near the landing zone should have provided an updated weather report, and also sent a warning back to the pilots at Camp Bastion to let them know it was out of control. “The aircraft could not recover on its own based on the diverging conditions and its insufficient programming; it required human intervention,” the investigation report said.  Investigators recommended several changes following the crash, including that the detachment of personnel running the drone have better communication with observers on the ground. Training also should be updated to respond to excessive oscillating or swinging by the load suspended beneath the aircraft, investigators recommended. “At a minimum, the crew should be trained to point the aircraft into the wind in an auto descent using all available indications and pitch and weight load should be thoroughly monitored through the delivery of cargo and return to the cargo waypoint,” the report said. A Lockheed spokesman for the K-Max program, Keith Little, referred comment to the military on Thursday. The Marine Corps released a statement saying it has addressed the concerns raised. “Tactics, techniques and procedures were put in place to address all findings of the report which have helped preclude incidents like this from happening,” said a Marine spokesman, Capt. Dustin Pratico. “The lessons learned have made the K-MAX mission safer and more effective.”

Authorities identify California man who flew drone near White House

Authorities have identified the man who flew a small drone over the park in front of the White House. U.S. Park Police gave details Friday, saying that U.S. Secret Service officials detained Ryan MacDonald, 39, of Vacaville, Calif., after he flew a drone over Lafayette Square on Thursday afternoon. The incident began just after 1 p.m. when Secret Service officers spotted the drone flying over the park, just north of the White House. MacDonald, who was operating the drone, was quickly located and taken into custody. Lelani Woods, a spokeswoman with the park police, said the drone operator was standing on Pennsylvania Avenue, just north of the White House when he was located. Secret Service members told him to land the drone and he did. The device was inspected and deemed safe, according to officials. MacDonald was turned over to park police. He was later arrested and charged for violating a federal order, which prohibits flying unmanned aerial vehicles in the District and on federal lands. At the time he was taken into custody, officials did not release his identity. MacDonald is expected in court in June. In a photograph provided by officials, the drone appears to be a Parrot Bebop Drone. According to the product’s Web site, it is just under a foot long, about 11 inches wide and weighs less than a pound. Roads were closed around the White House in the afternoon while police investigated. A day before this incident, the Federal Aviation Administration had launched a campaign to remind people that everything within a 15-mile radius of Reagan National Airport is considered a “No Drone Zone.” “Federal rules prohibit any aircraft from operating in the Flight Restricted Zone around our nation’s capital without specific approval,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement Wednesday. “That includes all unmanned aircraft.” The FAA started the campaign a month after a Florida man piloted a gyrocopter to the lawn of the U.S. Capitol. That incident caused a major security scare as he breached Washington’s highly restricted airspace without anyone appearing to notice. Last month, FAA Administrator Michael P. Huerta said the gyrocopter appeared on the radar as a small dot that was overlooked by air traffic controllers. “Anyone visiting the D.C. area should leave their drone at home,” Huerta said in a statement Wednesday.

How airports and the drone industry are teaming up to protect planes

‘Stop saying ‘uh-oh’ while you’re flying’: Drone crash pilot quotes unveiled

Drones are often called unmanned aircraft. But there is a lot of human drama when they crash. Drone pilots and other crew members swear, scream and yell at their remote-control video screens when the aircraft fly out of control. Those moments are often captured by audio recorders in ground control stations. Here’s a sampling of that dialogue, according to transcripts contained in Air Force accident investigation reports: *** _“This thing’s kind of climbing like a pig. Climb, you pig. . . . Boy, this is going to be tight. . . . Okay, interesting. We are falling out of the sky.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified pilot of a Predator that crashed near Creech Air Force Base in Nevada on May 13, 2013. *** _“Drone just pitched up. Drone’s pitching over. Drone is uh, crashed and destructed, at uh, the end of the runway.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified pilot of a chase plane that was following a QF-4E target drone before it crashed at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida on July 17, 2013. *** _“What’s going on? Hang on! Hang on!. . . . Uh-oh! Shit! It’s spinning! . . . Okay, I think it just fell out of the sky.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified pilot of Predator that crashed near Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan on March 2, 2013. *** _“We’re in the soup here. . . . Dude, uh, we’re not sure what the aircraft is doing. . . . Yeah, we crashed.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified pilot of an Air Force Reaper as it crashed in Douglas County, Nev., on Dec. 5, 2012. *** _“Stop saying ‘uh-oh’ while you’re flying. It’s never good. Like going to the dentist or a doctor. . . . ‘Oops? What the f— you mean ‘Oops?’ “_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified camera operator, to a habitually nervous Predator pilot right before takeoff at Jalalabad Air Base on July 24, 2012. _“Whoa. . . . I don’t know what the hell just happened.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The same nervous Predator pilot, moments later, after the drone crashed. *** _“Holy shit! We got hit by a UAV! Hit by a UAV!”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified Air Force navigator of a C-130 Hercules transport plane that collided in midair with an Army RQ-7B Shadow drone in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2011. _“There’s a big frickin’ hole in the airplane.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified pilot of the Hercules, moments later. *** _“Dude, look at this camera. Seriously, I can’t do anything. There’s nothing I can do. This camera is completely f—–. Like there’s something in the air. Yeah, dude, I literally have no picture right now. This camera’s like, completely messed up.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified camera operator moments before his Predator crashed in the fog two miles short of the runway on May 17, 2011, in Djibouti, a country on the Horn of Africa where the U.S. military operates a large drone base. *** _“Where the hell is — where is the runway? It’s all the way over here. I overshot. Oh, shit. I think we lost the engine. Oh, shit, oh damn, oh my God, what is that? . . . What was all that stuff I just hit?”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Air Force Capt. Matthew Scardaci as his Predator crashed into a row of empty shipping containers at Kandahar Air Base on May 5, 2011. *** _“Holy crap, this is really spinning.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Pilot of an MQ-9A Reaper moments before it crashed on Aug. 31, 2010, near Gray Butte Airfield in California. *** _“That’s freaking us!”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Camera operator for a Predator after the air-traffic control tower at Balad Air Base in Iraq reported seeing a burning drone that had just crashed on Aug. 16, 2010. *** _“I couldn’t tell which way it was turning, or if it was straight, if it was upside down, or if it was right-side up. . . . I couldn’t grasp what was happening with the aircraft. And he said he thought it was upside down.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Unidentified Predator pilot to investigators trying to determine how and why she flew the drone upside down before it crashed near Kandahar Air Base on Jan. 15, 2010. _“Um, I guess I’ll just be blunt and say not well.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The Predator pilot who flew upside down, when asked by investigators how well her training had prepared her for such an incident. *** _“As the plane was going down, all I saw were tents and I was afraid that I had killed someone. I felt numb and I am certain that a few cuss words came out of my mouth.”_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Maj. Richard Wageman to Air Force investigators examining the crash of a Predator at Kandahar Air Base on Nov. 2, 2008.  **RELATED: Read the Washington Post’s yearlong investigation on drones**    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday **Part two:**Crashes mount as military flies more drones in the U.S.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday **Part one:**When drones fall from the sky    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

So China seized a U.S. drone submarine? Welcome to the future of international conflict.

Get used to this. Attacks on remotely controlled vehicles — drones — may become a new currency for coercive diplomacy, enabling nations to challenge rivals without hurting an opponent’s military personnel — and so without risking significant escalation.           Second, the public probably wouldn’t support going to war over a lost machine. As part of an ongoing project, I surveyed 1,210 Americans about their perceptions of drone operations. Unsurprisingly, I found that Americans are less likely to call for hawkish retaliatory measures if a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance drone is shot down than if the same happens to a spy plane with a pilot aboard. Third, for many of the same reasons, Americans and observers internationally may see retaliation over the loss of a drone as excessive, a disproportionate use of force.    In short, there’s a big difference between a military machine and a military machine with a living person on it. Drones are increasingly viewed as an attractive and low-risk means of replacing manned ships and planes on dull, dirty and dangerous missions. China’s recent drone seizure, however, may prompt policymakers and military commanders to consider more carefully whether rivals will be more likely to attack drones.

Popular Science and 25 reasons to love drones

A team of reporters takes on drones in the August issue of Popular Science magazine, pointing out that the Federal Aviation Administration is working on regulations that would set off the widespread development and use of small, unmanned aircraft. The FAA’s progress has been slower than expected, but eventually drones are expected to fill the skies. “The truth is, we’re witnessing a Kitty Hawk moment — the start of an era in which drones will change the world and the way we live in it,” the authors write. Today drones may be best known for their military use; the FAA has prohibited most commercial flights until it can figure out how to make them safe. About 50 military drones have crashed on training flights in the United States since 2001, and about 24 civilian ones have been in accidents over the past year, The Washington Post reported in June. Eventually drones will help expand Internet access around the world, enable crop spraying that can improve farming and keep tabs on the weather, the magazine says. They’ll also be fun and useful, the authors say, giving you the opportunity to take great photos from overhead and speeding up deliveries to your doorstep. Of course, drones have their drawbacks. They could be misused, and crowded skies might mean more accidents — and what about privacy? “In a world where drone operators will include police and paparazzi, it will be hard to escape from probing eyes in the sky,” Popular Science says. Read more: Crashes mount as military flies more drones in the U.S.

Turkey downs drone near Syrian border; Russia denies aircraft lost

BEIRUT — Turkey said its warplanes shot down a drone Friday near its border with Syria, underscoring heightened hostility in the region’s increasingly crowded airspace. The aircraft was warned three times to turn back before being fired on by Turkish jets patrolling the border, the Turkish military said in a statement. It gave no further details. Russia, which sent military planes into Syria last month, said none of its aircraft in Syria had been hit. But the United States suspected that Turkish fighters targeted a Russian drone, the Reuters news agency reported, citing a U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity. The incident occurred during a period of escalating tension along the Syrian border since Russia began an air campaign in support of President Bashar al- Assad 2  1/ 2  weeks ago. Turkey, a NATO member, has accused Russia of intentionally violating its airspace on two occasions since then. The incidents have drawn sharp rebukes from Turkey’s NATO allies. “Our aircraft performing patrol duty on the border fired and shot down the aircraft,” the Turkish military statement said. It said Turkey acted “within the rules of engagement.” The drone went down near the village of Deliosman, in Kilis province, Turkish media reported. The province borders Syria’s Aleppo province, where Syrian government forces, backed by Russian airstrikes, launched a new offensive Friday. Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioglu said the drone crossed the border and flew nearly two miles into Turkey before it was shot down. Some of the wreckage was examined, and photos of the downed drone were circulated by the Turkish media. The wreckage resembled that of a small Russian-made Orlan-10 reconnaissance drone, reported the Aviationist, a blog specializing in military aviation. The United States, Russia and Syria operate drones in the border region. In Moscow, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said no Russian aircraft had been shot down. “All the airplanes of the Russian aviation group in the Syrian Arab Republic have returned after accomplishing their combat tasks,” Konashenkov said. In Lebanon, the pro-Syrian al-Mayadeen television channel echoed that denial, quoting a Syrian military official as saying that no Syrian or Russian warplane or drone had been shot down over Turkey. Since 2013, Turkey has downed a Syrian military jet, a helicopter and a surveillance drone that crossed into Turkish airspace. Turkey announced that any aircraft entering its airspace from Syria would be considered a threat after Syrian ground fire brought down a Turkish F-4 Phantom II fighter jet in 2012. The United States, which is leading separate airstrikes against the Islamic State, has raised concerns about possible confrontations between Russia and Turkey in the skies over Syria. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter this month called on Russia to act in a “safe and professional manner” and respect Turkish sovereignty. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said last week that the organization has “a duty to reinforce” its member state after the incursions, which he described as unacceptable. NATO said Friday that Turkey has not asked it for help since the aircraft was downed. “We understand that Turkish authorities are investigating the origin of the unidentified drone that was shot down. Turkey has not asked for any NATO assistance or consultations,” said a NATO spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under customary ground rules. In an attempt to ease friction with Turkey over previous warplane incursions, a high-level Russian military delegation held talks in Ankara on Thursday. Russia has blamed bad weather for what it says was a single incursion, and Turkey said it received apologies from the Russians. “They apologized a few times, said it happened by accident and that they have taken measures so that it will not occur again,” Sinirlioglu, the foreign minister, said following the meetings, Reuters reported. Russian airstrikes have added new zeal to the beleaguered Syrian government’s campaign. The Syrian army advanced to control four towns south of Aleppo on Friday, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency reported. A U.S. defense official and Syrian activists said this week that hundreds of Iranian troops were among those massing for an offensive near Aleppo. Pro-government forces have also launched attacks near the central city of Hama. Michael Birnbaum in Brussels, Erin Cunningham in Cairo and Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report. **Read more:** Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

No beer delivery drones, FAA? This is why we can’t have nice things!

This is why we can’t have nice things! The FAA has batted down a Minnesota microbrewery’s plan for Lakemaid Beer drones to deliver beer to lake ice fishermen. This is a shame. Keyed to fishers’ GPS locations, the drones would swoop in with a fresh twelve-pack to gladden their spirits through a long day of fishing in a relatively civilian- free zone. What could have gone wrong? A light hop with some light hops! They really missed an opportunity for great PR. What better way to start incorporating the drones into our daily lives than by having them bring us beer? If the Machines begin their Rise with brews in hand, I for one will welcome our new robot overlords.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University As yet, commercial drone operation is banned, even with beer involved. And there won’t be commercial drone regulations until 2015. Even if the FAA is being a terrible spoilsport, I give it some points for all the puns FAA spokesman Les Dorr made when telling ABC news about their dispiriting decision. (“The media just hops on it. I hope things finally have come to a head.”)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Still, of all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are: there could have been peaceful drones delivering us beer.

Virginia man charged with flying drone near the Washington Monument

A Virginia man who police said was flying a drone near the Washington Monument early Wednesday has been given a criminal citation, according to the U.S. Park Police. John Newcomer Jr., 51, of Reston, was charged with operating an unmanned aircraft, which is illegal in and around Washington, including from private property. Police said in a statement that officers were alerted to the drone about 4 a.m. Wednesday and found the man near the north side of the monument near 16th Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Police said officers ordered Newcomer to land the drone — a blue UDI RC — and that it and a black radio controller were confiscated. Sgt. Anna Rose, a spokeswoman for the Park Police, said there was “no indication of nefarious activities” with the drone, which sells for about $60 on the Internet. The citation is $85. Washington and its immediate environs are within what is called a Flight Restricted Zone. In addition, the National Park Service prohibits the launching, landing and operating of unmanned aircraft. Wednesday’s incident was the first report of an unmanned drone being operated in a national park in the Washington area this year. Park Police said there have been 28 incidents since 2013. In October 2015, police cited a drone operator for landing an unmanned aircraft on the White House Ellipse. In May 2015, Secret Service officers stopped a man flying a small drone over Lafayette Square, in front of the White House, and in January of the same year, a man accidentally crashed a small drone on the White House grounds.

United overbooked — by one scorpion

Attention, United Airlines passengers: Don’t forget to lather up with “Off.” A couple returning from vacation in Mexico apparently brought on an unexpected passenger: a scorpion. It turned out to be another stinging moment in a tough week for the airline, according to a report by CNBC. During a flight from Houston to Calgary, the creature dropped from the overhead bin, landing in the man’s hair, according to news reports. When he shook it out onto his tray table and picked it up, it stung him. The scorpion was disposed of in the toilet. And other than suffering what “felt like a wasp sting,” the man was okay. “Medical personnel met the aircraft after it arrived in Calgary,” United spokesman Charles Hobart told CNBC. “Talk about snakebit,” said Andrew Gilman, a crisis management expert. “The next time United does its emergency protocols, they will be dropping insect repellant along with the mask.” The airline has been in damage control mode all week as it attempts to tamp down widespread criticism from a deeply troubling video of a paying passenger being forcibly removed by law enforcement officers from his seat to make room for airline personnel on an overbooked flight from Chicago to Louisville. That incident also occurred on Sunday. United chief executive Oscar Munoz has repeatedly apologized to the passenger, who is a physician, and the airline has said it will reimburse all of the passengers on that flight.

Look, up in the sky: It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s … a disguised surveillance drone?

When most people picture a drone, they probably either think of military-style behemoths or hobbyist quadcopters. But what if you couldn't tell a drone from something you expect to be in the sky, like a bird? That's the question raised after reports of what appears to be a bird-shaped unmanned aerial vehicle going down in Somalia. The alleged drone looks like it has a crudely welded metal body that would resemble a bird of prey if viewed from the ground. Pictures of the craft were shared on the Twitter account of someone who identifies himself as Adam A. Omar, who said the drone crashed in Mogadishu's Waabari district.    The company doesn't seem to have any plans to turn their creations into digital superspies, instead developing them as proof-of-concept design challenges. But the designs also hint at a future where drone technology is so advanced that almost anything could be watching.

FAA starts ‘No Drone Zone’ campaign. A day later, man flies drone outside White House.

The Federal Aviation Administration did the equivalent Wednesday of telling a child: “Don’t you dare touch that.” And of course, less than a day later, someone did. The agency launched an educational campaign reminding the public you can’t fly drones in Washington. “Federal rules prohibit any aircraft from operating in the Flight Restricted Zone around our nation’s capital without specific approval,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, in a statement. “That includes all unmanned aircraft.” And, as in any good public outreach effort, it took to social media: The FAA said it in Spanish too: But less than 24 hours later, on Thursday afternoon, a man tried to fly a drone on the White House lawn. That was just after the FAA reminded the Twitterverse once more:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Don’t make me tell you again…! Ok, well maybe once more. Right around the time the drone-flying man was being detained by Secret Service, the FAA cautioned: You’ve been warned. [ _RELATED: Gyrocopter bound for Capitol lawn showed up as a tiny dot on FAA radar_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Super Bowl rules: guacamole yes, drones no

Super Bowl XLIX is just days away, but officials at the Federal Aviation Administration are doing their best to get the word on an issue that’s been the topic of discussion this week. Yes folks, drones. In a helpful press release, the FAA reminds folks that: A D.C. area man learned a very valuable lesson this week about drinking and so-called unmanned aircraft. The man, an employee at a government intelligence agency, apparently took his friend’s quadcopter for a spin, but lost control of the 2-foot by 2-foot drone, which then crashed on the White House grounds. The incident coming on the heels of other high profile security breaches, raised fresh questions about White House security.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The FAA has established airspace restrictions over the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale where the Super Bowl will be played. According to an FAA fact sheet, an additional 1,200 to 1,400 general aviation flights are expected in the Phoenix area for the game.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The fact sheet also notes this: All unmanned aircraft operations – also known as drones — are prohibited within the restricted areas. These include model aircraft operations, model rocketry and Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). Anyone who operates an unmanned aircraft in the restricted area could face civil penalties or criminal charges.

The FAA should strike the right balance on drone regulation

SOME PEOPLE intend to be national security threats. Others are just drunk. In the case of Monday’s drone crash on the southeast corner of the White House grounds, the immediate problem seems to have been an inebriated pilot. But the underlying issue is that the federal government poorly regulates the booming drone industry. The right response is not overreaction but rather tightening rules and procedures in some ways — and loosening them in others. The White House has seen a handful of eye-raising security breaches in recent years, including one in September in which a man armed with a knife hopped the perimeter fence and ran into the building. In response, security continues to tighten. Among the most visible changes are unsightly waist-high fences around the building. Following the latest breach, the Secret Service says it won’t install golf netting around the White House grounds. That’s good: Washington has already become a city of concrete bollards and security cordons; official buildings shouldn’t be wholly removed from the public. Federal authorities can and should enhance security against drones and other threats in smarter, less obtrusive ways. Technologies in the pipeline could detect small incoming aircraft. The trick will be intercepting or jamming drones on their way toward the West Wing without harming bystanders. Rather than shooting errant drones out of the sky, it would be better to ensure that they never get near sensitive areas. At the moment, the Federal Aviation Administration requires that amateur drone pilots keep their devices at least five miles away from airports and below 400 feet. But several recent near-miss episodes between descending jetliners and drones demonstrate that these rules are far from perfectly applied. The responsibility is mostly in operators’ hands. The FAA should look into requiring that safety protocols be written into drone firmware, which would automatically prevent operation in unauthorized airspace, no matter how inebriated operators are. Until the agency does that, high-profile enforcement in cases of serious rule-breaking might help. The government hasn’t released the name of the man who flew his 2-foot-by-2-foot unmanned aerial vehicle into restricted White House airspace Monday. Whoever he is, he should be punished publicly, showing other amateur drone pilots that responsibly operating their drones isn’t optional. In other ways, the government should loosen up. The FAA generally doesn’t allow drone flights for commercial purposes even as amateurs take to the sky freely. The agency is developing rules that would allow more commercial drone flying — but might also require commercial operators to carry full pilot’s licenses, which would be another form of regulatory overkill. The aim should be to prevent midair collisions and cordon off restricted airspace. Licensing makes sense, but requiring hours of cockpit time does not. The benefits of using drones in commerce — from delivering packages to dusting crops — are too great to continue repressing the industry. (One potentially interested party is Amazon, whose chief executive is Jeffrey P. Bezos, the owner of The Post.) Drone use should be safe. At the moment, though, it’s both under- and over-regulated. We hope the latest incident jolts the system into a better balance. **Read more about this topic:** The Post’s View: Making commercial and recreational drones safe Gary Shapiro: Commercial drones are ready for takeoff Dana Milbank: Drones? The White House is full of them.

Let’s enjoy those drone aircraft that let us kill with impunity while we can, because, as military history tells us, advantages gained through new technology don’t last long. There are plenty of examples. When the British Navy built Dreadnought, the first all-big-gun battleship, the ship was soon copied and a naval arms race ensued. The United States built and demonstrated the first atomic bomb; now numerous countries have them or want them. When the Philistines saw what David did to Goliath, they probably created a slingshot corps that fired even bigger rocks. Crashed drones are surely being reverse engineered right now. More seriously, every major power is no doubt investigating drone technology. Because of that, war, when it comes, will be ever more dreadful. Paul Mahany, Bethesda

When a drone crashed in front of Germany’s Angela Merkel

A September 2013 incident in which a drone crashed in front of German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a campaign event reinforced the potential dangers posed by small drones, like the one that flew onto White House grounds early Monday.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Activists from Germany’s Pirate Party took credit for the one in Dresden, saying they were protesting Merkel’s surveillance policies.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The Secret Service has been concerned about drones entering White House airspace. Despite all the post-9/11 efforts to secure the area, drones are still a problem because radar often doesn’t spot their movement. Officials familiar with the air protection at the White House said the threat of a drone carrying explosives or surveillance is not easily stopped, but is a high priority for the Secret Service. There was no indication of a threat from either the drone at the White House on Monday or the one in Germany in 2013. **Also read:**A short recent history of small drones near the White House and Capitol    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

How crashing drones are exposing secrets about U.S. war operations

Crashing drones are spilling secrets about U.S. military operations. A surveillance mission was exposed last week when a Predator drone crashed in northwest Syria while spying on the home turf of President Bashar al-Assad. U.S. officials believe the drone was shot down, but they haven’t ruled out mechanical failure. Regardless, the wreckage offered the first hard evidence of a U.S. confrontation with Assad’s forces. The mishap in Syria follows a string of crashes in Yemen, another country where the U.S. military keeps virtually all details of its drone operations classified. Yemeni tribesmen have reported three cases in the past 15 months in which U.S. drones have fallen from the sky, pulling back the curtain on likely surveillance targets. Air Force spokesmen said they could not confirm any crashes in Yemen, but Air Force records obtained by The Washington Post show the dates match up with official acknowledgments of accidents that occurred in classified locations. Since January 2014, the Air Force has reported 14 crashes of Predator and Reaper drones that either destroyed the aircraft or inflicted more than $2 million in damage. Three of the accidents took place in Afghanistan, but six happened elsewhere in classified or undisclosed sites, a sharp increase from prior years. The far-flung nature of the accidents reinforces how U.S. drone operations have spread well beyond the established war zone in Afghanistan. In November, a Reaper drone crashed in the Sahara while returning to a new U.S. base in Niger. At the start of last year, a Predator plunged into the Mediterranean Sea after conducting a secret mission over Libya, a rare tangible sign of U.S. surveillance operations there. U.S. military drones are also based in Turkey, Italy, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Djibouti, a small country on the Horn of Africa. In addition, the CIA has its own drone bases in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. The demand for U.S. military drones that are capable of conducting airstrikes continues to soar. Last year, Predators and Reapers flew more than ever: 369,913 flight hours, or six times the figure for 2006, according to Air Force statistics. The Predator alone logged the third-most hours of any plane in the Air Force, ranking narrowly behind the F-16 fighter jet and the workhorse KC-135 refueling tanker. Military planners had expected the opposite, that demand for drones would drop as U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan. Instead, the Pentagon became embroiled in a new conflict against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, other terrorist threats have flared in Yemen, Somalia and North Africa, further taxing the U.S. drone fleet. “We simply underestimated the continued demand,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work told a defense conference last week in Washington. “They quickly got sucked up in the unexpected campaign in Iraq and Syria.” Commanders’ appetite for drones and other surveillance aircraft, he added, “remains very, very high and continues to outstrip our supply.” In addition to keeping pilots out of harm’s way, drones such as the Predator and Reaper can instantly transmit full-motion video to intelligence analysts — a critical technology in modern warfare. Video from drones “has become fundamental to almost all battlefield maneuvers,” said Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the overall commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan, in a prepared statement this month to the House Armed Services Committee. He said allies were chipping in with their drones and other reconnaissance aircraft but that “shortages do remain that will need to be addressed.” The Pentagon is asking Congress for $904 million next year to buy 29 Reapers, more than double the number it had sought for this year. The Air Force says it has an acute need to replace drones that have crashed and to phase out the Predator, an older model that has less firepower and range than the Reaper. The surge in drone flights has also strained the crews that operate them from the ground, forcing many to work six days a week. Faced with a shortage of remote-control pilots, the Air Force has stepped up recruiting and is planning to offer retention bonuses. Reliability has long been the Achilles’ heel of drones. Although they malfunction less often than they used to, they still crash at a higher rate than other military aircraft. Of the 269 Predators acquired by the Air Force over the past two decades, more than half have wrecked in major accidents, records show. Predators and Reapers generally fly at altitudes above 18,000 feet — too high for militants to shoot them down with small arms. But the slow-moving aircraft can be easy marks for missile batteries operated by regular armies. On March 17, the U.S. Air Force lost contact with a Predator that had been flying a nighttime sortie near Latakia, Syria. While Assad’s forces had been happy to allow U.S. drones to target Islamic State fighters in other parts of the country, Latakia is an Assad stronghold. Syrian state-run media reported that government air defenses shot down “a hostile aircraft” and showed pictures of the wreckage, including a stamped label from General Atomics, the California-based manufacturer of the Predator. U.S. officials have not disputed that the drone could have been hit by a missile, but they have not ruled out other potential causes. A loss of electrical power and severed communications links are two other common factors in drone accidents. The crash revealed something else. It would be extremely difficult for U.S. drones to reach northwestern Syria from their primary bases in the Persian Gulf. That meant the Predator had almost certainly entered Syrian airspace from Turkey. The U.S. Air Force has Predators stationed at Incirlik Air Base, but the Turkish government has long insisted those drones are limited to flying surveillance missions over northern Iraq. The crash in Latakia was a clear sign that Turkish officials had secretly relaxed that rule and were permitting the Pentagon to use their territory for operations in Syria.

Plane hits deer. And so begins the annual rut, when lovesick animals collide with vehicles.

This is the time of the year when travelers should be extra alert to avoid hitting deer. Just ask the pilot of a small plane in Pennsylvania.  The plane, a the Beechcraft BE58, hit the deer and damaged or sheared off its left main gear while taking off from Wings Field Airport in Blue Bell, Pa., on a trip to Pittsburgh, the news report says. The pilot, recognizing that he would have to bring in the plane without functioning landing gear on one side, decided instead to land about 55 miles away at Lancaster Airport, where the plane’s home base was and where emergency crews were standing by. The diversion to Lancaster also allowed the plane’s crew and mechanics to study the plane’s manual for possible fixes and ultimately prepare for a landing on the aircraft’s belly, Lancaster Online says. The aircraft sustained only minor damage to its underside and propellers. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating. The pilot, who wasn’t identified, found out the hard way what biologists and insurers have known for years — and hunters have known for eons. This is the time of the year when collisions with white tail deer increase in frequency, largely because autumn coincides with the animals’ mating season.    Love hurts.

You may be powerless to stop a drone from hovering over your own yard

William Merideth had just finished grilling dinner for his family when he saw a drone hovering over his land. So he did what he said any Kentuckian might do — he grabbed his Benelli M1 Super 90 shotgun, took aim and unleashed three rounds of birdshot. “The only people I’ve heard anything negative from are liberals that don’t want us having guns and people who own drones,” said the truck company owner, now a self-described “drone slayer.” Downing the quadcopter, which had a camera, was a way to assert his right to privacy and property, he said. The drone was owned by John Boggs, a hobbyist, who told authorities he was trying to take pictures of the scenery. He argues in a lawsuit filed this month in U.S. District Court in Louisville that Merideth did not have the right to shoot the craft down because the government controls every inch of airspace in America. For decades, the issue of who controls the nation’s air didn’t matter much to everyday Americans. Planes, after all, typically must stay hundreds of feet above ground while in the air. But drones that can take off or land almost anywhere -- and the tech companies who dream of using them to deliver goods to your front porch -- are igniting a debate over who exactly owns the air just above ordinary homes and lawns. “There is gray area in terms of how far your property rights extend,” said Jeramie Scott, national security counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “It’s going to need to be addressed sooner rather than later as drones are integrated into the national airspace.” The issue is becoming more urgent as drones are crowding America’s skies: The Consumer Technology Association estimated 700,000 were sold last year. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, every inch above the tip of your grass blades is the government’s jurisdiction. “The FAA is responsible for the safety and management of U.S. airspace from the ground up,” said an agency spokesman, echoing rules laid out on its website. But common law long held that landowners' rights went “all the way to Heaven.” And today, it’s clear that they have some rights. After all, developers and even cities sometimes sell off rights to the air above their buildings. And if a neighbor has a tree limb hanging over your fence, you generally can chop it off.  The Court gave it to him -- and said that a property owner owns “at least as much of the space above the ground as he can occupy or use in connection with the land.” But even then, the justices didn’t clearly define a precise aerial boundary for landowners -- leaving a gray area that Boggs is hoping to clear up for the burgeoning drone market. “This industry is growing quickly -- and it’s to some extent being stifled by the legal uncertainty surrounding these issues,” said James Mackler, an attorney at Frost Brown Todd, who represents Boggs. If tech companies are going to deliver goods to the yards of customers, there will need to be clarity on exactly where a drone can fly. Could a drone delivering a package to your neighbor fly over your yard at 50 feet? Or would it need to descend vertically from hundreds of feet in the air to avoid trespassing on your airspace? Boggs is asking the court to rule he’s entitled to $1,500 to cover damages to the drone. But more importantly, he wants a judge to decide whether his drone was trespassing on the air over Merideth’s property or if it was flying within the jurisdiction of the federal government. A complicating factor is that Boggs and Merideth tell different stories about the day in question. Boggs’ suit says the drone was approximately 200 feet above ground, a claim he has previously said was backed up by images captured by the craft. But Merideth says it was much closer to his home. And when a local judge dismissed criminal charges against Merideth in October, she relied on multiple eyewitnesses who said the drone was flying below the trees. In 2012, Congress tasked the FAA with integrating drones into America’s skies. The FAA is still finalizing these rules, which are expected to be wrapped up by June. Its proposed rules have little to say about property rights, though they recommend that commercial drones cannot be operated over a person not directly involved in the operation. Crafts flown by hobbyists such as Boggs are also not addressed. Some argue the agency has the legal authority to address the privacy issues raised by drones. But the agency “does not consider privacy to be their role or expertise,” said University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo. The FAA says it is part of a White House-ordered effort to develop best practices on privacy with other agencies, think-tanks and drone companies. But these talks will not produce hard and fast rules. For now, everyday homeowners mostly have to depend on local laws to fend off drones. In some cases, homeowners could bring civil cases against the pilots of low flying drones, according to Calo. They may also be able to persuade local law enforcement to bring charges against the operators under existing trespass, nuisance or “peeping Tom” laws. While the federal government has moved slowly to craft drone rules, 32 states have enacted their own laws or resolutions regarding the crafts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But the specifics vary across the country. And some states left it to local authorities to judge when drones are trespassing on people’s property. Merideth says the day that Boggs’ drone — a DJI Phantom with a camera — flew by was actually the third time in 18 months he’d spotted that kind of craft over his neighborhood. He had called the police on previous occasions, he said, but gotten no help. By the time Boggs’ drone flew over his land -- hovering after multiple passes, according to Merideth -- he was fed up. “In my mind it wouldn’t have been any different had he been standing in my backyard with a video camera,” Merideth said.

Near-collisions between drones, airliners surge, new FAA reports show

Pilots around the United States have reported a surge in near-collisions and other dangerous encounters with small drones in the past six months at a time when the Federal Aviation Administration is gradually opening the nation’s skies to remotely controlled aircraft, according to FAA records. Since June 1, commercial airlines, private pilots and air-traffic controllers have alerted the FAA to 25 episodes in which small drones came within a few seconds or a few feet of crashing into much larger aircraft, the records show. Many of the close calls occurred during takeoffs and landings at the nation’s busiest airports, presenting a new threat to aviation safety after decades of steady improvement in air travel. _**(Related: Close encounters on rise as small drones gain in popularity) ** _ Many of the previously unreported incident reports — released Wednesday by the FAA in response to long-standing public-records requests from The Washington Post and other news organizations — occurred near New York and Washington. The FAA data indicates that drones are posing a much greater hazard to air traffic than previously recognized. Until Wednesday, the FAA had publicly disclosed only one other near-collision between a drone and a passenger aircraft: a March 22 incident involving a US Airways regional airliner near Tallahassee, Fla. The newly released incident reports, however, reveal that the FAA has been receiving a steady stream of near-miss alerts from airliners and private pilots since then. On Sept. 30, air-traffic controllers at LaGuardia Airport in New York reported that Republic Airlines Flight 6230 was “almost hit” by a brightly colored small drone at an altitude of 4,000 feet as the passenger plane was descending to land. On Sept. 8 at LaGuardia, three different regional airliners — Express Jet, Pinnacle and Chautauqua — reported “very close calls” with a drone within minutes of one another at an altitude of about 2,000 feet as they were preparing to land. On July 29, a US Airways shuttle flight that had departed from Reagan National Airport reported an extraordinarily narrow encounter with a yellow drone with a four-foot wingspan that suddenly passed within 50 feet of the aircraft while it was approaching LaGuardia. Outside Washington, Porter Airlines Flight 725 from Toronto was descending to Dulles International Airport at an altitude of 2,800 feet on June 29 when it reported that a black-and-silver drone zipped past, just 50 feet away. On June 1, a United Airlines flight originating from Rome alerted the control tower at Dulles that a four-engine helicopter drone interfered with its descent and passed just 100 feet underneath the Boeing 767. The 25 near-midair collisions were among more than 175 incidents in which pilots and air-traffic controllers have reported seeing drones near airports or in restricted airspace since June. Pilots described most of the rogue drones as small, camera-equipped models that have become increasingly popular with hobbyists and photographers. Although such drones often measure only a few feet in diameter and weigh less than 10 pounds, aviation safety experts say they could easily trigger an accident by striking another plane’s propeller or getting sucked into a jet engine. “The potential for catastrophic damage is certainly there,” said Fred Roggero, a retired Air Force major general who was in charge of aviation safety investigations for the service and now serves as a consultant to companies seeking to fly drones commercially. The reported increase in dangerous encounters comes as the FAA is facing pressure from federal lawmakers and drone manufacturers to move more quickly to open the skies to remotely controlled aircraft. Under a 2012 law, Congress ordered the FAA to safely integrate drones into the national airspace. The FAA is still developing regulations to make that happen, a process that is expected to take years. Under FAA guidelines, it is legal for hobbyists to fly small drones for recreational purposes, as long as they keep them under 400 feet, at least five miles away from airports and outside other restricted areas. Flying drones for commercial purposes is largely prohibited, although the FAA has begun to issue special permits to filmmakers and other industries to operate drones on a case-by-case basis until the agency can adopt a final set of safety regulations. The FAA, however, is struggling to keep up with an influx of cheap drones that have flooded the market. According to some estimates, half a million small drones have been sold in the United States in the past three years. The aviation-safety agency lacks the manpower to police airports or effectively track down offenders. Only a handful of rogue drone operators have been apprehended or penalized across the country. In a statement, the FAA acknowledged that it is now receiving about 25 reports a month from pilots who have spotted drones flying in restricted airspace or in close proximity to other aircraft. “In partnership with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, the FAA has identified unsafe and unauthorized [drone] operations and contacted the individual operators to educate them about how they can operate safely under current regulations and laws,” the agency said. Previously, the only other occasion in which the FAA has released data on drone sightings near airports came in June, when The Post reported that the agency had received a total of 15 reports of risky encounters over a period of two years — or an average of fewer than one incident a month. Asked why there had been such a large increase in reports since then, the FAA said in a statement Wednesday that the difference could be “attributed to increased awareness by pilots and the public and improved reporting and record-keeping processes.” Manufacturers and businesses that want to fly drones — including real estate agents, delivery firms, photographers and farmers — have criticized the FAA for moving too slowly to develop rules of the sky for using the new technology. They say the absence of clear regulations for certifying drone pilots and aircraft has contributed to a rise in reckless behavior by untrained drone enthusiasts. “The reality here is that we need to have rules,” said Michael Drobac, executive director of the Small UAV Coalition, a lobbying group for firms that make drones or want to integrate them into their business operations. He said “sophisticated companies” are largely prohibited from flying drones but that hobbyists can operate them without oversight. Among the companies that are part of the Small UAV Coalition is Amazon.com, which wants to use autonomous drones to deliver small packages to customers’ doorsteps. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos also owns The Post.) Rapid advances in technology have made small drones affordable and easy for people to fly right out of the box. Some models cost less than $500. Most come with powerful miniature cameras that can film striking video scenes while hovering over back yards, stadiums, city centers and other places previously beyond the reach of amateur photographers. R. Lee Morris, a professional photographer in Charleston, S.C., said he began flying a small DJI Phantom drone with a GoPro camera last year and was “blown away” by its capabilities. “It’s just an incredible thing to have fun with.” In a blog post in March, he wrote that he wanted to see how high the Phantom could fly so he tested it over the skies in a populated area in Charleston. He estimated that the Phantom rose to about 1,000 feet — more than twice as high as the FAA guidelines for hobbyists — and acknowledged that it could have caused problems for rescue helicopters or low-flying aircraft. In an interview, Morris said he felt a little guilty afterward and removed videos of the flight from his Web site because “I didn’t want to set a bad example.” But he added that he wasn’t convinced that flying a small drone like a Phantom posed an aviation hazard. He said a pilot friend told him that if the drone struck another plane’s propeller, the remotely controlled aircraft “would just explode into a million pieces.” Several pilots who reported dangerous encounters with drones to the FAA disagreed strenuously, telling The Post in interviews that the tiny aircraft can pose a menace to air safety. Drones are not equipped with transponders to broadcast their locations in the sky, and most models are too small to show up on radar or anti-collision warning systems. By the time they become visible at high altitudes, pilots said, it is usually too late to change course. “All it’s going to take is for one to come through a windshield to hurt some people or kill someone,” said Kyle Fortune, who was flying a four-seat Cirrus SR-22 near Medford, Ore., on Sept. 22, when he said a drone about four feet in diameter suddenly appeared 100 feet underneath his plane. He was flying at an altitude of 4,000 feet — about 10 times higher than the FAA’s height restrictions for small drones. “It was some idiot out there with a drone. I have no idea what he was doing up there, taking pictures or whatnot,” Fortune said. “If it had come through the cockpit it wouldn’t have been a good day.” Mike Gilbert, chief flight instructor at Aviation Adventures, a flight school based in Manassas, Va., was flying a Cessna with a student and another passenger about 9:45 p.m. on Sept. 17 when a small drone with two red lights suddenly appeared about 200 feet overhead. “It came seemingly out of nowhere,” Gilbert said. “As pilots, at a minimum it’s distracting. If one of them hits us, we’re coming down. We’re trained to deal with dead engines, but we’re afraid it’s going to hit a [propeller], which would be a disaster, or the airframe.” Several other near-collisions have been reported by pilots of rescue helicopters used to transport patients needing emergency medical attention. A Life Flight helicopter in Pottsville, Pa., reported Nov. 19 that it was descending at 2,400 feet when a flight nurse in the co-pilot seat suddenly yelled: “Watch out!” A small drone was flying straight toward the rescue helicopter “at a high rate of closure,” according to a report that the crew said it filed with the FAA. The pilot was forced to make a sharp banking turn to the right to avoid a collision, according to the report. The crew estimated that the drone passed with about 50 to 100 feet of separation. Greg Lynskey, government relations manager for the Association of Air Medical Services, said small drones were becoming a major concern for rescue helicopter crews around the country. He said the FAA guidelines that allow hobbyists to fly drones as long as they stay five miles away from airports are too lax and do little to protect helicopters that fly near hospitals or pick up patients at accident scenes on the ground. “I’m hoping this can get worked out before we have a catastrophic incident,” he said. “It wouldn’t take much to bring down a helicopter. If a drone hits the tail rotor, that’d pretty much be it.” Concerned about the potential for trouble, drone manufacturers have begun to add software upgrades to their drone operating systems to prevent them from flying near airports or above a certain altitude. DJI, the Chinese firm that makes the popular Phantom model, now programs its drones so that they cannot take off within 1.5 miles of a major airport and must stay below 400 feet within a five-mile radius of the installation. The default height limit in other areas is programmed at 400 feet, although owners can bypass that ceiling by downloading a software application that comes with safety warnings. “We did start noticing one of the challenges, or opportunities, we have is to program basic safe-flying practices into the firmware,” said Michael Perry, a DJI spokesman. “We all want to see this technology safely integrated into the airspace.”

Man vs. drone, vs. the law

An interesting story, reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune (Kristina Davis) (see also the story by NBC 7 San Diego’s Greg Bledsoe):    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico 1. Augustine Lehecka and his friends are at the beach. 2. A drone flies over them; according to Lehecka, the drone “was flying dangerously low,” with “its mounted camera swiveling back and forth apparently aimed at the group. He said he motioned for the drone to leave them alone, but it didn’t appear to work.” 3. Lehecka then threw his T-shirt at the drone. The T-shirt got caught in the drone’s propeller, which caused the drone to fall, and apparently caused $750 damage to the drone. 4. Lehecka was then arrested and charged with felony vandalism, and had to stay in jail overnight, though charges have now been dropped. 5. The pilot says the drone was flying “up high” above the ground, according to the NBC7 story; Lehecka says it can’t have been more than about 6 feet above him. It seems to me that if Lehecka downed it with his T-shirt, the drone can’t have been very high up, though I expect the distance could have been somewhat more than 6 feet. Here’s my question: Say that instead of the camera being (say) 6 to 12 feet above Lehecka, it was 6 to 12 feet to the side of someone (call him Joe Schmoe), being carried by someone standing on the beach. It could have been a normal camera, or a cell phone camera. The person — a paparazzi (paparazzo), a freelance news photographer, or anyone else — was recording video without Schmoe’s permission. That recording would likely not have been a crime or tort against Schmoe: not trespassing, since the beach is public property; not actionable “intrusion upon seclusion,” since it wasn’t photographing onto Schmoe’s property, or recording any particularly intimate activity; not criminal stalking, since it didn’t involve following, or a “knowing and willful course of conduct directed at a specific person that seriously alarms, annoys, torments, or terrorizes the person, and that serves no legitimate purpose.” It would have been rude, and a mild annoyance, but not enough to make it a crime or tort against Schmoe (or his companions). Perhaps the law should be different, and photographing someone in a public place from a close enough distance should generally be illegal. (Certainly many movie stars beset by papparazzi would be happy to change the law this way.) But my sense is that such photography from a nearby place on the ground is generally legal. But say that to stop this photographer, Schmoe knocked the camera away, in a manner that was likely to damage the camera (and did indeed damage the camera) but wouldn’t have injured the photographer. Would we think Schmoe should be criminally or civilly liable for damaging the photographer’s camera in this hypothetical? And is there sufficient reason to think that the result should be different if the camera is 6 to 12 feet above Lehecka, as opposed to 6 to 12 feet to the side of Schmoe? Or is the possible distinction solely based on safety rather than privacy, so that Lehecka’s actions were justifiable but only if he was worried that the drone was likely to physically injure him or his friends (and not if his real motivation was solely that he didn’t like being photographed)? For more on this general question, check out “self-defense against overflying drones,” a guest-post here last year by Prof. Michael Froomkin & Zak Colangelo. Note also that it’s possible that the drone operators activity violated FAA regulations, and it’s also possible that intentionally damaging a flying drone is a a federal crime, given that federal criminal law seems to treat drones as “aircraft,” given that they are “civil, military, or public contrivance[s] invented, used, or designed to navigate, fly, or travel in the air” (and “civil aircraft” is broadly defined as “an aircraft except a public aircraft”).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico UPDATE: A comment by reader Liberaltarian: Reader PubliusVA responds,

A disturbing reality behind that Chinese tiger drone video making the Internet rounds

When the tigers struck the drone from the sky, as seen in a recent and popular YouTube video, the act of animal destruction at first seemed playful. The sight of a few chubby cats romping around in the snow helped. Certainly, a few observers found the scene amusing for the same reasons the Greeks told the tale of Icarus: Look, kids, raw nature kneecapping technological hubris. Once the cats swatted the drone to the ground, the tigers chewed on the machine for a bit, causing the object to smoke (quadcopter, quadcopter, burning bright!), before staff members took the drone away. Hunting the drone around the tiger park was, reportedly, a form of exercise for the animals.

World’s largest aircraft takes world’s slowest nose-dive during second test flight

Everything seemed to go well for the helium-filled craft. The skies were clear. As Hybrid Air Vehicles, the company that manufactured the airship, put it on Twitter, it was a “Glorious English summer day.” After 100 minutes, the ship swung back toward the airfield to land. But on the return journey, around 11 a.m. local time, something went wrong.   It was different from the first landing, the level descent that Hatwell had seen a week before. This time, the forward end of the cabin hit first, she said, “and it was horrible.” The two pilots seemed surprised about what was going on, according to onlookers who said they could see the crew through the cabin windows.  “Hybrid Air Vehicles runs a robust set of procedures for flight test activities and investigation of issues,” the company said in its statement. “We will be running through these in the days ahead as we continue the development of the Airlander aircraft.”

MLB will ‘monitor the situation’ after drone nearly takes out fans at Padres game

No drones allowed. That’s the rule MLB reiterated Tuesday, two days after a drone nearly took out a couple of fans during the San Diego Padres’ 5-1 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks at Petco Park on Sunday.   “Pretty sure the Russians have something to do with this,” one of the television commentators joked before the drone crashed into an empty seat between two adults in attendance.  “Guest safety at Petco Park is a top priority for the Padres. Sunday’s drone incident was immediately addressed by Padres’ security and the San Diego Police Department to ensure the safety of our guests,” Padres Chief Operating Officer Erik Greupner said in a statement to Sports Illustrated. “This incident highlights the dangers posed by unauthorized drone use in proximity to large public venues like Petco Park. The Padres vocally supported the City of San Diego’s recently enacted ordinance that enables SDPD to enforce the FAA’s restrictions on operating drones near large public venues. “We look forward to continuing to work with local authorities to ensure that this ordinance is enforced to the fullest extent possible.” The drone operator remains at large.

The last moments of Predator #07-3249

The drone, armed with a single Hellfire missile, crashed on its approach to the runway next to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti on May 17, 2011. Air Force investigators concluded that low clouds and humidity obscured the drone’s camera sensor – rendering it “blind” – and that a Global Positioning System malfunction misjudged how close the aircraft was flying to the ground. __ COCKPIT VOICE RECORDING TRANSCRIPTS  23:15:22- Air Traffic Controller – CALL SIGN (XXXX) 5 miles final, gear down runway 9  23:15:28- PILOT – Gear down, runway 9  23:15:31- ATC – clear to land runway 9, CALL SIGN (XXXX)  23:15:34- SENSOR – Dude, look at this camera. Seriously, I can’t do anything. There’s nothing I can do. I just nuked it.  23:15:41- PILOT – Alright.  23:15:42- SENSOR – Let’s try it again.  23:15:44- PILOT – Yeah, see what you can get working and I’ll plan on landing on this for now.  23:15:47- SENSOR – There’s seriously like something… This camera is completely [expletive].  23:15:54- SENSOR – Like there’s something in the air.  23:16:24- SENSOR – Alright 30 seconds and this will be the second nuke at this altitude which if it doesn’t correct it, it’s unbelievable.  23:16:41- SENSOR – Did he say, “Cleared to land”?  23:16:42- PILOT - Yeah  23:16:44- SENSOR – Ok. Checklist complete, links are set up, autopilots disengaged, cleared to land, try to mess with this picture.  23:17:01- SENSOR – Yeah dude, I literally have…. No picture right now. This camera’s like, completely messed up.  23:17:16- SENSOR – Can you land on that?  23:17:17- PILOT – Uh, I’m going around if I can’t see it.  23:17:21- SENSOR – What altitude are we at right now?  23:17:23- PILOT – Oh  23:17:27- PILOT – That was the ground  23:17:27- PILOT – That was the ground. __ NOTES: • The pilot and sensor operator were part of a ground recovery crew at Camp Lemonnier that took over the remote controls of the drone for landing. • A “nuke” is a non-uniformity correction, or a procedure intended to reset or adjust the picture from the drone’s infrared sensor. • The Predator crashed into undeveloped terrain in Djibouti city, about 2.7 miles west of the runway. No bystanders were injured, but the $3 million drone was a total loss. _Source: U.S. Air Force Accident Investigation Board report_

Lawmakers express alarm about small, cheap drones and the risk they pose

Federal lawmakers on Wednesday questioned whether the Federal Aviation Administration is able to cope with an influx of small, cheap drones that are endangering air traffic, saying the agency was moving too slowly to adopt safety regulations. Citing recent reports of near-collisions between handheld drones and passenger planes, members of a House Transportation Committee panel said they were alarmed that aviation standards have not kept up with rapid technological advances that are fueling a boom in consumer drone sales. “I’ve got a quadcopter on my Christmas list, as I suspect many people do,” said Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-Tex). But with an estimated half-million small drones sold in the United States over the past three years, he said he was worried the FAA was losing a battle to protect the national airspace. “We’re really going to have a dangerous situation,” he said. Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-Conn.) said she recently attended a charity event where a drone buzzed overhead. “I don’t think we can rely on the hobbyists here” to adhere to strict safety standards, she said. “All it’s going to take is one horrific accident.” Pilots have reported a sharp increase in risky encounters with drones, including close calls at the nation’s busiest airports, according to FAA data released last month. Since June 1, commercial airlines and private pilots have alerted the FAA to at least 25 episodes in which hard-to-see drones came within a few feet of crashing into much larger aircraft. Pilots described most of the rogue drones as small, camera-equipped models that have become increasingly popular with hobbyists and photographers. Although such drones generally weigh only a few pounds, aviation safety experts say they could easily trigger an accident by striking another plane’s propeller or getting sucked into a jet engine. The FAA allows recreational drone flights as long as operators keep them below 400 feet and at least five miles away from an airport. But those guidelines are being widely flouted by drone enthusiasts, and the FAA has struggled to enforce the rules. Peggy Gilligan, the FAA’s associate administrator for aviation safety, acknowledged the problem with rogue drones, which she attributed to untrained operators. She said the agency was conducting a public outreach campaign to educate users. The FAA has also imposed a general prohibition on flying drones for commercial purposes while it develops safety regulations for the industry. With those regulations still years from becoming finalized, however, commercial photographers and other businesses are ignoring the FAA’s drone ban and taking to the skies anyway. Gilligan said the agency hoped to unveil proposed regulations this month for drones weighing less than 55 pounds. She acknowledged that it would take much longer to collect public comment and finalize the rules; other U.S. officials predicted it could take until 2017 or 2018 until they take effect. Devising regulations for larger drones that weigh more than 55 pounds is expected to take even more time. “We all agree that that project is taking too long,” Gilligan said, adding that it “has been delayed beyond what any of us think is acceptable.” Shortly before the hearing began, the FAA announced that it had granted special permission to four companies to use drones on a limited basis for aerial surveying and inspections. The permits are a way for the companies to sidestep the FAA’s temporary prohibition on commercial drone flights around the country until the agency can adopt a permanent set of safety standards. Along the same lines, the FAA in September granted exemptions to six Hollywood filmmakers, allowing them to fly drones on movie sets. That precedent-setting decision was the first time the FAA had given permission to businesses to fly drones near populated areas. In the meantime, the FAA has begun to consider special exemptions to the commercial drone ban on a case-by-case basis. Gilligan said the agency is processing more than 150 other applications from businesses seeking permission to fly drones.

The drone lobby isn’t excited about the latest White House fence hopper

A small drone flew onto White House grounds in the wee hours of Monday morning -- and the drone lobby isn't happy about it.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico "This incident represents a clear misuse of [unmanned aerial systems] technology," Brian Wynne, president of the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, told the National Journal. "Flying any aircraft around the White House is a serious violation of the restricted and prohibited airspace in Washington, D.C. We hope the individual or individuals responsible are found and held accountable."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico A Secret Service statement identified the erstwhile craft as a "quad copter" -- a commonly available type of unmanned aerial vehicle with four propellers. The incident comes at an inconvenient time for drone supporters, who staged a charm offensive last week -- storming Capitol Hill for meetings with legislators, flying a drone in a congressional hearing, and offering a free concert by band OK Go at the 9:30 Club.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico But it's not the first time that a drone has infiltrated the 3-mile no-fly zone that surrounds the White House -- in fact, there have been at least three other incidents involving drones in that airspace within the last six months.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Passenger: ‘Why does this keep happening to me?’

Two airline flights were disrupted in the Washington area recently under unusual circumstances — one airplane got stuck in the tarmac and the other was in a collision on the ground. Defying the odds, at least one man was on both flights. Phillip Dugaw of Northern Virginia was on a US Airways plane that was scheduled to take off for Charleston, S.C., on July 6 when it got stuck in a soft spot near the gate at Reagan National Airport. On Friday, five weeks later, Dugaw was on a Lufthansa Airbus that clipped another plane at Dulles International Airport. “These things seem to follow me,” Dugaw said with amusement. A rough calculation suggests that, based on 10 million airline operations a year, the chances of being on both flights might be less than one in a billion. In Friday’s incident, the Airbus had just left a gate about 3 p.m. when it clipped the tail of a United commuter plane that had just landed, according to a Dulles spokesman. “Why does this keep happening to me?” Dugaw asked in an e-mail. He said he was rebooked on a United flight that landed on time in Zurich, “with no crazy incidents.”

Jon Stewart: ‘Friends don’t let friends drone drunk’

That drone that fell on the White House lawn early Monday morning? Jon Stewart says it should have been _obvious_ that the drone wasn't going to hurt Obama. "Drones _love_ Obama," he said on Tuesday night's episode of the Daily Show. "He's like a one-man drone employment program. That drone probably just wanted to slip its resume under Obama's door."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico As for the government employee who allegedly crashed the drone after drinking, "The Daily Show" saw another valuable lesson to be learned. Always have a designated droner. "Friends don't let friends drone drunk." **The Daily Show**   Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook,Daily Show Video Archive    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

Dangerous drones

REPORTS OF dangerous drone encounters are multiplying. Aircraft crews, security officials and others say they’ve seen many small, unmanned and unmarked aerial vehicles where they do not belong: over airports, 12,000 feet aloft near a JetBlue airliner, above the White House grounds. The military scrambled fighter jets last week after a Cessna pilot spotted a drone in restricted airspace over Washington. Pilots have reported 700 close encounters with drones to the Federal Aviation Administration so far this year, already tripling last year’s total. Some of these reported drones turn out to be something else, such as birds. But the increasing number of stories about small flying objects that could mangle a jet engine intake, disrupt a propeller or smash a windshield is still scary. Happily, there is much more the government can do. The FAA sets rules on two types of drone activity — amateur and commercial. Hobbyists are barely regulated. Commercial operators have to undergo onerous review before they can put drones in the air. This picture should change. The government should first be more upfront about what’s going on. Post reporter Craig Whitlock was able to obtain this year’s drone reports before the FAA finally released them Friday night, but it shouldn’t take intrepid journalism to see them in a timely manner: Public education about the dangers is crucial, particularly because the government has had a hard time enforcing its rules on amateur drone flights. Next, the government should require that drones sold to amateurs come with a lot more safeguards. An obvious upgrade is “geo-fencing,” designing firmware so that these devices cannot ascend more than their legal limit of 400 feet or breach any restricted airspace, such as around airports where passenger planes descend into low altitudes. Yes, such safeguards could be deactivated. But most users would not do so, and those who did fiddle with the safety equipment would be knowing law-breakers. Security personnel, meanwhile, are looking at technologies that will help them detect and destroy errant drones, a challenge when the aircraft are so small and when downing one could pose threats to people below. At the least, it’s worth investigating whether hobbyists’ drones should come with transponders or some other technology to alert air traffic controllers or security details to their presence. On commercial drones, by contrast, the government should loosen up. The FAA is still writing permanent rules governing commercial drone use, and the agency might not be done until next summer. For now, only a relatively small group of businesses have obtained special FAA permission to fly unmanned aerial vehicles to do things like shoot movies, make aerial videos of real estate for sale, examine power lines and dust crops. An open question is whether and how the government will allow for tantalizing possibilities such as drone-based package delivery, a concept that Amazon.com, whose chief executive is Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos, is moving forward with. The rise of drones can be a great thing — if the government writes and enforces smart rules of the road. Er, sky. **Read more on this topic:** The Post’s View: The FAA should strike the right balance on drone regulation

Camera drones banned by international ski federation after close call with racer

The international ski federation is cracking down on the use of camera drones at World Cup races in the wake of an incident at an event in Italy, in which one crashed onto the course, narrowly missing an Olympic silver medalist. The drone that almost hit Marcel Hirscher on Tuesday was carrying a camera, and was part of the broadcast operation at the men’s World Cup slalom race. News of the ban comes via the Associated Press, which reported that after the scare, FIS men’s race director Markus Waldner said drones would be banned “as long as I am responsible …. because they are a bad thing for safety.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “It was huge luck that Marcel was not hurt,” Waldner told AP. “I am very angry.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Below you’ll find a GIF of the drone’s fall. It crashed on the course in Madonna di Campiglio during Hirscher’s second run. “This is horrible,” Hirscher told the Associated Press after the race. “This can never happen again. This can be a serious injury.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico AP reported:    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This isn’t the first time a drone has disrupted a major sports event. A high school teacher was arrested in September after the drone he was allegedly operating crashed into the stands during a match at the U.S. Open. No one was hurt, though Flavia Pennetta, who was on the court at the time, did describe the incident as “a little bit scary.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The AP reported that Infront, a sports marketing agency, was “responsible” for the camera drone that crashed this week.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “We are extremely relieved that apparently none was hurt,” Infront said in a statement. “At the same time, this incident is being taken very serious and the circumstances leading to it are currently being examined. An update will be provided as soon as secured information is available.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico **Read More:**   The flying of unauthorized drones at stadiums prompts safety concerns    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico World Surf League turns to drones to enhance its broadcasts    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico NFL wins federal approval to film with drones    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

‘Leave everything, please!’ The chaotic scene when a flight crash-lands.

Moments after an Emirates airline flight was forced to crash-land Wednesday at Dubai International Airport, chaos erupted on board as crew members urged more than 280 passengers to flee the plane. Emirates said the plane, which was en route to Dubai from a city in southern India, had an "operational incident" while landing. It came to a screeching halt and caught fire, according to news reports. A cellphone video shot from inside the aircraft shows some passengers frantically shouting  and shoving while others pop open luggage compartments and try to grab their belongings. "Leave everything. Leave the bags," a man calls out, telling people to use the inflatable slide to evacuate the plane. "Jump down the slide. Leave everything. Please, jump down the slide." A woman screams: "Jump, jump, jump!"   Moments after Wednesday afternoon's emergency landing, the passenger who was filming it captured part of the engine ablaze on video. "The key to keeping people safe is speed — getting your bag slows things down," aviation expert Ashley Nunes told BBC News. "These sorts of crashes are highly combustible and highly emotional. You've got people fearing for their lives and trying to get off the plane, but they can't because someone is tinkering with their luggage. "That could create conflict. A laptop or piece of luggage with a sharp edge could also, potentially, puncture the inflatable escape slide." The General Civil Aviation Authority posted on social media urging people to "stop abusing social networks by publishing videos, news or pictures of aviation’s accidents."

Kuwaiti pilot punished for letting ex-porn star visit the cockpit

The allegations seem more like the tawdry plot of an adult film than an actual security breach on a passenger jet flying at more than 30,000 feet. Chloe Mafia, a former porn star, claimed that a married pilot of a Kuwait Airways flight from London to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport invited her and a friend into the cockpit for champagne and a ride on his lap as he smoked, let them play with aircraft controls and boasted about being a member of the “mile-high club,” according to British tabloid reports in July. Now, the wayward aviator apparently has had his license revoked. Kuwait’s al-Jarida daily reported Sunday that the Persian Gulf country’s transportation minister announced the punishment in the findings of an investigation into the incident that was submitted to parliament. The co-pilot received a demotion, but the rest of the crew was unaware of the incident at the time and did not face disciplinary action, the newspaper said. The incident, which occurred two years ago, highlights an especially troubling safety violation. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, passengers have been barred from entering the cockpit. It also reveals an apparently overly enthusiastic aviator's bizarre behavior. According to British media reports based on Mafia’s comments and video footage of the incident, the pilot serenaded the women with such songs as "Hakuna Matata" from the movie "The Lion King." The reports also said that he smoked about 40 cigarettes during the incident and bragged to Mafia about having sexual relations with flight attendants. The pilot allegedly took particular interest in certain parts of Mafia, a 24-year-old British citizen and resident of Los Angeles whose real name is Chloe Khan. “I wasn’t drinking much and when he asked why, I said I was recovering from a boob job. He asked if he could see them but they were bandaged up so I said no,” Mafia told Britain’s Daily Star tabloid, which first reported the incident. Mafia — who once was forced off a British reality television show over allegations of cocaine use and prostitution — also was pictured next to the controls of the aircraft in an apparent selfie. “I pushed something. I don’t know what it did but he said it was fine as the plane flew itself,” Mafia was quoted by the Daily Star as saying. She also described the pilot as “a total sleaze” who was “calling us sexy and asked us to call him naughty. You could tell he was getting off on it.” The pilot did not consume alcohol, according to the British media reports. Kuwaiti investigators also concluded that neither the pilot nor the co-pilot drank alcoholic beverages, according to the al-Jarida report. It said Kuwait has since ordered the revocation of the license of any pilot found to have smoked in the cockpit.

All this congressman wants for Christmas is his own drone

At a congressional hearing Wednesday, one congressman revealed what he’s asking Santa for this year: Blake Farenthold (R-Tex.) wants his very own drone. “I’ve got a quadcopter on my Christmas list, as I suspect quite a few people do,” Farenthold told told Peggy Gilligan, the Federal Aviation Administration’s associate administrator for aviation safety. These aerial robots are used primarily to take photos from above. Commercially sold “unmanned aerial vehicles” are increasingly popular — you can buy one online for as little as $32 to as much as $900 — but the FAA has been slow to develop regulations to ensure they are operated safely. Our Post colleague Craig Whitlock, who covered the House Transportation and Infrastructure hearing on commercial drone security, wrote that there is concern the small devices could hit a plane, causing an accident.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The FAA, which has imposed some prohibitions while it works on broader regulations, is finding it difficult to regulate drone use. In other drone news, a New York reporter probably wishes there were tighter regulations. Chain restaurant TGI Fridays had the inspired idea to fly a drone with a mistletoe around its restaurant in Brooklyn to encourage patrons to kiss. Which was all sweet and nice until the drone lost control and hit a Brooklyn Daily photographer, slicing her nose and chin.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico According to the newspaper, the drone operator was unfazed. “If people get hurt, they’re going to come regardless. People get hurt in airplanes, they still fly,” David Quiones said. “There is a risk involved — anything flying, there is risk.” But seriously, congressman, if you get your Christmas wish, be careful.

Are intruding drones any different from human trespassers?

The Aug. 29 editorial “Relaxing the rules on drones” was silent on the most damaging precedent that the expanded use of private drones could set: the right to fly uninvited over someone else’s property. We who own land in rural Northern Virginia enjoy the peace and quiet of our countryside. Packages arrive at reasonable hours. UPS and FedEx drivers use existing roads and respect our privacy. Unwelcome intruders on our property are considered trespassers. Shouldn’t private drones flying below 400 feet (or above) be held to that same standard? Low-flying drones would alarm our young horses (my farm’s business) and could be used to drive deer toward waiting rifle-toting “sportsmen.” A Fauquier County woman recently shot down a drone with her shotgun. We have some good wing shots in Northern Virginia. This matter needs a deeper look than just welcoming a new technology to our airspace. ****Bruce Smart** , Upperville**

Should we be concerned about drones? Craig Whitlock talks about Post investigation into drone safety

More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, according to a year-long Washington Post investigation. No one has died in a drone accident, but the documents show that many catastrophes have been narrowly averted, often by a few feet, or a few seconds, or pure luck.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Craig Whitlock, the reporter behind the investigation, talks to All Things Considered and Nevada Public Radio about the future of the drone program.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

Britain suspends flights from Sinai, citing bomb fears

LONDON — Britain on Wednesday offered the strongest signal to date that a bomb was to blame for the Saturday crash of a Russian airliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula by halting flights to and from the resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh amid concerns about airport security. In a Wednesday night television appearance, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond cited “a significant possibility that the crash was caused by an explosive device on board the aircraft.” He said that flights from Britain to Sharm el-Sheikh would be suspended indefinitely and that the thousands of Britons already in the city would return home under “emergency procedures for additional screening.” As the British government suspended flights, a U.S. official said that intelligence potentially indicates that the Russian plane was brought down by a bomb. But the official cautioned that the information was still being vetted. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, would not describe the kind of intelligence that was being examined. The Islamic State’s affiliate in Egypt has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the crash, which left 224 people dead when a Metrojet airliner broke up midflight and scattered debris across seven square miles of desert. The group reiterated its assertion Wednesday in an audio clip that appeared to taunt Russian and Egyptian officials who have sought to play down suggestions that terrorism was to blame. “Search the wreckage of the plane and bring forth your black box and analyze it. Show us your expertise, and prove that we did not cause the plane to crash,” the group said. “We shall reveal in the coming days the mechanics of bringing down the plane, at the time we want and through the method we deem best.” Britain’s announcement will significantly heighten speculation that the group’s claims are accurate — particularly the theory that a bomb was smuggled on board, either in the cabin or the cargo hold. Such attacks have become rare in recent decades as airport security has intensified. If a bomb was to blame, the crash could expose previously unknown vulnerabilities. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry told CNN on Wednesday that the government had increased security at the country’s airports. But he denied that the precaution was an indication the plane had been brought down by terrorists. Even with the heightened measures, Britain’s decision to suspend all flights suggested that the country’s intelligence services have deep apprehensions about the state of security at the Sharm el-Sheikh airport. Britain first announced a pause in flights from Sharm el-Sheikh in the late afternoon and said a team of experts was on the ground evaluating security measures. But a spokesperson for 10 Downing Street said they were not satisfied with what they found, prompting Hammond to announce an indefinite suspension of flights and to warn Britons against all but essential travel to the Red Sea resort, which is a favorite of British tourists. Hammond said the decision was made “very reluctantly,” acknowledging the likely impact on the Egyptian economy. But he said that “we have to put the safety and security of British nationals above all other considerations.” An estimated 20,000 Britons are on the ground in and around Sharm el-Sheikh. The 10 Downing Street spokesperson, who spoke under customary rules of anonymity, said there would be no flights back to Britain on Thursday and that bringing British citizens home would “take time.” Ireland’s aviation authority said Wednesday that it would follow Britain’s lead and advise its country’s carriers to avoid Sharm el-Sheikh. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said that no U.S. carriers regularly operate out of the Sinai. “The airport in question . . . is not the last point of departure into the United States for any airline, including foreign airlines that do operate in the Sinai Peninsula,” he said. The suspension of flights came just a day before British Prime Minister David Cameron is due to host Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi in London. A statement from 10 Downing Street on Wednesday said that Cameron and Sissi had spoken by phone on Tuesday evening to discuss security at the Sharm el-Sheikh airport. Britain has not been directly involved in the investigation into why the Russian plane crashed, and the Downing Street spokesperson would not comment on what information had triggered Wednesday’s suspension. But Stephen Wright, an aviation expert at the University of Leeds, said the highly unusual move suggests officials are concerned that airport security has been compromised. They are likely focused, he said, on the procedures for vetting airport personnel — and the possibility that someone working at the airport helped smuggle a bomb on board the Metrojet plane. “If it’s happened once, it can happen again,” he said. “It’s a very astute move to err on the side of caution.” Earlier this year, police found and defused two improvised explosive devices near the arrivals hall at the international airport in Cairo. And security experts have warned that corruption inside the Interior Ministry and other government institutions can make the system vulnerable. Security is generally tight in Sharm el-Sheikh, one of Egypt’s most important tourism destinations and the site of a number of major international conferences. Dozens of international and regional airlines fly to the city. A senior official with Metrojet had said Monday that the company ruled out pilot error or a technical malfunction as the cause — seeming to point to malfeasance. The comments elicited a stern rebuke from Russian officials. U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. said Monday that there was no “direct evidence of terrorist involvement yet” but that it could not be ruled out. Several carriers fly direct between London and Sharm el-Sheikh, including British Airways, Monarch Airlines and EasyJet. British passengers late Wednesday tweeted that they had been left stranded at the airport, with airlines providing no information about when their flights might depart or how they will be able to leave the city. Air France, Lufthansa and Emirates had earlier announced they would avoid flying over the Sinai Peninsula while Saturday’s crash remains under investigation. British Airways and other U.K.-based carriers, however, had not joined them. Egypt’s Civil Aviation Ministry said Wednesday that the plane’s cockpit voice recorder had been damaged in the crash, which could slow the investigation. Investigators have taken particular note that the tail of the aircraft was found about three miles from much of the rest of the debris, which fluttered down in pieces from an explosion tens of thousands of feet above the Earth’s surface. It the tail broke loose first, the pilot would lose the ability to control the plane. That circumstance would be reminiscent of the worst crash of a single airplane in history, the 1984 crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123 that killed 520 people. Cunningham reported from Cairo. Heba Habib in Cairo, Ashley Halsey III and Adam Goldman in Washington, and Karla Adam in London contributed to this report. **Read more:** Militant cells are carrying out more brazen attacks across Egypt Russian airline official rules out technical error as cause of crash Today’s coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Predator drone crashed in New Mexico after losing communications link

An MQ-1 Predator drone that crashed about 8.6 miles northwest of Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in October lost its satellite communications link with its pilot before flipping over and falling out of the sky, an Air Force investigation has found. The results of the investigation were released Thursday by the service in a 23-page report. The loss of communications with the $4.5 million unmanned aircraft was found to have “substantially contributed” to the Oct. 30 accident, the investigation found. It said the overall cause of the incident was a “commanded symmetric pitch,” but it did not determine how the aircraft was ordered to crash. The pilots and air crew were cleared of any wrongdoing.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The investigation’s release comes as the U.S. military grapples with a series of drone accidents on U.S. soil. As outlined in a recent Washington Post investigative report, there have been at least 47 military drone crashes in the United States since 2001.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The Oct. 30 MQ-1B Predator crash was the ninth drone crash at Holloman since 2001 to be classified as a Class A accident – which means, under current standards, that it resulted in at least $2 million in damage. Five of the Class A accidents at Holloman involved QF-4E Phantom aircraft. Those drones are retrofitted F-4 fighter jets used for target practice by other planes. The Air Force began flying Predators on training missions from Holloman on Sept. 10, 2009. Exactly one day later, a Predator crashed during takeoff and hit a fence. The cause has never been disclosed; Air Force officials chose not to convene an Accident Investigation Board, which normally examines how a crash happened and writes a publicly releasable report. Two MQ-9 Reapers – a bigger, faster and more capable version of the Predator – crashed in Class A accidents at Holloman on Aug. 24, 2011 and Oct. 7, 2011. Unusually, the Air Force did not convene an Accident Investigation Board into those accidents, either, so the official causes were kept quiet. On top of those accidents, another Predator crashed at Holloman on Oct. 22, 2010 in a Class B accident, which means that it caused between $500,000 and $2 million in damage. On April 2, 2011, a Reaper crashed in a Class B accident. The Air Force does not convene Accident Investigation Boards for Class B mishaps, so the official causes of those crashes are also unknown. The results of the Oct. 30 accident investigation were released on the same day as a new report by the Stimson Center examining U.S. drone policy. It suggested that the U.S. reliance on lethal drone strikes has become a “slippery slope” toward a state of never-ending war. The Predator that crashed in New Mexico in October was unarmed at the time.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday _Staff writer Craig Whitlock contributed to this report._    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday

Delivery drone carrying marijuana, cellphones and tobacco crashed outside a S.C. prison

Police are seeking one man and have arrested another who they believe tried to smuggle contraband into a South Carolina prison by way of drone. On the morning of April 21, officers discovered a small drone that had crashed in the bushes outside the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, S.C., according to the Associated Press. The drone never made it over the 12-foot fence, though the AP noted that “officials aren’t sure exactly where the drone would have gone if it made it over the wall.”    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday The drone was carrying marijuana, cellphones and tobacco, according to Stephanie Givens, a spokeswoman for the S.C. Department of Corrections. One person, 28-year-old Brenton Lee Doyle, has been arrested in connection with the incident and appeared in court Wednesday. He has been charged with attempting to smuggle contraband into a prison and possession of the drug flunitrazepam, also known as “roofies,” according to Reuters.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday Police have issued a plea for information about a second suspect who may be connected to the incident. They released a series of surveillance photos of the man taken in a convenience store near the prison.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday As smuggling attempts go, this is slightly more sophisticated than the old cellphone-over-the-wall trick — which somehow still manages to be effective. It isn’t new, however. In November, four people were arrested for allegedly trying to smuggle a few pounds of tobacco into a Georgia correctional facility using a remote- controlled helicopter. According to WALB, they were caught after prison officers noticed the helicopter trying to get over the prison walls.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday To their credit, the helicopter smugglers made sure to keep an eye on the aircraft with binoculars.

Watch this Russian man use a prehistoric weapon to wreck a drone

But despite being on the cutting edge in 2016, they’re no match for a technology that’s 400,000 years old. A reenactor at Rusborg in Lipetsk, Russia, threw a spear at a drone filming the festival devoted to the Middle Ages, causing the quadcopter to tumble to the ground.  The drone pilot had previously received permission from the event’s organizers to document the festival from the sky. Next year the festival plans to have a sanctioned contest in which reenactors aim at flying targets.

Confused pilot nearly lands on top of four planes at San Francisco’s airport

San Francisco International Airport was nearly the scene of tragedy on Friday after an Air Canada flight narrowly avoided a taxiway crowded with four other aircraft.  But the pilot inadvertently set course for the taxiway, where four planes were waiting to depart, the spokesman said. The pilot was ordered by an air traffic control tower to pull up and find another approach.  The pilot asked whether he was cleared to land after observing lights on 28R, a runway. “There’s no one on 28R but you,” the air traffic controller said in response. “Where’s this guy going? He’s on the taxiway,” said an unidentified voice presumed to be another pilot on the ground. “It looks like you were lined up for Charlie (Taxiway C) there,” the air traffic controller said after redirecting the aircraft. “United One, Air Canada flew directly over us,” a pilot on the ground said. The Airbus A320 with 135 passengers and five crew members “landed normally without incident,” Peter Fitzpatrick, an Air Canada spokesman, said Tuesday, adding that the airline is investigating the incident. The spokesman for the FAA said that it is unclear how close the landing aircraft came to the four planes waiting for takeoff and that it is investigating the incident. It is uncommon for pilots to mistake taxiways for runways, though such errors typically involve smaller airplanes at small airports, the Associated Press reported. In December 2015, an Alaska Airlines flight landed on a central taxiway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.  “If it is true, what happened probably came close to the greatest aviation disaster in history,” retired United Airlines captain Ross Aimer, CEO of Aero Consulting Experts, told the Mercury News while discussing the Friday incident. “If you could imagine an Airbus colliding with four passenger aircraft wide bodies, full of fuel and passengers, then you can imagine how horrific this could have been,” he said.

What happened when a guy tried to sweep leaves with a drone

A drone pilot’s view of the mission to find “Lone Survivor” Marcus Luttrell

On June 28, 2005, Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell—subject of the movie “Lone Survivor”—was stranded on a mountainside in eastern Afghanistan. His SEAL team had been killed. The quick reaction force sent to retrieve Luttrell and his men had returned to base after one of its helicopters had been shot down. Above him, though, was a Predator drone flown by Air Force Lt. Col. T. Mark McCurley. McCurley’s Predator was the only aircraft on the scene, as the first two drones had vanished into a band of thunder clouds that had quickly moved into the area, McCurley recounts in his recently released book, “Hunter Killer: Inside Unmanned Air War” co-authored by Kevin Maurer.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico [ _Air Force struggles to keep pace with explosion in the use of combat drones_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico As the gunmetal gray aircraft slowly scanned for any signs of life in the wooded valleys and draws of Kunar Province’s Pech Valley below, McCurley said he sat thousands of miles away in an operations center on the outskirts of Las Vegas. As the Predator closed in on Luttrell’s last known position, McCurley’s sensor operator fixed onto the wreckage of the MH-47 Chinhook that had been hit by a rocket propelled grenade hours before, killing everyone aboard. “The helicopter had fallen into a wooded area and exploded,” McCurley writes. “The broken rotors and downed trees glowed in the light from the fire. There could be no survivors.” Soon after, McCurley’s aircraft picked up a garbled radio transmission on an emergency frequency. All he could make out was, “Come in.” It was a man’s voice and he was whispering. Then there was nothing. McCurley writes that he kept trying to contact whoever had called, circling the Predator over the patch of mountainside where they had received the call. After an hour, McCurley’s shift manning the drone’s sensors ended, and a new crew took over with no luck. McCurley passed on the coordinates where he had heard the radio calls, but Luttrell was still out there, escaping and evading from the Taliban. In the days following, he would be taken in by a local Pashtun tribe who would shelter him until he was rescued by an element of Army Rangers a week later. “SEAL Team Five was still out there,” McCurley writes. “I left the ops cell and walked to my car. The sun was rising and I knew most of Las Vegas was shaking off their Saturday night hangover. I felt the same way, but for a different reason. I’d really wanted to find the SEAL team, but I’d failed.” [ _‘Unrelenting’ need for drones will prompt changes in Air Force_ ]    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico McCurley joined the Air Force’s drone program in 2003 before deploying five times in support of various operations around the globe, including those in Yemen and Pakistan. McCurley told The Washington Post in a recent interview that participating in the operation to find Marcus Luttrell was “one of the highlights” of his career. “We were one of the groups of guys that helped triangulate his position and helped guide friendly forces in,” McCurley said. “Whatever we can do to save lives, that’s what’s important to us. Those stories are just as important as the ones of when we take out a terrorist.”

‘That’s unbelievable!’: Watch this plane make an emergency landing on a busy New York highway

The pilot of a small, single-engine plane made a stunning emergency landing on a busy Long Island highway on Wednesday afternoon, dodging motorists and a road sign, then gliding under an overpass and coming to a stop.  The plane pulls slightly to the left before the pilot straightens it out, avoiding several cars on the roadway. It then stops on the shoulder, kicking up a cloud of dust and dirt.  O’Donnell could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday morning. Suffolk County Assistant Police Commissioner Justin Meyers told The Washington Post that the pilot, who was flying a single-engine Cessna 206, landed the aircraft about 1 p.m. on the westbound side of Sunrise Highway at exit 57. He was the only person onboard and was not injured in the incident, police said. “All things considered, he did a pretty good job landing it where he did,” Meyers said. He said the maneuver under the overpass was “very close.” “By the nature of emergency landings, you don’t get to pick your spot,” he said, adding that O’Donnell “was pretty fortunate he was able to get his bird on the ground. Another few feet and it could have been a very different situation.” The Federal Aviation Administration said it is handling the investigation.

Drones delivering drinks in a crowded restaurant? It’s not as crazy as it sounds.

A Singapore restaurant plans to use drones to transport food and drinks from the kitchen to a wait station near customers’ tables by the end of this year. Infinium Robotics, the Singapore company that’s developing the drones for restaurant chain Timbre, showed off the technology here: It has spent the past two weeks testing the technology at the restaurant before it opens each night for business. Delivering plates of food and drink to individual tables sounds like a recipe for disaster. How does the drone know where to hover? What if someone bumps into the drone or is standing in its way? While Infinium Robotics claims it’s all technically possible, Timbre won’t be delivering food from the kitchen straight to customers’ tables. It wants to preserve a human touch. So the drones will fly from the kitchen to two stations frequented by waiters. The routes are 30 and 60 feet. The drones are programmed to fly no lower than 8½ feet, so as not to crash into any guests. “There’s no chance at all you will hit anything,” says Infinium Robotics chief executive Junyang Woon. The drones automatically charge while waiting in the kitchen. After the chef puts an order on the drone, he hits a button on a keypad and the drone automatically flies to one of two wait stations. Sense-and-avoid technology built into the drone won’t allow it to land at the wait station if anything is in its way. The drones are also equipped with sonar and an infrared sensor. A waiter then removes the food or drink from the drone and hits a button that sends it back to the kitchen. The 5 1/3-pound drones can carry just over four pounds of food. Infinium Robotics, which develops the hardware and software, is working on a model that will carry twice as much food. Woon says this isn’t just a gimmick or marketing stunt to help restaurants draw in customers. He points out that unlike a human or traditional robot, the drone flies above congested areas, providing more efficient service. “Its job is to help the waiters, to alleviate some of their mundane tasks,” Woon said. “If they let the robots do the job they can concentrate on interacting with customers to bring about higher customer satisfaction and dining experience.” Since drawing recent media attention Woon has heard from resorts and restaurants in 10 countries, including the United States. “The reason why we wanted to focus on restaurants right now is because it doesn’t have issues with privacy,” Woon said. “It doesn’t have issues with outdoor regulations where we have to seek permission from the FAA for example, because it might interfere with the commercial airliners.”

Book review: ‘Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution’ by Richard Whittle

_Craig Whitlock covers the Pentagon and national security for The Washington Post._ Twenty years ago this summer, a revolution in aviation began inauspiciously on a runway in El Mirage, Calif. An insect-shaped aircraft, which may or may not have been named after an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, performed miserably on its maiden flight — staying aloft for barely 14 seconds, just two seconds longer than Orville Wright managed at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The results, however, were good enough for the Pentagon. The military had signed a contract to buy 10 of the experimental reconnaissance aircraft and wanted to rush them to the Balkans. Known as the Predator, it stood out for one thing it didn’t have or need: a pilot on board. The Predator drone was ugly, slow and unreliable. Despite those drawbacks, the aircraft quickly exceeded expectations; within a decade, it had transformed the very nature of warfare and spawned a lucrative new defense industry. Today, the Pentagon has 10,000 drones of varying types, from the size of a child’s toy to that of a Boeing 757. Compared with newer models, the Predator has become technologically outdated. The Air Force plans to phase it out by 2018. But it remains an iconic warplane, one that has enabled the U.S. government to hunt down al-Qaeda leaders and other enemies of the state by remote control. Critics see it more darkly, as a weapon that the United States has wielded to assassinate people without accountability. The unlikely circumstances that led to the birth of the Predator are narrated in fresh and authoritative detail by Richard Whittle, a longtime military journalist and former defense correspondent for the Dallas Morning News. Whittle spent five years cultivating access to insiders from the Defense Department and General Atomics, the Predator’s publicity-averse manufacturer. His reporting in “Predator” is methodical and credible, no small feat given the lid of silence that the Air Force, the CIA, the Obama administration and General Atomics have welded onto their drone operations, even the trivial parts. I’ve covered secretive military drone programs for years, and I’ve always wondered how the Predator was tagged with such a fearsome name. Other early-model drones sounded non-threatening, almost comical: the Gnat, the Albatross and the Lightning Bug. When the Predator was invented, it was envisioned solely as a harmless spy plane — a new way to conduct surveillance with high-tech cameras. The idea of turning it into a killer drone by arming it with Hellfire missiles didn’t emerge until several years later. So why the menacing name? According to Whittle, one General Atomics executive wanted to call a prototype the Birdie, because “birdies go cheep, cheep, cheep” and affordability was its selling point (price back then: $1.5 million apiece — the equivalent of a rounding error in the Pentagon budget). Another General Atomics official, retired Navy Adm. Thomas Cassidy, nixed Birdie in favor of Predator. In an interview with Whittle, Cassidy was cagey about why. But he insisted it was only a coincidence that he dreamed up the name at the same time that Hollywood released a Schwarzenegger flick titled “Predator,” featuring a bloodthirsty extraterrestrial monster. Regardless, the name stuck. Early versions of the drone looked as if they had been cobbled together in somebody’s garage — which, according to Whittle, was pretty much the case. The aircraft was powered by a four-cylinder engine that had the same horsepower as an old VW Beetle and flew only slightly faster. “As aircraft go, the new Predator’s name was the sexiest thing about it,” he writes. In a harbinger of problems to come, the drone had trouble staying in the air. Its first combat deployment came in July 1995, when the Air Force packed three Predators into crates and shipped them to an old communist military base in Albania to spy on Serb forces in the Balkans. Within a month, the Serbs had shot down one Predator, and a second had crashed into a mountain after its engine conked out. The drone’s performance record gradually improved, but from a safety and reliability standpoint, it was a flawed aircraft. According to a recent Washington Post investigation, nearly half of all Predators bought by the Air Force since then have been involved in major aviation accidents. Whittle’s best material appears in the final chapters, when he delivers action-packed details about how the CIA and the Pentagon used armed Predators to hunt for al-Qaeda leaders immediately after 9/11. Based on interviews with numerous participants, he describes how the CIA operated the Predators from a remote-control ground station disguised as a double-wide construction trailer outside headquarters in Langley. A joint CIA-Air Force team thought it had Taliban boss Mohammad Omar in its sights in Kandahar, Afghanistan, but interference from a muddled chain of command screwed up the mission. Redemption came a few weeks later when the Predator team helped track down al-Qaeda’s military chief, Muhammad Atef, in Kabul and he was apparently killed in a missile attack. Much of the book, however, dwells on bureaucratic rivalries and the sausage-making of defense acquisition. While such issues may have preoccupied the military officers, spies and contractors who gave us the Predator, Whittle has less to say about some more-profound questions that drones pose. Is it ethical to fight a war by remote control, with uniformed Air Force pilots blowing up targets on the other side of the world from their safe, air-conditioned work stations? And what happens when the Pentagon inevitably invents a flying robot that can decide on its own, without a human at the controls, to launch a Hellfire missile? **Craig Whitlock** is covers the Pentagon and national security for The Washington Post. **PREDATOR** **The Secret Origins   of the Drone Revolution** ****By Richard Whittle Henry Holt. 353 pp. $30

British air force diverts Pakistani plane, 2 passengers arrested, after alleged threat

LONDON — Two passengers on board a Pakistan International Airlines flight were arrested Friday on suspicion of endangering an aircraft after Britain scrambled two Royal Air Force Typhoon jets to investigate and escort the plane to safety. Flight PK709 from Lahore, Pakistan, to Manchester, England, was diverted at 1:20 p.m. local time to Stansted Airport, northeast of London. The plane, with 297 passengers on board, landed safely and was being held in an isolated area. Essex police confirmed the arrests of two passengers, who are British nationals, ages 30 and 41. The incident was being treated as a criminal offense and both men were being questioned, officials said. There were no reports of injuries. Mashood Dajwar, a spokesman for Pakistan International Airlines, said the incident began when the two passengers in question threatened a flight attendant. The attendant communicated the threat to the pilot, who passed on the concern to air traffic control in Manchester. Dajwar said he could not elaborate on the nature of the alleged threat but said the two men later said they were only making a joke. After concerns were conveyed to authorities in Manchester, the flight was diverted to Stansted — one of two airports in Britain designated for managing security threats. “Normally, if something goes wrong, whether it is a real threat or a hoax, the standard procedure is to send the plane to an isolated area, like Stansted,” Dajwar said. “The two passengers, who have later claimed that they were just joking about the threat, have been arrested. The Essex police are still investigating.” After landing at Stansted, police boarded the aircraft and two men were taken into custody before passengers disembarked. Showaib Naseer, 17, of Manchester, was about to pick up his father from the airport and had his car keys in hand when he received an unexpected call. “Around 2 o’clock I received a call from my father,” Naseer said. “He said, ‘The plane has been hijacked and we are now in London Stansted Airport.’ ” The phone call was cut short, but Naseer’s father said that he and other passengers were being held at Stansted to be interviewed separately by police. The incident has occurred at a time when Britain is on edge, after the brutal slaying Wednesday of a British soldier in East London by two Islamic extremists.

Ready for a spy in the sky? Panel says FAA should expand commercial drone flights.

A federally commissioned panel on Wednesday recommended that commercially operated small drones be allowed to fly over populated areas, a proposal that would clear the way for dozens of uses, including filming parades, inspecting towers and tracking movement on construction sites. Most drones would be required to fly at least 20 feet above people and never come within 10 feet of them during takeoff and landing. To date, the Federal Aviation Administration has banned routine commercial drone flights over people who are not a party to the drone’s operations. The FAA is not bound to follow the recommendations of the panel that it created, a coalition of stakeholders that includes drone manufacturers, firms that fly them, commercial and private pilots, and airports. The FAA prohibition on commercial overflights of people has frustrated construction firms that want to monitor their work sites, news organizations eager to use them for media coverage and companies that would use them to inspect things such as cellular towers before sending workers up to repair them. The FAA’s caution in restricting drone use grew from fears they would invade privacy or pose a risk to airplanes in flight. Pilots reported hundreds of close calls with drones last year. The FAA has been under pressure from Congress to expedite drone regulations as annual sales of the unmanned aircraft are expected to grow from 2.5 million this year to 7 million in 2020. The FAA already requires that they be registered, and lawmakers have proposed that their owners pass a mandatory online test before flying. The FAA already has one set of proposed regulations open for public comment, and the recommendations outlined Wednesday will be considered by the agency and put out for comment shortly. In recommendations released Wednesday, the panel proposes dividing into four categories the drones allowed to fly over people. Those that weigh about half a pound or less would be permitted to fly over people without restriction if their manufacturer certified that there would be no more than a 1 percent chance that serious injury would result if they hit someone. Heavier drones would be required to fly at least 20 feet above people or keep a lateral distance of at least 10 feet. “That gives the operator and the person time to react should anything go wrong,” said Nancy Egan, a panel member and general counsel of drone manufacturer 3D Robotics. “The 10-feet lateral was really to clear takeoff space, so if you’re around people, you don’t take off within two feet of them, you don’t fly nose-to-nose with a person.” Manufacturers would be required to test their products to determine how seriously they would injure someone. “Think like the crash tests the automotive [industry does], when you see the car with the dummy in it and they hit the wall,” said Earl Lawrence, the FAA’s director of the Office of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration. Lawrence said similar tests have been conducted with aircraft in the past. “Picture a UAS being slammed into a plate that has sensors in it. Force measurements would be made, and if they were lower than the limits that have been established by medical research to not cause a serious injury, then it passed the test,” he said. The industry would certify to the FAA that its drone had passed the test. The panel recommended that drones be labeled by category so operators would know what restrictions applied. “Letting people know what they can and cannot do with a particular drone is very important, and there will be industry standards,” Egan said. The panel’s work was complicated because drones differ not just in weight but in size. A five-pound drone carrying a heavy camera may be equal in weight to a larger drone carrying lighter equipment. But the impact, if each of them hit a human, might differ. As a result, the potential damage a drone could do was seen by the panel as the decisive factor. A drone determined to fall in category 2 is allowed to perform above people if its operator observes the 20-foot and 10-foot rules. A third category would be restricted to closed locations, such as a construction site, movie set or farm field. The fourth category would require a risk-mitigation plan, a specified flight path and a more highly credentialed person at the controls. The FAA rule-making proposal already out for public comment would require that the aircraft weigh less than 55 pounds. The operator would be required to be able to see the drone at all times. Drones would be restricted to flying during daylight hours and required to keep clear of other manned or unmanned aircraft. Their use around airports would be prohibited, and operators would have to contact air traffic controllers if they sought to fly in the vicinity of airplane flight paths.

A drone of your very own: These aren’t your average remote-controlled aircraft

Kevin Good thought there was an 80 percent chance he could successfully deliver his brother’s wedding rings with a tiny drone. “The other 20 percent is that it could go crashing into the bride’s mother’s face,” the Bethesda cinematographer somewhat jokingly told his brother. His brother was okay with those odds, so he signed off. A few weeks ago, sitting in the back row at the ceremony near San Francisco, Good steered the drone to the altar, delivering the payload in front of 100 or so astonished guests. His brother grabbed the rings, then watched as Good buzzed the drone off into the blue sky. “At the end of the wedding, that was what everyone was talking about,” Good said. “It was pretty awesome.” This is the gee-whiz side of drones, a technology typically associated with surprise air assaults on terrorists. Drones designed to do the bidding of ordinary people can be bought online for $300 or less. They are often no larger than hubcaps, with tiny propellers that buzz the devices hundreds of feet into the air. But these flying machines are much more sophisticated than your average remote-   controlled airplane: They can fly autonomously, find locations via GPS, return home with the push of button, and carry high-definition cameras to record flight. Besides wedding stunts, personal drones have been used for all kinds of high-minded purposes — helping farmers map their crops, monitoring wildfires in remote areas, locating poachers in Africa. One local drone user is recording his son’s athletic prowess from a bird’s-eye view, potentially for recruiting videos. But not every flier is virtuous. There are videos on YouTube of people arming drones with paintball guns. In one video — apparently a well-done hoax to promote a new video game — a man appears to fire a machine gun attached to a small drone and steer the device into an abandoned car to blow it up. Privacy and civil rights activists worry about neighbors spying on each other and law enforcement agencies’ use of drones for surveillance or, potentially, to pepper-spray protesters. “Drones make it possible to invade privacy without even trespassing,” said Amie Stepanovich, a surveillance expert at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “This is a real concern.” The Washington region is a hotbed of personal-drone deployment, possibly because of the area’s tech-wonkiness and wealth. Nearly 500 people belong to the D.C. Area Drone User Group, making it the largest such organization in the country. They have been assembling for almost a year, working on flying safety, spreading a more benevolent message about drones and incubating ideas for companies. “What this is really about is a grand experiment in taking a technology and making it empowering instead of disempowering,” said Timothy Reuter, the group’s leader, whose day job is at the U.S. Agency for International Development. “I believe we can take this technology and start with ordinary people to create small businesses, to do art, to monitor the natural resources of the community.” But already, several law enforcement agencies across the country, including the Queen Anne’s County Sheriff’s Office on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, have purchased the devices. Meanwhile, as many as 40 states, including Maryland, have considered legislation to limit police drone use or ban the devices. A small Colorado town is weighing an ordinance to allow hunters to shoot down drones. In supporting a Maryland bill to limit law enforcement use of drones, an American Civil Liberties Union official testified, “In short, all the pieces appear to be lining up for the eventual introduction of routine aerial surveillance in American life, a development that would profoundly change the character of public life in the United States.” Drone defenders, including the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, say those fears are overblown and threaten the potential economic benefits of commercial drones. The group predicts 70,000 new U.S. jobs and a nearly $14 billion economic boost. “These concerns have had an impact on us,” said Ben Gielow, the general counsel for the unmanned-vehicle group. “There is a widespread belief that these are just military systems for persistent domestic surveillance. That’s just not the case.” Right now, drones operate under the same rules as radio-   controlled planes. Commercial use is not legal, meaning Good could not, for instance, start a drone wedding-ring delivery service. Congress has mandated that the Federal Aviation Administration come up with rules by 2015 to integrate drones into the nation’s airspace. Hobbyists are supposed to fly the devices below 400 feet. That has not stopped scores of devices from entering the market. There are generally three types of personal drones available. There is the toy market, which features devices such as the Parrot AR.Drone. It sells for $300 and can be bought online, at the mall or even through the online Apple store. The drone is controlled with an iPhone and operates over WiFi, recording what happens below. Many newbies start off with the Parrot and eventually graduate to more sophisticated devices, such as the fully autonomous drones sold for upwards of $600 by 3D Robotics, a California company run by Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine, who gave up words for drones. Anderson said the company, founded in 2009, was generating $5 million a year in sales early on and is now growing 100 percent year over year. His drones can fly for 15 or 20 minutes, with HD cameras attached. If a big gust of wind comes along, the drone knows how to stabilize itself. And then there are the $20,000-and-above drones, such as the Falcon UAV that police departments are purchasing. They can fly for hours at a time and coordinate with surveillance systems on the ground. Last month, at Davis Airport in Laytonsville, more than three dozen members of the D.C. drone group gathered for a fly-in. The group included men with their grandsons progressing from remote-   controlled planes, photographers and filmmakers hoping to integrate drones into their work, and military contractors such as Ken Druce, who was zooming his drone through the air when another drone came spiraling down to the earth not far from his feet. “You’re fine, you’re fine,” Druce told the other pilot. “No, I wasn’t fine,” he replied. They laughed. Another pilot offered the following observation: “Everyone crashes.” Especially amateurs. But Druce has a loftier goal — starting a company that helps farmers map their fields for fertilization. The group of fliers is mostly male, ranging from elementary-schoolers to retirees, and the diversity of backgrounds is best exemplified by Scott Avey, the group’s self-proclaimed “drone evangelist.” The title is not entirely in jest. Avey is a pastor at a Frederick church, or, as he put it, “a guitar-playing pastor who flies drones.” He has used his drone to get aerial footage of his church’s parking lot to figure out more-efficient parking strategies. Not long ago, he met with members of Congress to discuss the potential for commercial drone uses. Like other drone fliers, he is worried that privacy and safety issues will overshadow the commercial benefits of drones, a concern shared by a variety of groups. The National Football League and Motion Picture Association of America have reportedly both pushed the FAA to integrate commercial use into U.S. airspaces. “We are at the same place with drones in the technology curve as computers were in 1986,” Avey said. “People would have never thought of the uses that we use computers for now.” The D.C. group is sensitive to concerns about drones, and it has been pushing positive uses. There are hopes to partner with a local first-responder organization to help with search-and-rescue missions for missing children or Alzheimer’s patients who have wandered off. The group wants to work with disabled veterans to help them find commercial uses for the technology. This month, it hosted a guest speaker, University of Maryland professor Tom Snitch, who is helping park rangers in Africa spot poachers, with drones larger than the ones the group typically flies. Good, the wedding-ring deliveryman, wants to use drones to make commercials and movies, but he knows the nascent personal-drone community has more work to do to make people comfortable with the technology. “There are people outside the White House probably right now protesting drones,” he said. “But we’re trying to do really positive stuff with these things, developing uses that are cool and new and exciting. I want to live in the future that is more like ‘The Jetsons’ and less like ‘The Terminator.’ ”

Fish hits plane taking off in Florida

We’ve all heard of planes hitting birds upon takeoff. It happens fairly regularly, something that was illustrated by high-profile incidents like the “miracle on the Hudson” in 2009.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University It’s a much, much less common for a plane to hit a fish while taking off. But it happened last fall in Florida, because obviously it happened in Florida, it couldn’t happen anywhere _but_ Florida (the state’s Constitution is very strict about weird news).    *[WSU]: Wayne State University A jet was rolling down a runway at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa last September and on the verge of taking off when it hit something, the base said in a statement.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Nick Toth of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, stopped the takeoff and brought the plane back to a hangar so it could get checked out. The crew had seen an osprey fly in front of the plane moments before and figured that they had hit the bird, just as thousands of other planes hit thousands of other birds every year. But nobody could find any remains of the bird on the runway. They did, however, find a sheepshead on the runway (the fish is commonly found in waters around the Tampa region). A Smithsonian lab in D.C. — the same one that identifies birds that get hit — confirmed that the jet hit the fish while taking off.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University “At first, we didn’t believe the test results,” Toth said in a statement last month. “There was no way we hit a fish during takeoff. I mean, how does something like that even happen?” Officials said they think the bird was sitting on the runway eating the fish when it saw the jet and flew away, dropping the sheepshead. They also think the bird barely got away and would’ve hit the jet if it hadn’t dropped the fish. Had the jet hit the osprey, it wouldn’t have been quite so unusual. Bird strikes date back to almost to the inception of human air travel. The first recorded bird strike happened to a plane flown by Orville Wright in September 1905.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Last year, there were 11,000 animal strikes at 650 airports, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The overwhelming majority of the animals hit by planes are birds, though planes also hit deer, coyotes, turtles, skunks, bats and alligators, the FAA said. (Snowy owls flocking south have also been cropping up around airports and getting hit by planes.)    *[WSU]: Wayne State University And, apparently, planes also hit the occasional fish.

FAA records detail hundreds of close calls between airplanes and drones

On Sunday, a swarm of small rogue drones disrupted air traffic across the country on a scale previously unseen in U.S. skies. At 8:51 a.m., a white drone startled the pilot of a JetBlue flight, appearing off the aircraft’s left wing moments before the jet landed at Los Angeles International Airport. Five hours later, a quadcopter drone whizzed beneath an Allegiant Air flight as it approached the same runway. Elsewhere in California, pilots of light aircraft reported narrowly dodging drones in San Jose and La Verne. In Washington, a Cessna pilot reported a drone cruising at 1,500 feet in highly restricted airspace over the nation’s capital, forcing the U.S. military to scramble fighter jets as a precaution.   In Louisville, a silver and white drone almost collided with a training aircraft. In Chicago, United Airlines Flight 970 reported seeing a drone pass by at an altitude of 3,500 feet. All told, 12 episodes — including other incidents in New Mexico, Texas, Illinois, Florida and North Carolina — were recorded Sunday of small drones interfering with airplanes or coming too close to airports, according to previously undisclosed reports filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. Before last year, close encounters with rogue drones were unheard of. But as a result of a sales boom, small, largely unregulated remote-control aircraft are clogging U.S. airspace, snarling air traffic and giving the FAA fits. Pilots have reported a surge in close calls with drones: nearly 700 incidents so far this year, according to FAA statistics, about triple the number recorded for all of 2014. The agency has acknowledged growing concern about the problem and its inability to do much to tame it. So far, the FAA has kept basic details of most of this year’s incidents under wraps, declining to release reports that are ordinarily public records and that would spotlight where and when the close calls occurred. The Washington Post obtained several hundred of the rogue-drone reports from a government official who objected to the FAA’s secrecy. An FAA spokeswoman, Laura Brown, declined to comment on the reports obtained by The Post. The documents show that remote-control planes are penetrating some of the most guarded airspace in the country. Drones have also continued to pose a headache for Secret Service agents seeking to protect the president, according to the FAA reports. On March 29, the Secret Service reported that a rogue drone was hovering near a West Palm Beach, Fla., golf course where President Obama was hitting the links. Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary confirmed the incident. He declined to provide further details but said the Secret Service “has procedures and protocols in place to address these situations when they occur.” Two weeks later, just after noon on April 13, authorities received a report of a white drone flying in the vicinity of the White House. Military aircraft scrambled to intercept the drone, which was last seen soaring over the Tidal Basin and heading toward Arlington, Va., according to the FAA reports. Both episodes occurred after a widely reported scare in January, when a small quadcopter drone crashed on the White House grounds, briefly triggering a lockdown and reinforcing concerns about security at the executive mansion. U.S. officials have said they are growing more concerned about the possibility that terrorists might seek to use small drones. In a July 31 intelligence bulletin, the Department of Homeland Security said it had recorded more than 500 cases since 2012 in which unauthorized drones have loitered over “sensitive sites and critical installations.” According to the FAA documents, military aircraft flying near U.S. bases or in restricted areas have also reported close calls with drones on at least a dozen occasions this year. On July 10, the pilot of an Air Force F-15 Strike Eagle said a small drone came within 50 feet of the fighter jet. Two weeks later, the pilot of a Navy T-45 Goshawk flying near Yuma, Ariz., reported that a drone buzzed 100 feet underneath. Despite a prohibition against small drones flying within five miles of airports or above 400 feet, the FAA documents show that the robotic aircraft have become pervasive intruders, hovering near runways and busy air traffic corridors. Pilots are also spotting the small drones at altitudes previously unheard of — higher than 10,000 feet. On May 30, crews from Caribbean Airlines and JetBlue separately reported seeing a drone with colored lights at an altitude of 12,000 feet about 25 miles southeast of John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. The FAA reports are brief and preliminary in nature. In some cases, follow-up investigations determined that objects pilots had assumed to be drones were in fact something else. On May 9, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 863 — traveling from San Francisco to Sydney — reported that the Boeing 777 hit a drone at an altitude of 3,000 to 4,000 feet along the California coast. “Sparks were observed after contact,” according to the FAA report, which said the 777 kept flying because it did not appear to be damaged. A United spokesman said it was later determined that the plane had hit a bird, not a drone. In most cases, rogue drones disappear without a trace. The aircraft are usually too small to be detected by radar and do not carry transponders that would broadcast their locations. Unlike other planes, these drones are not marked with serial numbers, and their owners are not required to register them. No incident has resulted in a midair collision. But in dozens of cases, pilots reported that drones flew within 500 feet of their aircraft, so close that they usually had no time to react. On March 21, the crew of Delta Air Lines Flight 874 told air traffic controllers in New York that a small drone passed within 50 feet of the airliner’s left wing near LaGuardia Airport. One month earlier, on Feb. 24, a Delta flight heading toward Los Angeles reported that a red and black drone coming from the opposite direction overflew the Boeing 757 by 100 feet. In an incident near Los Angeles International Airport, American Airlines Flight 287 reported on June 8 that a blue and silver drone appeared 50 feet off its left side, just above the wing. Elsewhere, regional carrier Air Wisconsin reported May 10 that a drone whizzed “right off the nose” of the passenger plane at an altitude of 5,000 feet near Charlotte. Nine days later, another Air Wisconsin flight reported that a drone passed within 10 feet of the aircraft outside Philadelphia. United and other air carriers declined to comment, referring questions to Airlines for America, an industry group. Melanie Hinton, a spokeswoman, said the trade association would continue to work with the FAA to educate the public about the proper use of drones. “The U.S. aviation system is the safest in the world, and nothing is more important to us than the safety of our passengers, crew and aircraft,” she said in an e-mail. Rogue drones are posing a particular threat to small aircraft that often fly at lower altitudes than major air carriers. The pilot of a single-engine Piper P-28 reported making a “hard left bank” on June 20 to avoid colliding with a silver drone about 5,200 feet above Groton, Conn. On Aug. 1, a Cessna reported that a yellow drone the size of “a dishwasher” came within 50 feet as it was flying near Johnstown, Pa. Most of the drones were described as small and likely weighing only a few pounds, according to the reports. Aviation safety experts say that even tiny drones could trigger a disaster by crashing into a propeller or windshield, or getting sucked into a jet engine. Small drones have become hugely popular with consumers who fly them for recreation. Many models come equipped with sophisticated video cameras yet retail for less than $500 and can be flown with little or no training. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that hobbyists will buy 700,000 of the aircraft in the United States this year. No city has seen more illicit drones than New York. Since March, pilots flying into or out of LaGuardia and Kennedy airports have reported encounters with drones 33 times, according to the FAA reports. In an interview, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that “the number of near misses is astounding” and predicted that it would be “only a matter of time” before a crash occurs. Schumer pledged to introduce legislation requiring manufacturers to install technology on all drones to prevent them from flying above 500 feet, near airports or in sensitive airspace. Such technology, known as geo-   fencing, relies on satellite navigation to pinpoint a drone’s location. “Every day without this law increases the chances that a bad accident will occur,” he said. DJI, the world’s leading seller of consumer drones, began programming such technology last year into all models sold in the United States. Brendan Schulman, the firm’s vice president of policy and legal affairs, said the software upgrade and public education efforts have proven effective. “The vast, vast majority of drone users are flying safely and responsibly,” he said. “The real issue is that there are a handful of outliers.” **Read more:** When drones fall from the sky: A Post investigation Rogue drones are a growing nuisance across the U.S. FAA rules might allow thousands of business drones

Drone? What drone? NFL teams fly small aircraft under the radar.

The Washington Redskins are grounded. National Football League teams seeking a competitive edge are increasingly deploying small drones in practice to provide a better glimpse of action on the field. But data shows that the Redskins and some of their NFC East peers are flying the unmanned aircraft under the radar — without approval of the Federal Aviation Administration. After inquiries last week about whether the team uses drones for competitive purposes in practice, a Redskins spokesman offered an enthusiastic response. “We definitely do,” said Tony Wyllie, a senior vice president with the team. “It does enhance our coverage, and it’s been well-received, and it’s pretty innovative.” By that afternoon, however, Wyllie had made an adamant reversal. “We don’t use drones for any of our practices,” he said in a phone call to The Washington Post. “We don’t use it to gain any type of competitive advantage.” Why the sudden change in tone? Well, perhaps the law. The FAA stipulates that businesses cannot fly unmanned aerial vehicles without approval from the agency. As of Thursday, 733 petition waivers had been granted, according to figures available online . But none of them belonged to the Redskins, Cowboys or any other NFL team. That means the organizations operating the devices could be slapped with charges of careless or reckless operation of an aircraft, which carry a fine of up to $25,000, according to an FAA spokesman. At this point, however, the agency is focused on getting teams to comply with the rules. Fear of retribution hasn’t stopped the Redskins’ NFC East rivals from using the small aircraft. The Dallas Cowboys used a drone in practice as recently as the week of June 18, according to team media relations coordinator Scott Agulnek. Cowboys Coach Jason Garrett said in a recent news conference that drones can provide an unparalleled view of the field. A $1,259 model operated by some teams, the DJI Phantom 3, can soar thousands of feet and reach speeds of 35 mph. “You see hand placement, you see where they have their feet and where they have their eyes,” Garrett said. “You can look at the players and coach them better when you’re that much closer to the action.” But the aircraft pose safety concerns, from sliced fingers caused by contact with rotors and injuries from falling aircraft to interference with planes in the sky. The FAA began investigating in the fall, when there were at least six drone sightings reported at NFL and major college football contests in the span of a few months. In one instance, a quadcopter buzzed into the University of Wisconsin’s 80,000-seat Camp Randall Stadium and hovered over the student section during a game against the University of Illinois. Between June 2014 and late November, private pilots and air traffic controllers alerted the FAA to 25 incidents in which drones came within a few seconds or feet of crashing into much larger aircraft. Accidents involving unmanned aircraft can be lethal: A 19-year-old was killed in 2013 after the remote-controlled helicopter he was flying in Brooklyn struck him and cut off the top of his head. The FAA has been in touch with the Cowboys to explain the proper procedure for obtaining permission to use drones in practices. It also is investigating the New England Patriots and New York Giants for their use of drones. But FAA spokesman Les Dorr said the agency hasn’t heard from the Redskins. An April video shows  the view from a drone flying over a Virginia practice field as it was prepped for team workouts. “If they’re doing it outside, and they’re doing it obviously in connection with a business, they would need some sort of FAA authorization,” Dorr said. “No one has previously informed us, that I’m aware of, that they are operating an unmanned aircraft at outside practices.” Gregory S. McNeal, an associate professor of law and public policy at Pepperdine University whose area of focus includes drones, says the FAA’s position represents regulatory overreach. “The risk to manned aircraft is almost nil, and the risk to padding-clad football players is similarly low,” McNeal said. “While there aren’t scientific studies to demonstrate the potential harm, I think it’s reasonable to think that a small drone could cause damage on par with that of large birds.” McNeal said the best way to prevent collisions between drones and manned aircraft is simply to keep the drones away from controlled airspace. The Redskins spokesman would not say who was piloting drones for the team, other than “members of the digital teams.” FAA rules require commercial drone operators to be licensed. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it doesn’t matter how low an aircraft is flying — the FAA is responsible for airspace from the ground up. The use of drones in private indoor facilities is, however, legal. The Redskins are lucky in one regard: The team’s Ashburn, Va., practice facility falls outside Washington’s “no drone zone,” the 15-mile radius around Reagan National Airport in which drones are strictly prohibited. It also is on the outside fringes of the five-mile radius around Dulles International Airport, where hobbyists cannot use drones without permission from an air traffic controller. NFL teams offered muted responses last week in the aftermath of several reports highlighting their use of drones outside of FAA regulations. League spokesman Brian McCarthy said the NFL has no policy on teams using drones for practice video. New England Patriots spokesman Stacey James did not return an e-mail seeking comment. The team has been embroiled in scandal in recent months after allegations surfaced that staff members underinflated footballs for a competitive advantage during the NFL playoffs. And an earlier video controversy, in which team staffers were found to have secretly videotaped the New York Jets’ hand signals in 2007, led to steep fines. Giants spokesman Pat Hanlon referred a reporter to comments he made in a Bloomberg News article  on the topic. He said the Giants fly a DJI Phantom 3, the camera-equipped device that weighs less than three pounds. Wyllie said that future use of drones in Redskins practices would be for social media purposes and that the team would operate the aircraft within the law. He noted that the drones have hovered at low altitudes when operating in the past. Still, until FAA approval is obtained, the Redskins’ drones will have to abide by a singular rule: Stay inside or stay on the ground.

Drone operations over Somalia pose danger to air traffic, U.N. report says

The skies over Somalia have become so congested with drones that the unmanned aircraft pose a danger to air traffic and potentially violate a long-standing arms embargo against the war-torn country, according to United Nations officials. In a recently completed report, U.N. officials describe several narrowly averted disasters in which drones crashed into a refugee camp, flew dangerously close to a fuel dump and almost collided with a large passenger plane over Mogadishu, the capital. Although U.N. investigators did not directly pin the blame for the mishaps on the United States, the report noted that at least two of the unmanned aircraft appeared to be U.S.-manufactured and suggested that Washington had been less than forthcoming about its drone operations in Somalia. The U.S. military has conducted clandestine drone flights over Somalia for years as part of a broader counterterrorism campaign against al-Shabab, a group of Islamist fighters that controls much of the country and is affiliated with al-Qaeda. Although the drone missions have long been an open secret, the Obama administration acknowledged last month for the first time that it “is engaged in a robust range of operations to target al-Qaeda and associated forces, including in Somalia.” The number of military drone flights over Somalia has increased substantially since the Air Force opened a new base last year in next-door Ethiopia. The military opened a similar base in late 2009 in the Seychelles, an Indian Ocean archipelago off the eastern coast of Somalia. Both of those operations complement a much bigger U.S. military drone base in Djibouti, a small country on Somalia’s northwestern border on the Horn of Africa. Somalia, a failed state stricken by famine and decades of civil war, has been largely off-limits to U.S. ground troops since 1993, when Somali fighters shot down two military helicopters and killed 18 Americans in the “Black Hawk Down” debacle. In recent years, however, small teams of Special Operations forces and CIA operatives have gradually stepped up secret missions inside Somalia to rescue hostages and hunt for al-Shabab leaders. The U.N. Security Council imposed an arms embargo on Somalia in 1992, although it has carved out an exception for an African Union military force that has been battling al-Shabab and propping up a transitional Somali government based in Mogadishu. The U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia, which prepared the new report, said that it considered the use of drones in that country “a potential violation of the arms embargo” because the aircraft are “exclusively military” in nature. The Pentagon has supplied several small, hand-launched surveillance drones, known as Ravens, to the African Union troops in Somalia. But any other drones — such as the Predator and Reaper unmanned aircraft that the U.S. military flies at higher altitudes — would “be operating in violation of the embargo,” said Matthew Bryden, a Canadian official and coordinator for the U.N. Monitoring Group. Spokesmen for the Pentagon and the State Department declined to comment on U.S. drone operations in Somalia. The U.S. military has plans to send more surveillance drones to Somalia. Earlier this month, the Pentagon notified Congress that it will give eight additional hand-launched Ravens to Kenyan forces deployed to Somalia as part of the African Union mission. The U.N. report said that unmanned aircraft now “routinely operate in Somali airspace.” Confirmations are elusive, however, because it can be difficult for people on the ground to distinguish between drones and regular planes flying high overhead. The United Nations said it had documented 64 unauthorized flights of drones, fighter jets or attack helicopters in Somalia since June 2011. At least 10 of those flights involved drones, according to the report, which provided dates and locations but few other details. U.N. officials said they catalogued the flights from “confidential international agency security reports” and press reports. In addition, the U.N. report presented evidence of two other incidents in which aircraft believed to be drones nearly caused catastrophes. The first occurred Nov. 13, when a small surveillance drone fitting the description of a Raven flew dangerously close to large fuel depots in Mogadishu kept by the United Nations and African Union. U.N. officials said it was unclear who was operating the drone. The second incident happened Jan. 9, when a drone flying above Mogadishu nearly collided with a Boeing 737 transport plane carrying more than 100 African Union soldiers. That near-miss prompted the commander of the African Union forces in Somalia to call an urgent meeting with partner countries participating in the peacekeeping mission, according to U.N. officials. They said the commander complained that the unauthorized and uncoordinated drone flights represented a threat to his troops and “aviation safety in general.” A military spokesman for the African Union force did not respond to an e-mail Monday seeking comment.

Lost: The mysterious, baffling disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 is the kind of mystery that’s not supposed to be possible anymore. The Information Age is also the age of surveillance, of interconnectedness, of cloud computing, of GPS satellites, of intelligence agencies that can monitor terrorists from space or call in a drone strike from a control console on the other side of the world. But so far, all the technological eyes and ears of the world have failed to find the missing plane. The Boeing 777 jetliner, with 239 people aboard, silently vanished early Saturday morning on its way to China, disappearing from radar so suddenly and inexplicably that it might as well have flown into another dimension. The civilian and military assets of multiple nations, including the United States, are being devoted to the search for wreckage on both sides of the Malay Peninsula, in the Gulf of Thailand and the Strait of Malacca. A Colorado commercial satellite firm, DigitalGlobe, is crowdsourcing the hunt by asking volunteers to scan images for signs of the plane. _(See: Five planes that mysteriously vanished for a long time)  _ But the satellite coverage of the planet isn’t as complete as some people might assume. “Despite the impression that people get when they use Bing and Google Earth and Google Maps, those high-resolution images are still few and far between,” said John Amos, president of SkyTruth, a nonprofit organization that uses such images to engage the public on environmental issues. The pilots of Flight MH370 never communicated distress. No one activated an SOS signal. No debris or fuel slick has been found. The plane’s flight recorders may be on the seafloor, buried in sand. Scenarios abound. Did the plane disintegrate at 35,000 feet from a mechanical failure and sudden decompression? Did the pilot commit suicide by flying it straight down into the sea? Did terrorists blow it up? Did a passenger plant a bomb so that his family would collect life insurance? Was the plane shot down by a jumpy military? Could it have crash-landed in a jungle somewhere, where the passengers are now fighting to survive? From a long list of possibilities that range from the unlikely to the extremely far-fetched, the truth about what happened to Flight MH370 will probably emerge eventually. For now, it’s the mystery of the year — and a source of immense anguish for the families of the missing passengers and crew. There were media reports Tuesday, quoting Malaysia’s air force chief, Gen. Rodzali Daud, saying that military radar picked up the plane Saturday flying far off-course, to the west, hundreds of miles from its scheduled flight path. That would suggest foul play — for example, a cockpit intrusion and forced diversion — if the reports hold up. But these reports still do not reveal where the plane is, whether it crashed on land or at sea, or is intact somewhere. “As we enter into Day 4, the aircraft is yet to be found,” Malaysia Airlines said Tuesday in the company’s 11th media update. The airline noted reports that the plane may have changed direction. “All angles are being looked at,” the airline said. “We are not ruling out any possibilities.” “I can’t think of an airplane getting lost for a long period of time — not a modern, regular airliner with all the communications equipment,” said San Diego-based aviation consultant Hans Weber. “Sometimes a small plane disappears and it’s not found for a small time, but this is a completely different matter.” One possibility, he said, is that an engine malfunction sent a turbine disk through the plane’s fuselage and caused an instant, catastrophic decompression. But that is very rare during the cruising portion of a flight and would not explain the lack of debris on the sea surface. The plane had a transponder to signal where it was flying, but the signal vanished over the Gulf of Thailand. Someone could have turned it off intentionally and then diverted the plane to the west, Weber said. He said there was enough fuel aboard to fly at least 1,800 miles. “That airplane could have landed somewhere,” he said. But he acknowledged that this is extremely unlikely, because word of the secret landing would surely have gotten out by now. “This whole thing is a series of puzzles and, frankly, red herrings,” said Washington-based aviation analyst Richard Aboulafia of Teal Group. Aboulafia expects the wreckage to be found relatively soon. “This is a big jet. This is a wide-body,” he said. “That means a lot of structure, a lot of components, a lot of luggage, a lot of fuel. You can’t make it all go away, even if you hit perpendicularly. It doesn’t all go straight, sucked into the seabed. It’s going to be found.” The case has similarities to that of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic after leaving Rio de Janeiro, killing all 228 people aboard, in 2009. But in that case, when airspeed measurements failed and led pilots to put the plane into a stall, the computers on the plane sent error messages to computers on land before the plane disappeared. Wreckage on the sea surface was spotted five days after the crash, and most of the bodies were eventually recovered, though it took two years for the black-box flight recorder to be retrieved from the seafloor. The lack of a solid explanation for the Malaysia Airlines disappearance has spawned rampant speculation. Two Iranian passengers traveling on the plane with stolen passports do not appear to have any connection to terrorist groups, intelligence officials have told reporters. Weber, the aviation consultant, said a case such as this captures our attention in part because we like to think such things can’t happen. “We like to think that we’re in control. That’s our culture,” Weber said. “Not knowing means you’re not in control. That’s hard for us to take.” The missing plane may be a mystery, but the search for answers is likely to produce some sooner rather than later. Space aliens don’t abduct Boeing jetliners. Anyone wondering whether there’s the equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle off the coast of Southeast Asia should remember that the Bermuda Triangle is a myth. The plane is out there somewhere. More from The Washington Post: Malaysian official says plane veered hundreds of miles off its flight path Malaysia, China and Vietnam point fingers amid search How can an entire plane go missing?

NTSB: Air Canada flight was less than 100 feet from the ground when it narrowly avoided crowded taxiway

An Air Canada flight that narrowly avoided a crowded San Francisco International Airport taxiway this month came within less than 100 feet of the ground when the pilot aborted the landing, a federal investigation revealed Monday. The National Transportation Safety Board said Monday that the Airbus A-320, which originated in Toronto, had been cleared to land on runway 28R in San Francisco just before midnight July 7, but instead descended on a parallel taxiway with four aircraft lined up on it. After overshooting the first plane, a Boeing 787, the A-320 plunged below 100 feet, the federal report said, before abruptly climbing and avoiding the three other aircraft in its path. The other planes awaiting takeoff clearance were an Airbus A-340 and two Boeing models: another 787 and a 737, NTSB said. After the near miss, the plane with 140 people aboard safely landed “without incident,” an Air Canada spokesman said last week. The airline declined to comment on the new revelations about the botched landing attempt, citing its own investigation into the incident and ongoing investigations by authorities. An NTSB investigation into the incident began July 9. By Monday, the investigative agency said it had interviewed the Air Canada pilot and had begun interviews with air traffic controllers at San Francisco International Airport. The agency was also interviewing northern California radar controllers. The first officer, or co-pilot, on the flight will be interviewed Tuesday, NTSB said. The agency added that it had recovered the Air Canada plane’s flight data recorder, and has also obtained security footage from the incident that it expects to release in the coming months. Interviews with air traffic controllers are expected to wrap up by Wednesday.    “As a passenger of Air Canada 759 I believe we have a right to know what happened, why it happened, and what can be done to make sure that no plane and its passengers are placed at such risk of loss again,” Jones wrote.

Do we still think drones are a good idea?

Drone strikes, by their nature, are bound to kill innocent civilians. It is all too easy to ignore this ugly fact — and the dubious morality of the whole enterprise — until the unfortunate victims happen to be Westerners. Only then does “collateral damage” become big news and an occasion for public sorrow. President Obama acknowledged Thursday that a January strike in Pakistan against a suspected al-Qaeda compound killed two men who were being held as hostages by the terrorist group: Warren Weinstein, an American, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian. “I profoundly regret what happened,” Obama said. “On behalf of the United States government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.” Obama said he took “full responsibility” for the deaths of Weinstein and Lo Porto. The president’s demeanor in revealing the tragedy was grim. I have no doubt that Obama’s regret is sincere. Nor do I doubt that every attempt is made to avoid killing innocents or that the president has ordered fewer drone strikes recently than in previous years. But history tells us that good-faith effort is not enough to guarantee that sound moral choices are being made. This is, put simply, war by assassination. Drone attacks have a chillingly antiseptic nature: One minute, the targeted individuals are going about their business, nefarious or otherwise. Perhaps they notice the sound of an aircraft overhead. The drone’s operator, sitting at a console that may be thousands of miles away, presses a button. Kaboom. If all goes as planned, there are only terrorists — and no civilians — in the building or vehicle being targeted. But war never goes entirely as planned, not even war conducted by remote control. Targeting is based on intelligence, which can never be perfect. Will nearby structures that have nothing to do with terrorism be damaged or destroyed? Did the target’s youngest child stay home from school that day with a fever? Did his wife’s cousin unexpectedly drop by? Or, as in the present case, are hostages being held at the compound that happens to be in the drone’s cross hairs? Obviously, neither Obama nor anyone in the chain of command knew that Weinstein and Lo Porto were in what turned out to be the wrong place at the wrong time. But my point is that some degree of collateral human damage should be considered the rule, not the exception. According to human rights organizations, hundreds of civilians have been killed in drone attacks so far. Weinstein, 73, was a contractor working for the U.S. Agency for International Development when he was kidnapped in Lahore, Pakistan, in August 2011. Lo Porto, 39, was a humanitarian aid worker who was kidnapped in 2012. It was also disclosed that the drone strike that took the lives of the two hostages also killed a U.S. citizen, Ahmed Farouq, who was reportedly an al-Qaeda militant. In a separate strike in the same region, the administration said, another American — Adam Gadahn, described as a prominent figure in al-Qaeda — was killed. Farouq and Gadahn voluntarily put themselves in harm’s way by taking up arms against their country. But while killing a U.S. citizen without due process can be justified, it is a measure that should never be taken lightly. Nor can the decision to conduct drone strikes within the sovereign territory of a nation with which we are not at war. Pakistan is a U.S. ally — although the nature of the relationship is obviously complicated. Osama bin Laden lived in comfortable exile not far from Pakistan’s capital, and the remote regions near the Afghanistan border — where al-Qaeda and the Taliban have found refuge — are largely beyond the government’s control. Obama claims the right to order drone strikes against terrorist targets essentially anywhere he believes such action is necessary — Yemen, Somalia, Libya and perhaps other countries as well. And of course declared U.S. military operations are underway in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Scores of countries operate drones, mostly for surveillance and other nonlethal purposes. The technology for arming these pilotless aircraft is within the capabilities of any industrialized nation. What will we think when China or Russia begins defending its national interest with missile-firing drones? And what about the moral question? Targeting a terrorist when you know there’s a good chance of also killing his family can be effective. But that doesn’t make it right. _Read more fromEugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook. You can also join him Tuesdays at 1 p.m. for a live Q&A;._ **Read more:** Greg Sargent: Botched CIA operation is a reminder: Still no transparency around drones Eugene Robinson: How the use of drones may haunt the U.S. Charles Krauthammer: In defense of Obama’s drone war

Drone operator says he accidentally crashed device on White House grounds

A man believed to be a recreational drone operator accidentally crashed a small device onto the White House grounds early Monday, investigators said, briefly triggering a lockdown and reinforcing concerns about security at the executive mansion. The man later called the Secret Service and explained that he never intended for his two-foot-wide “quadcopter” to breach White House security, the investigators said. They said the agency was working to corroborate his account. The Secret Service said the drone operator contacted the agency voluntarily at 9:30 a.m. Monday, more than six hours after the device crashed, and was being cooperative. It did not immediately identify the person. According to a U.S. official cited by the Associated Press, the man is a D.C. resident, and investigators currently do not have any reason to doubt his story. The crash caused a lockdown at the compound until the device was recovered and examined, the Secret Service said. The service later said it questioned a person who called to “self-report” the incident and that “initial indications” pointed to a “recreational use” of the drone. The latest security breach at the executive mansion came as President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama were visiting India, but their two daughters remained behind in Washington. The Secret Service statement identified the object as a “quad copter,” a commercially available drone with four propellers. “There was an immediate alert and lockdown of the complex until the device was examined and cleared,” the statement said. “An investigation is underway to determine the origin of this commercially available device, motive, and to identify suspects.” In its subsequent update, on the incident, the Secret Service said: “An individual called the Secret Service this morning at approximately 9:30 a.m. to self-report that they had been in control of the quad copter device that crashed on the White House grounds early this morning. The individual has been interviewed by Secret Service agents and been fully cooperative. Initial indications are that this incident occurred as a result of recreational use of the device.” The statement added: “This investigation continues as the Secret Service conducts corroborative interviews, forensic examinations and reviews all other investigative leads.” Earlier, White House press secretary Josh Earnest, speaking to reporters in New Delhi, said the device did not pose a threat to the building or the first family. The Service said the drone was spotted about 3:08 a.m. flying at a low altitude onto the White House grounds, crashing on the southeastern side. It was not immediately clear whether the Obama children, Malia and Sasha, were at the White House when the device was discovered before dawn. They were under the care of their grandmother, who also lives at the White House. “There is a device that has been recovered by the Secret Service at the White House,” Earnest said when asked if a drone was found. “The early indications are that it does not pose any sort of ongoing threat to anybody at the White House.” Around 5 a.m., authorities could be seen searching the White House grounds with flashlights. Investigators continued the search after sunrise as a light snow fell. The lockdown was later lifted. The incident follows a series of lapses in security at the White House and a shake-up in the leadership at the Secret Service. In September, a knife-wielding man scaled the fence at the White House and ran through much of the mansion’s main floor. An armed private security contractor in Atlanta also boarded an elevator with Obama that same month. In a series of reports, The Washington Post disclosed how the Secret Service failed to respond well after a gunman shot at the White House in 2011. That incident raised major concerns among lawmakers. Small drones previously have violated the highly restricted airspace near the White House and the Capitol. But this was believed to be the first time that a drone has penetrated the White House perimeter. Most commercially manufactured quadcopters are small devices that weigh two to five pounds, measure one to three feet in length and sell for a few hundred dollars, AP reported. “Something of that size is going to be very limited in terms of what it can carry, probably down to a few ounces in payload,” Paul McDuffee, vice president at drone-maker Insitu, said of the device that crashed, according to AP. About 7:30 pm on July 3, a Secret Service patrol detained an individual who was flying a small quadcopter drone in President’s Park, about one block from the White House grounds, said an incident report filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. The camera-equipped drone was flying about 100 feet in the air near the statue of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, close to the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th Street NW. The FAA report noted that the drone was confiscated by the Secret Service but did not identify the pilot or elaborate on whether charges were filed. A three-mile area around the White House, called the P56 zone, is a permanent no-fly zone. All pilots are warned to steer clear though standard “notices to airmen,” and they are given emergency alerts if they come close to crossing the line. Drones have violated that airspace on at least three other occasions in the past six months. On Aug. 29, the U.S. Capitol Police reported detaining an individual for flying a small drone on the Capitol grounds, according to an FAA incident report that gave no further details. Ten days earlier, on Aug. 19, District police arrested an unidentified man after they found him stuck in a tree in Freedom Plaza, just east of the White House at the intersection of 14th Street NW and Pennsylvania Avenue. According to an FAA report, the man had climbed up the tree to fetch a small drone that he had been flying when it got caught in the branches. And on July 7, another person was questioned by the U.S. Park Police for flying a small quadcopter drone in the vicinity of the Lincoln Memorial, according to an FAA incident report that gave no other details. A boom in sales of small consumer drones in recent years has triggered hundreds of other incidents around the country in which the remotely controlled aircraft have buzzed dangerously close to passenger planes, rescue helicopters and sports stadiums, according to FAA data. Quadcopters also have been linked to smuggling attempts, including a failed bid last year to transport drugs into a Dublin prison. Last week, a quadcopter carrying 6.6 pounds of methamphetamine from suspected Mexican traffickers crashed into a supermarket parking lot in San Ysidro, Calif. While the White House grounds are an especially sensitive area, drone operators have gotten into trouble elsewhere in the Washington region. On Oct. 6, for example, Prince George’s County police arrested at least two people for flying a white drone over FedEx Field about one hour before the Washington Redskins kicked off against the Seattle Seahawks during a nationally televised Monday Night Football matchup, according to an FAA incident report. The drone, which was equipped with red and blue lights, was spotted flying about 150 feet over the stadium, according to the report, which did not identify the suspects or give further details. A recent incident involving a drone crashing in front of German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a campaign event reinforced the possible dangers posed. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has been investigating the Service’s recent security lapses and said Monday in a phone interview that the incident is “deeply concerning”. “These kinds of threats are not going away. But I do believe they are on top of it,” he said of the Service. He stressed that the problems with drones is they are easily accessible. “Anybody can go down to RadioShack and buy one of these. It could be a guy down by the river in his van or it could be a nefarious terrorist,” Chaffetz said. “You just don’t know.” __ Zezima reported from New Delhi. Dana Hedgpeth, Brian Murphy and William Branigin in Washington contributed to this report. ****

The possible perils of private drones

While the advantages of drones are numerous, as we mentioned earlier Monday, they are not without risks.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico At the top of the list is safety. Drones can cause serious injuries if not operated properly. Last year, a Brooklyn man was killed when his own drone hit him in the head. Other incidents have been close calls, including a drone in Manhattan falling hundreds of feet and landing at the feet of pedestrians on the sidewalk below, and a wedding photographer’s drone accidentally flying into a groom who was posing for romantic images with his bride-to-be. Recently, we have seen news reports of drones flying too close to airports and in the paths of helicopters. And, it’s not hard to imagine the safety concerns that arise from many drones flying through the sky — something like a three- dimensional highway system with no roads, no traffic lights, and no drivers in the cars. Those same concerns might have implications for safety on the ground: just think of drones flocking to catch a glimpse of medical emergencies, forest fires, or a presidential motorcade.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The security of drones themselves is an important safety issue. Drones are vulnerable to hijacking through tactics like GPS spoofing. It is conceivable that drones could be hacked or stolen, compromising any data they have collected.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Drones also implicate questions of private property rights, as others at the Volokh Conspiracy have explored in the past. Drones raise issues about property rights in airspace that rarely come up for most landowners. These issues have the potential to inflame passions and raise a host of additional questions. Indeed, some individuals have expressed the desire to defend themselves and their property against drones flying overhead.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Any review of potential drone risks is not complete without mentioning privacy. Privacy concerns have dominated the discussion about domestic drone use. Camera-equipped drones have elicited the most concern: Sen. Dianne Feinstein claimed that a drone was flown outside the window of her house during a protest, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently spoke about the privacy concerns drones raise. Government officials are not the only ones who have expressed privacy concerns. Indeed, a woman reportedly assaulted a teenager flying a drone above a beach. The possibility of sensors attached to drones — such as infrared sensors — also raise privacy concerns.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Some of these risks and concerns may eventually be mitigated by technological solutions like airborne sense-and-avoid technology (which would help drones avoid collisions), return-to-base functionality (which would automatically send a drone back to its starting point if it loses contact with its operator), systems that would slow a drone’s fall to the ground in case of damage or low battery, and technology that can alert someone if a drone is hovering nearby.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Nevertheless, each of these risks and concerns — safety, security, property, and privacy — have sparked calls for legislation and regulation. Federal regulators, members of Congress, and state lawmakers have heard these calls and have set their sights on addressing each concern. In our next post, we’ll begin to explore the legal landscape governing drone use, first discussing the philosophical approaches to drone regulation and then turning our attention to where the law stands today.

Watch: Drone, hawk collide in the skies over Cambridge

Christopher Schmidt has been taking his quadcopter drone out for a spin a couple of times a week since he purchased it six months ago, producing lots of interesting footage for his YouTube page.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico This weekend, those efforts were temporarily halted by some competing air traffic. The aircraft collided with a hawk in midair above Magazine Beach Park in Cambridge, Mass. Schmidt is a software developer from Cambridge who says the quadcopter is a great way to spend time outdoors with his daughter.  He says both the copter and hawk came away with little damage.

Virginia sheriff uses drone in manhunt

Some may think that the farther away from big cities, the less modern technology is used by law enforcement, but it turns out that only Thursday the sheriff’s office in Stafford County, Va said they found who they were searching for by sending up a drone. Stafford is about 50 miles southwest of Washington. Woods and trees cover much of its 280 square miles. But it has a population of more than 140,000 and in carrying out their duties, sheriff’s office personnel have their abilities amplified by access to drone. As related by the sheriff’s office, the drone, or “unmanned aircraft system,” came into play Thursday in an incident that began when a call came into authorities about 10 a.m. It indicated that someone had become angry and fired shots into a vehicle outside a house on Tackett’s Mill Road, which the office said is in the western part of Stafford, not far from Fauquier County. Two occupants of the house were escorted out, and the house was searched. But whoever had fired the shots was not there, the sheriff’s office said. However, they got a description, and began a manhunt. In addition to a SWAT team, and dogs, they also sent up a drone. A little more than two hours after the original call, according to the sheriff’s office, the drone spotted someone. He was walking along the route of a power line, and then headed into the woods. SWAT team members were sent there, the sheriff’s office said, and took someone into custody. The sheriff’s office said a man was chargd with possession of a firearm, and reckless handling of a firarm. They said he was being held at the Rappahannock Regional Jail. The use of drones in law enforcement was addressed last year in a paper by the Cato Institute. It described drones as being clearly useful in such missions as searches for missing persons, suspects and accident victims It also said drones facilitate investigation in hazardous situations, including bomb threats and toxic spills. The CATO paper also suggested that without strict controls they could threaten privacy. . .

Why a TV station flew a drone over Kentucky governor’s home

To settle the appeal, the three-member Jefferson County Board of Assessment Appeals inspected the entire property on Tuesday to determine its value. Given that the mansion would serve as the de facto governor’s mansion, some argued that the assessment constituted an open meeting.   So WDRB sent a drone to the property. The Republican governor was not pleased. So displeased, in fact, he turned to Twitter to lash out at two other news organizations, one of which doesn’t even have drones. “Drones again flying directly over and around my home filming my children…@wave3news @courierjournal #PeepingTom Loftus,” he tweeted just before noon CDT. Two minutes later, he tweeted, “At what point does the perverse fascination by @wave3news, @courierjournal & #PeepingTom Loftus with my home & family border on stalking?”  That wasn’t the governor’s only complaint of the day. About two hours later, he tweeted that Loftus, whom he referred to as “#PeepingTom” in a Trump-like flourish, “just came to my home again with three attorneys demanding to be let in…” Both news organizations quickly responded to the governor’s claims.    To recap: The governor barred reporters from his home, became angry that a news station legally filmed his home from a drone, then blamed two news organizations that were not involved. Upon getting his facts straight, Bevin tweeted yet again — this time posting a link to Fulmer’s contact information while continuing to claim the drone filmed his children.  Kentucky and drones have a bit of a contentious relationship. In 2016, Kentucky resident William Merideth spotted a camera-equipped drone flying over his property. Displeased, he grabbed a Benelli M1 Super 90 shotgun and blasted it out of the sky. According to Merideth, no one seemed to mind.

President Obama just used the one word drone makers hate most

When the president adopts the word "drone," it's time to admit the industry's big attempt at rebranding has failed. In his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, Obama reminded Americans of his "prudent limits on the use of drones." For months, companies that make remotely piloted vehicles have waged a quiet campaign to stop people from using the word "drone" — a term businesses fear ties them too closely to the Obama administration's controversial program of targeted strikes in foreign countries. As an alternative, many have been pushing awkward jumbles like "unmanned aerial systems" and its corresponding acronym, UAS.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University The idea is to promote the impression of drones — sorry, unmanned systems — as a technology that leads to more than just explosions. A surging international business in this stuff has recently drawn a great deal of attention in the United States, helped along by announcements from Amazon.com concerning drone-based parcel delivery. Meanwhile, the Federal Aviation Administration is working on policies to integrate drones into the national airspace, or NAS. (Using only technologically neutral terms underscores how cumbersome it can be to talk about drones: "The FAA is integrating UAS into the NAS.")  It's much simpler, and more accessible, to use the word everyone else does. If you're among the people worried about that — don't. Definitions change. And now that Obama has very consciously dropped the word in a major televised speech, there's no going back. "Drone" is here to stay.

Report: FAA should improve control of birds, wildlife near airports

The victims could fill a novice bird-watcher's bucket list: blackpoll warbler, double-crested cormorant, American black duck, short-billed dowitcher, black-crowned night heron, magnolia warbler, budgerigar and green-winged teal. The other victims could fill an airplane repair shop: several Boeing 737s, a Boeing 717, a Beechjet 400, a Boeing 747, a Boeing 757 and a Boeing 767. Birds and jet airplanes don’t play well together. This fact made news in 2009 when Capt. Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger III landed a US Airways flight in the Hudson River after a flock of geese stalled both of its engines. Such encounters don’t all turn out that well. In 1960, a flock of European starlings was blamed for an Eastern Airlines crash into Boston Harbor that killed 62 people. Now there are more planes and more large birds flying around, and collisions between them are happening five times more often than they did in 1990, a new federal report says, sometimes with deadly results. Almost 75 commercial planes have hit birds this year while taking off or landing at Washington’s three major airports, and in more than than a dozen instances in the past five years, the airplanes have suffered major damage. At Dulles International Airport, the culprits doing damage have included a pair of red-tailed hawks and a starling. A Canada goose badly damaged a Boeing 737 at Reagan National Airport. And at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, planes have suffered substantial damage in collisions with a long-tailed duck, an American kestrel, a snow goose and a great blue heron. Since 2000, Dulles has recorded 1,130 bird strikes, 78 of them causing serious damage; BWI has had 975 strikes, 54 of them damaging; and National has had 550 strikes, with 42 resulting in notable damage. Vice President Biden’s plane was grounded in April after colliding with birds while approaching the Santa Barbara, Calif., airport, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Air Force jet was damaged the same month while bound from Brussels to Paris. The Federal Aviation Administration has spent $458 million in the past five years to control birds and other wildlife around airports, but an inspector general’s report says it should do a better job of dealing with the risk animals pose to passengers. The FAA says it plans to tighten its oversight. “After the miracle on the Hudson and bird strikes on both the vice president and secretary of state’s aircraft, I’m a a loss to know what’s required to get the FAA to do its job,” said James E. Hall, former head of the National Transportation Safety Board. “I certainly hope it will be this report, and not a fatal accident in the future.” Hall, who is involved with a group opposed to a new landfill near New York’s LaGuardia Airport, said the report showed “a failure of leadership at the top of the FAA.” The FAA says that the worst strikes are decreasing. “It is important to note that reported damaging strikes are down despite [the fact that] total reported strikes are increasing,” the agency said in a statement. “This is attributed to the many professionally managed wildlife hazard mitigation programs in place at airports. The FAA has already adopted and completed a majority of the IG’s recommendations, and will continue to make improvements to the wildlife hazard mitigation program.” Keeping the critters at bay is no easy task. Failure to do so carries a cost: an estimated $625 million a year and at least 25 deaths and 235 injuries since 1988. Had not Sullenberger pulled off what came to be known as “the miracle on the Hudson,” the number of deaths might have grown sixfold in an instant. It is a problem that exemplifies the law of unintended consequences. “Most of the large birds that represent strike threats have been increasing in number,” said Carol Bannerman of the wildlife service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “It’s a conservation success story.” Many of the birds that were endangered 50 years ago by the pesticide DDT have rebounded beautifully. They include Canada geese, pelicans, sandhill cranes, wild turkeys, eagles and other raptors. “All of which could cause catastrophic failure if ingested into an aircraft engine,” said the report by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s inspector general, which made 10 recommendations to the FAA . “Increases in the populations of hazardous wildlife species continue to challenge the airports’ ability to provide a safe operating environment.” A federal aviation expert put it more bluntly: “It’s definitely a real hazard.” In many instances, said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the subject, aircraft from the era when hitting big birds was a rarity were not built to sustain those impacts. “The threat to big airplanes is jet engine outages,” he said. “The threat to smaller planes and helicopters is even greater.” Five people died in 2008 when the wing of a small passenger jet struck a pelican near Oklahoma City. Eight people died in 2009 when a red-tailed hawk crashed through the windshield of a helicopter carrying passengers to an offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. A red-tailed hawk also was blamed for the crash last year in California of a Marine AH-1 attack helicopter that killed two Marines. Managing wildlife is a particular problem at Washington’s three major airports because they are situated in the Atlantic flyway, the aerial path on which birds migrate. To passing birds, National Airport looks like a relatively quiet oasis amid the urban roar. Dulles and BWI appear as vast spreads of mostly empty acres in the East Coast sprawl of suburbia. To seagulls, Canada geese, pigeons, starlings, foxes and terrapin, they provide a haven relatively safe from most predators. On March 6, Dulles reported that a plane had an encounter with a mink. The USDA, working on behalf of the FAA, has done a variety of creative things to reduce airport wildlife. At Dulles, for example, fences extend two feet underground to foil small animals. At BWI, the wildlife service traps and relocates American kestrels, which are a type of falcon. The remains of birds struck by planes are sent to the Smithsonian for identification, and the airport and adjacent grounds are purged of vegetation birds feed on. Signs and trees where birds like to perch have been reduced in number, and a sticky coating that birds find unpleasant has been applied in some places. Standing water has been reduced or eliminated. Netting covers light posts and hangar corners to discourage nesting. Dumpsters that draw rats and the raptors that feed on them have been minimized. “Not providing the food, water and shelter that the animals want chases more than 90 percent of them away,” Bannerman said. When that fails, airports such as BWI use the noise of cannons to frighten them. And sometimes, Bannerman said, they are “lethally removed.” She said most bird strikes occur between July and October, and they peak in late summer “because you have all of the fledgling new birds.” The first known bird strike by an airplane occurred in 1905 above an Ohio cornfield. It was dutifully recorded in a diary by the pilot, Orville Wright.

Secret Service conducting drone exercises in U.S. capital region

The Secret Service on Tuesday announced plans for conducting drone exercises in the Washington, D.C., area, but the agency provided few details about the program and declined to answer basic questions about it. The agency’s brief announcement, just two paragraphs and 76 words long, said exercises will take place “in the coming days and weeks” in “normally flight restricted areas.” It did not specify dates, times or locations for the exercises. Secret Service spokeswoman Nicole Mainar on Tuesday declined to answer questions about the what types of drones the agency would use and the nature of the tests. In January, a small drone crashed on White House property after flying at a low altitude above the grounds without setting off alarms. The operator of the robotic aircraft said the incident was an accident. The episode exposed a security gap that the Secret Service has spent years trying to fix with little success: How to identify and disable unmanned aircraft. Four days before the crash, a panel of experts warned a group of lawmakers examining White House security about the problem, according to a Washington Post report.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Recreational and commercial drones are a growing concern for the federal government, pilots and the airline industry. Most lack the power to do much harm, but officials from the Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service have studied their potential to carry explosives and weaponry. The unmanned aircraft are increasingly interfering with air traffic and threatening passenger planes in the absence of oversight and clear safety standards, according to a Washington Post report in December.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico The Federal Aviation Administration said in a report last year that near- collisions between drones and airliners had soared in the previous six months, with 25 incidents occurring during that time. The episodes were among 175 in which pilots and air-traffic controllers reported seeing drones near airports or in restricted airspace.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Congress passed legislation in 2012 ordering the FAA to safely integrate drones into the national airspace, but the regulations are taking years to develop. Current FAA guidelines allow hobbyists to fly small unmanned aircraft for recreational purposes if the devices are kept under 400 feet, five miles away from airports and outside other restricted areas. Airspace near the White House and U.S. Capitol are highly restricted. The Secret Service said it has “coordinated with all appropriate federal, state and local agencies” in preparation for its drone exercises. Below is the full text of the agency’s Tuesday announcement:

British Airways passengers fled a burning plane with luggage. Here’s why you shouldn’t do that.

Your plane is on fire. You can see smoke billowing outside the windows. Flight attendants are screaming to evacuate. So you unbuckle your seat belt, stand up, open the overhead compartment and make sure you grab that nice piece of luggage you brought with you. _I mean, you can’t possibly let it burn!_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico Wait, what? That scenario might seem like something straight out of a “How NOT to Evacuate a Burning Airplane” guide, but it is very real. The terrifying scene unfolded on a Las Vegas tarmac when the engine of a British Airways Boeing 777-200 burst into flames. Instead of running for their lives, passengers did something that is unconscionable in the eyes of flight attendants: They grabbed their bags. _[‘I’m finished flying,’ British Airways hero pilot says after Las Vegas fire]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico And not just the purses beneath their seats (though, you should leave those too). Some people could be clearly seen evacuating the plane carrying roller suitcases that had been retrieved from the compartments overhead. The danger is obvious, say flight attendants. With a plane on fire — or, really, in any emergency situation — flight attendants are trained to help passengers evacuate as quickly as possible. Specifically, they want to clear the plane within 90 seconds. That’s impossible if even a few people on a full plane stop to grab their bags. An engine fire is particularly dangerous. Luckily, British Airways Flight 2276 was far from full, allowing passengers to evacuate more quickly. And the fire never pierced the fuel tank or the cabin. But it easily could have been worse. _[Quick action averts disaster as flames and smoke engulf London-bound jetliner]_    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico “Absolutely selfish and pathetic,” commented one flight attendant who was not authorized by his airline to be quoted. “You are hindering the person on the window side from quickly evacuating. And what if they panicked and trampled you to death? “Leave it! Not worth your life, it can be replaced.” The fears go beyond just the time it takes for people to evacuate if they are also, perplexingly, trying to bring their bags with them. What if their purse strap gets caught on the arm rest? Or the roller board suitcase punctures the massive plastic slide that is virtually the only hope of getting to safety? And finally, flight attendants are understandably concerned about their own safety.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico They undergo mandatory training on how to help passengers save their own lives should something go wrong on an airplane. They and the pilots are also required to be the last people to exit the plane in an emergency. Evacuating a plane in 90 seconds isn’t just a matter of pride for those who are able to accomplish it; it’s a matter of life or death. According to Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, passengers should heed the commands of flight attendants during an emergency — and leave their bags on the plane. “We expect the [National Transportation Safety Board] investigation will show that the bags slowed the evacuation and may even have caused some of the injuries,” Nelson said in a statement. In the case of the fateful Flight 2276, all passengers and crew survived. But according to the Associated Press, 27 people were hospitalized with minor injuries — including all 13 members of the flight crew.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University   *[Tue]: Tuesday   *[Wed]: Wednesday   *[UNM]: University of New Mexico

The government may soon commandeer drones near airports

CACI International, the defense and intelligence contractor, is working on a system that could soon track and overtake rogue drones flying too close to airports, an increasing concern of the Federal Aviation Administration as it struggles to regulate the proliferation of flying robots. Once deployed, the company’s system could not only make aviation officials aware of where the unmanned aerial vehicles are but pinpoint the location of their operators, the company said. Using technology developed for the military, officials could also interfere with the drone’s signal and commandeer the vehicle so that it flies out of sensitive airspace. Company officials discussed the new program Thursday as they released financial results for the quarter ended Sept. 30. The company reported that revenue grew nearly 1 percent, to $822.4 million, and said that it won $1.9 billion in contracts during the quarter. Profit rose 8 percent, to $33.8 million, over the same period a year ago. Earlier this month, the FAA announced its partnership with Arlington-based CACI to study how the drone-tracking technology works near airports. In an interview, CACI chief executive Ken Asbury said that the system could help law enforcement officials hunt illegal operators and keep drones from entering sensitive airspace. Once a drone loses its signal, an “E.T. call home” device kicks in, Asbury said. “It’ll fly back to its operator. There could be a capability in the future where you could spoof the device and return it back to them.” The partnership with the FAA to study the tracking technology comes as the federal government is scrambling to regulate the burgeoning drone industry. This year, 700,000 drones are projected to be sold in the United States, and near misses with aircraft are becoming more common. Earlier this month, federal regulators said that they will require recreational drone owners to register their vehicles. They acknowledged that they need to move quickly, and to do more, because the unmanned aircraft, some of which weigh just a few pounds, are increasingly interfering with air traffic. Airplane pilots report more than 100 sightings or close calls with drones a month, according to the FAA. Earlier this year, a two-foot-wide quadcopter crashed onto the White House grounds. One pilot reported that craft came so close to his plane that he could “hear the propeller noise from the drone inside my cabin.” During the forest fire season, authorities said that recreational drones interfered with low-flying tankers trying to battle the flames. Some members of Congress briefed on the issue said it is only a matter of time before a drone crashes into an airplane. In addition to requiring drones to be registered, the FAA will test CACI’s system within a five-mile radius of airports. It then could be deployed at other major U.S. airports. At a hearing on aviation safety earlier this month, Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) said he was impressed with CACI’s technology. “As they explained it to me, they can pinpoint the operator. That’s good. They can do numerous things. They can force the drone to land. They can force [it] to go back to the operator,” he said The partnership with the FAA would “assess the safety and security capabilities of CACI’s product,” the FAA said in a statement announcing the deal. At the safety hearing, DeFazio said authorities probably would not want to disable the craft and risk having it drop out of the sky. Instead, they would direct it to a “safe” place. “If we had designated safe sites around airports or critical airspace, and we use this technology, we could direct the drones there and say, ‘Oh, come get your drone.’ We’ll be waiting,” he said. Asbury said CACI also helps to develop a mobile system that could move around the country to sensitive areas, such as when there’s a forest fire. He said the technology behind the system grew out of military uses and “is very mature.” “It’s simply a new application to the broad variety of recreational vehicles that are being sold around the country,” he said. CACI saw it as a business opportunity after it acquired Six3 Systems, an intelligence contractor, in 2013. In addition to the drone-tracking program, the company is also working to develop advanced communication systems for Special Operations forces and provide better night vision and infrared capabilities for the Army and a more reliable public warning system for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Craig Whitlock contributed to this report.

Drone overflights of Kentucky governor’s home

First, the governor’s tweet complaining (because of course, to complain about drones, you need to do it on Twitter): Now, the TV station’s response:

Take a closer look at North Korea’s alleged drones

If these unmanned aircraft look rudimentary, it's probably because they are: Not only did they all crash, but with only a poor quality camera that could not take video, and no way to broadcast the images, their use as a spy plane is severely limited. Despite their lack of sophistication, however, the sudden appearance of these drones in South Korea is causing some serious concern. According to the Chosun Ilbo, one drone crashed on Baeknyeong Island on Monday, not long after the North and South engaged in artillery fire. The others had crashed in Paju, Gyeonggi Province on March 24, the paper reported.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University While the South Korean government hasn't formally accused anyone of being behind the drones yet, there's one obvious suspect: North Korea. Why? First, the North is the state with the most reason to attempt to spy on the South. Secondly, Yonhap News has reported that the drones flight route appeared to suggest they began their journey in the North. The drones also bear a strong resemblance to other military drones paraded by the North Korean air force in Pyongyang recently (though those larger drones were much larger and reportedly designed for "suicide" attacks). Finally, a South Korean official has told reporters that the batteries used in the drone had North Korean-style writing on them.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Experts consulted about the drone seem unanimous in pointing out that it's an extremely unsophisticated affair. "It is like a toy," Kim Hyoung-joong, a cyber-defense professor at Korea University in Seoul, told Reuters, while another expert described it to Yonhap as like a "model airplane."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University That doesn't mean it's not worrying. According to Korea JoongAng Daily, one of the drones that crashed on March 24 had managed to take photos of landmarks in central Seoul, including the president's official residence, the Blue House and the Gyeongbok Palace, apparently undetected before it crashed. It's not clear if other drones have done the same.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University

Drone incident at White House highlights long-studied, still-unsolved security gap

The intrusion by a recreational drone early Monday onto the White House lawn exposed a security gap at the compound that the Secret Service has spent years studying but has so far been unable to fix, according to several officials familiar with the concern. The episode came just four days after lawmakers examining White House security had been warned by a panel of experts that the Secret Service’s inability to identify and disable drones remained one of the leading vulnerabilities at the complex, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. Just after 3 a.m. Monday, the drone flew at a low altitude over the south grounds of the White House without setting off alarms and was spotted by a Secret Service officer standing guard. The “quadcopter” device, approximately two feet in diameter, then crashed on the southeast corner of the property, prompting a lockdown at the complex until the device was examined and determined not to pose a danger. Officers and agents with flashlights scoured the complex and surrounding area for clues. A man called authorities roughly six hours later to report that he was a recreational operator and had mistakenly crashed the drone. He said he did not mean to fly it onto the White House grounds, according to the Secret Service. Monday’s incident was believed to be the first time that a drone had penetrated the White House perimeter, an especially sensitive threshold that immediately caught the attention of lawmakers and counterterrorism officials. The incident brought public attention to what has been an ongoing source of anxiety within the agency tasked with protecting the White House and, more broadly, among government officials in charge of protecting nuclear power plants, military bases and other sensitive areas seen as vulnerable to potential attack from drones. Most recreational drones, like the one that crashed Monday, weigh only a few pounds and lack the power to do much harm. But Department of Homeland Security and Secret Service officials have studied the potential that these devices, which can be purchased cheaply and easily, could be modified to carry explosives or weaponry. Larger models that can carry payloads of up to 30 pounds are available on the market and are expected to become more common. Small drones have violated the highly restricted airspace near the White House and the Capitol before without attracting public attention. According to Federal Aviation Administration records, authorities arrested an unidentified man on Aug. 19 after he crashed a drone into a tree in Freedom Plaza, just east of the White House. On July 3, a Secret Service patrol detained a person who was flying a quadcopter about one block from the White House grounds. People have also been nabbed in recent months for flying drones near the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. At the White House, a proposal for a higher fence, along with already added surveillance cameras and sophisticated environmental sensors, has been aimed at making the presidential residence more secure in the wake of a series of security lapses that have proved embarrassing for the Secret Service, including an intruder making it deep into the house in September. And antiaircraft missiles have been in place for years to guard against airplane attacks. But officials said the Secret Service does not have the ability to easily identify and stop a typical drone. Most models are too small to appear on radar and are not equipped with electronic transmitters that broadcast their location. Also, federal law prohibits the use of any device that could be used to jam or interfere with the GPS signals that drones rely on for navigation. Unlike regular aircraft, drones used for noncommercial purposes are not affixed with registration numbers and pilots are not required to obtain a license. As a result, it is extremely difficult to track down the owner of a rogue drone unless the operator is fiddling with the remote controls in plain sight. One official familiar with internal discussions said the Secret Service is “still trying to work through this, how to defend against them.” Secret Service spokesman Brian Leary declined to comment. Frederick F. Roggero, a retired Air Force major general who heads an aviation safety and risk-management consulting firm, Resilient Solutions, said his company has been in talks with several government agencies about finding ways to track rogue drones. He said commercial technology is available that can use a combination of sensitive radar and acoustic trackers to detect small drones, though coming up with an effective way to stop them has been more elusive. “To do something about the problem, you have to find it, you have to track it, you have to identify it and you have to decide what to do with it,” Roggero said. “But especially in an urban environment, it would be tough to detect and tough to defeat kinetically without shooting it down and causing collateral damage.” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said he has repeatedly asked the Secret Service whether it has deployed the most cutting-edge technology in its efforts to safeguard the president and its other protectees. Cummings pointed to the mobile air-defense system erected by Israel to intercept and shoot down enemy missiles before they strike targets in the country. “Just like our friends in Israel feel comfortable with that ‘Iron Dome,’ I want the people in the White House to feel comfortable, too, and I want the people who are trying to do us harm to know they cannot penetrate that sky over the White House,” Cummings said. Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the Oversight Committee, said Monday morning’s incident is “deeply concerning” because it lays bare the chink in the White House armor that drones can get past. “These kinds of threats are not going away,” Chaffetz said, adding that he believes the Secret Service is working hard on the problem and is “on top of it.” Rapid technological advances have made small drones increasingly affordable, easy to fly and popular. By some estimates, manufacturers are selling as many as 15,000 consumer models each month in the United States. Developing reliable defenses to protect sensitive areas from drones, however, has posed a challenge. Brian Hearing, co-founder of Drone Shield, a Washington-based company that helps private clients detect the presence of drones, said many people in the industry had been bracing for an event like Monday’s. “We always suspected that a high-profile event like this at the White House would occur and have been a little surprised that some protest group hadn’t already done something like it,” he said. The flood of inexpensive surveillance drones on the market has already spurred demand for countermeasures from people worried about their privacy. Drone Shield, founded 18 months ago, has built a thriving business by providing detection systems to clients, including Hollywood celebrities looking to fend off paparazzi stalking them with camera-equipped drones. “That’s our bread and butter,” said Hearing, Drone Shield’s co-founder. “There’s been a higher demand than we anticipated, but nobody could have anticipated how quickly the drone industry would have expanded.” Hearing said his firm’s technology can detect drones and their flight path by sensing their acoustic signature. An alert or alarm is sounded to make clients aware of the presence of a drone and give them time to scurry indoors. The system, however, cannot do anything to stop a drone in midair. U.S. counterterrorism officials have long worried about the potential that terrorists might use small drones in an attack. In 2012, a Massachusetts man received a 17-year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty in a plot to attack the Capitol and the Pentagon with drones carrying plastic explosives. Rezwan Ferdaus, who studied physics at Northeastern University in Boston, built detonators that he planned to trigger with cellphones, according to federal prosecutors. In November, French security officials reported a spate of incidents in which small drones were seen conducting surveillance over 13 nuclear power plants. Fighters with the Islamic State have also used commercially available drones to conduct surveillance of Syrian military targets and have posted some videos of their efforts on the Internet. On Jan. 16, officials from the Department of Homeland Security sponsored an invitation-only conference in Northern Virginia to discuss the potential threats that drones pose to sensitive public installations. According to participants at the conference, officials from DHS, the Defense Department, the FAA and the National Counterterrorism Center all gave presentations on an array of federal efforts underway to counter threats from small drones. The FAA imposes strict safety regulations on drones flown by government agencies or anyone who operates them for commercial purposes. In contrast, hardly any rules apply to people who fly drones as a hobby, other than FAA guidelines that advise them to keep the aircraft below 400 feet and five miles from an airport. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Monday’s incident at the White House should spur safety rules for drone operators. “With the discovery of an unauthorized drone on the White House lawn, the eagle has crash-landed in Washington; there is no stronger sign that clear FAA guidelines for drones are needed,” he said in a statement.

Amazon makes its first drone delivery to a real customer

Amazon.com has long talked about its ambitions for using drones to deliver small parcels to its legions of customers. Now, it appears the e-commerce giant is one step closer to that goal. On Wednesday, the company said that it has made its first autonomous drone delivery — an order for an Amazon Fire TV streaming device and a bag of popcorn — to a shopper in the United Kingdom. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, tweeted Wednesday morning that the box was at the customer’s home 13 minutes after the order was placed. This single delivery hardly means we’ll soon be seeing a flurry of Amazon drones descending on our neighborhoods. Amazon considers the program to be in “beta test” mode; in fact, only two customers are part of its Prime Air trial so far. In a video, the company said it plans to soon expand the offering to dozens and then hundreds of customers, all in England’s Cambridge area.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a drone that makes movies!

Remember this scene from "Skyfall" where James Bond is chasing a bad guy across the rooftops of Istanbul?    *[WSU]: Wayne State University You might not realize it — in fact, that's part of the point — but a not-insignificant chunk of the footage shot for the movie was filmed using a drone. In fact, a growing share of blockbuster films involve the use of unmanned aerial footage. Beyond Skyfall, the list includes "Oblivion," "Man of Steel," "Star Trek: Into Darkness," "The Hunger Games," "The Dark Knight Rises," and "Iron Man 3," among others. Drones give cinematographers a unique advantage over traditional filmmaking methods. They have more reach and range than a crane. They're often more nimble than a helicopter. And that means directors can pull off risky, real-world acrobatic shots that would otherwise have to be created on the computer. "Ten years ago, when you wanted an action sequence you did them at 18 frames a second, then projected them at 24 — so that you could do them slow but it looks fast," said Emmanuel Previnaire, an academy-award winning drone cinematographer, at a Washington conference on drone technology Wednesday. "Now everything has to happen fast. It's become a very demanding industry in terms of motion control."    *[WSU]: Wayne State University It's also become demanding in terms of liability. With the Federal Aviation Administration still deliberating on how to allow drones to operate in U.S. airspace, film studios remain generally skittish about relying too heavily on them. Unmanned machines may be less expensive to buy and maintain than other equipment like full-sized helicopters, but a crash, even one where nobody gets hurt, would be a major blow to a studio's credibility. Insurance is a must, and so is pilot experience.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University "This is not a push-and-play system," said Previnaire. "You'll never get there if you're not an expert pilot." Every time a filmmaker wants to shoot in the United States using a drone, they have to ink a one-time deal with the authorities for permission. In other countries where the rules are more lax, the checks may be weaker or nonexistent. And that's led to an explosion in the international market for unmanned aerial footage. Previnaire's company, which helped shoot the Skyfall chase, set up a bureau in Hong Kong in 2005 just to handle all the demand from Asia. But regulatory hurdles aren't stopping independent filmmakers from tinkering on their own. Here's one California-based team on YouTube using a drone to splice video from a third-person perspective with video from a first-person perspective: At about nine minutes in, the filmmakers show how they managed to keep the camera level with a climbing actor as he scaled a wall — without an expensive crane. And the final effect is pretty neat.    *[WSU]: Wayne State University Previnaire insisted, though, that his job is to be invisible. "The movie maker wants to tell a story," he said. "They don't care about the technology. Our main goal is to make sure you forget the technology behind the images."

Sully was a hero, but the geese weren’t the bad guys

Regarding the Sept. 9 Weekend review of the movie “Sully,” “Soaring into fall awards season”: Perhaps this is nitpicking, but could we please put to rest the notion that the plane “was struck by a flock of Canada geese”? The top speed of a Canada goose is about 70 mph; the minimum speed needed for a jetliner even to become airborne is 150 mph to 180 mph. It is clearly accurate to say that there was a collision between the plane and the geese. We cannot say that the plane had a clear right of way over the geese, so I don’t see how it’s possible for something traveling at 70 mph at most to “strike” something going at least twice as fast. Logic and physics show that the plane struck the geese, not vice versa. ****Meg Spencer Dixon** , Kensington**

Agreement on Capitol Hill: Drones are on collision path with airliners

With airline pilots reporting close encounters with unmanned drones more than three times a day, it’s just a matter of time before a midair collision could carry deadly consequences. That was the virtual consensus on Capitol Hill on Wednesday as lawmakers, pilots, experts and the Federal Aviation Administration gathered to discuss how to keep millions of privately owned drones out of the path of airplanes that carry millions of passengers. “Unless more is done, it’s not if an accident will happen, it’s when,” Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) said at a hearing of the House subcommittee on aviation. “We don’t really know what happens when you suck a quadcopter [drone] into a jet engine,” said Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), who pointed out that a four-pound bird hits a jet moving at 260 mph with the force of 12 tons. “When it hits one,” said Tim Canoll, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, “for the flight crew, it’s going to be a challenge to save the aircraft.” That comment captures the urgency expressed at the hearing as the committee and the FAA look to protect people who fly and to encourage a commercial drone industry valued at $2.5 billion worldwide last year and expected to sell between 700,000 and 1 million units in the United States during the holiday season. FAA Deputy Administrator Michael G. Whitaker told the committee that pilots report close brushes with drones about 100 times a month. “We want people to enjoy this new technology, but we want to make sure that they do it safely,” Whitaker said. “Our preference is for people to voluntarily comply with regulations, but we won’t hesitate to take strong enforcement action against anyone who flies an unmanned aircraft in an unsafe or illegal manner.” He said the FAA had investigated several hundred encounters and fined more than 20 drone operators, most recently Tuesday, when Chicago-based SkyPan International was hit with a proposed record fine of $1.9 million for 65 flights in the heavily trafficked skies over Chicago and New York. “It’s almost inevitable that we’ll have a drone hit an aircraft,” said Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), who criticized the FAA for moving too slowly with regulations. Regulators face a challenge in identifying the operators of drones because the devices can be dispatched from and returned to fairly distant locations. There was general agreement among committee members and panelists that drones capable of more ambitious flight should be required to be registered, either with the government or on a manufacturer’s database that the FAA could access. Stanford University aeronautics professor Mykel Kochenderfer suggested that, in most cases, drones should be prevented from flying above 400 feet. He said a system such as the traffic collision avoidance system used by commercial airlines would require that drones be equipped with transponders, which are too heavy and too much of a battery drain for most drones to carry. He said lighter transponders are in development. There also were suggestions that drone use be banned within a radius of large and mid-size airports — Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) said two miles sounded right — or that technology be used to detect transmissions between a drone and its operator. The FAA in February released proposed regulations for drones’ weighing less than 55 pounds. They require that the devices remain within the operator’s line of sight, cannot operate above anyone not involved with drone operation, can be used only during daylight hours, must yield right of way to other aircraft, can’t move faster than 100 miles per hour or at above 500 feet, and that an operator must contact air traffic controllers if operating in airspace they control. Whitaker said he expects the rules to take effect next year. Rich Hanson, a director of a group of model-aircraft hobbyists, said most of his 180,000 members understand the need for registration of certain drones. “People get into this hobby, at least traditionally, because of their interest in aviation and their interest in learning how to build and operate their aircraft,” Hanson said. “The newer [drone] communities are attracted more by the technology and something it can do, such as taking pictures. They look at it as just an extension of their camera.”

U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against drones

Al-Qaeda’s leadership has assigned cells of engineers to find ways to shoot down, jam or remotely hijack U.S. drones, hoping to exploit the technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that has inflicted huge losses upon the terrorist network, according to top-secret U.S. intelligence documents. Although there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has forced a drone crash or interfered with flight operations, U.S. intelligence officials have closely tracked the group’s persistent efforts to develop a counterdrone strategy since 2010, the documents show. Al-Qaeda commanders are hoping a technological breakthrough can curb the U.S. drone campaign, which has killed an estimated 3,000 people over the past decade. The airstrikes have forced al-Qaeda operatives and other militants to take extreme measures to limit their movements in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places. But the drone attacks have also taken a heavy toll on civilians, generating a bitter popular backlash against U.S. policies toward those countries. Details of al-Qaeda’s attempts to fight back against the drone campaign are contained in a classified intelligence report provided to The Washington Post by Edward Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor. The top-secret report, titled “Threats to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” is a summary of dozens of intelligence assessments posted by U.S. spy agencies since 2006. U.S. intelligence analysts noted in their assessments that information about drone operational systems is available in the public realm. But The Post is withholding some detailed portions of the classified material that could shed light on specific weaknesses of certain aircraft. Under President Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, drones have revolutionized warfare and become a pillar of the U.S. government’s counterterrorism strategy, enabling the CIA and the military to track down enemies in some of the remotest parts of the planet. Drone strikes have left al-Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan scrambling to survive. U.S. spy agencies have concluded that al-Qaeda faces “substantial” challenges in devising an effective way to attack drones, according to the top-secret report disclosed by Snowden. Still, U.S. officials and aviation experts acknowledge that unmanned aircraft have a weak spot: the satellite links and remote controls that enable pilots to fly them from thousands of miles away. In July 2010, a U.S. spy agency intercepted electronic communications indicating that senior al-Qaeda leaders had distributed a “strategy guide” to operatives around the world advising them how “to anticipate and defeat” unmanned aircraft. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported that al-Qaeda was sponsoring simultaneous research projects to develop jammers to interfere with GPS signals and infrared tags that drone operators rely on to pinpoint missile targets. Other projects in the works included the development of observation balloons and small radio-controlled aircraft, or hobby planes, which insurgents apparently saw as having potential for monitoring the flight patterns of U.S. drones, according to the report. Al-Qaeda cell leaders in the tribal areas of northwestern Pakistan were “determining the practical application of technologies being developed for battlefield applications,” analysts from the DIA wrote. The analysts added that they believed al-Qaeda “cell leadership is tracking the progress of each project and can redirect components from one project to another.” The technological vulnerabilities of drones are no secret. The U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board issued an unclassified report two years ago warning that “increasingly capable adversaries” in countries such as Afghanistan could threaten drone operations by inventing inexpensive countermeasures. The board said insurgents might try to use “lasers and dazzlers” to render a drone ineffective by blinding its cameras and sensors. It also predicted that insurgents might use rudimentary acoustic receivers to detect drones and “simple jammer techniques” to interfere with navigation and communications. Researchers have since proved that the threat is not just theoretical. Last year, a research team from the University of Texas at Austin demonstrated to the Department of Homeland Security that it was possible to commandeer a small civilian drone by “spoofing” its GPS signal with a ground transmitter and charting a different navigational course. Al-Qaeda has a long history of attracting trained engineers and others with a scientific background. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, holds a mechanical-engineering degree and is such an inveterate tinkerer that the CIA allowed him to fiddle around with new designs for a vacuum cleaner after he was captured a decade ago. In 2010, the CIA noted in a secret report that al-Qaeda was placing special emphasis on the recruitment of technicians and that “the skills most in demand” included expertise in drones and missile technology. In July of that year, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, an al-Qaeda operations chief, told a jihadist Web site that the network did not need “ordinary fighters” and that it was looking instead for “specialist staff” to join the organization. That same year, authorities in Turkey said they arrested an al-Qaeda member who was developing plans to shoot down small NATO surveillance drones in Afghanistan. The suspect, a 23-year-old mathematics student, was using software to conduct ballistics research for drone attacks, according to Turkish officials. Al-Qaeda leaders have become increasingly open about their anti-drone efforts. In March, a new English-language online jihadist magazine called Azan published a story titled “The Drone Chain.” The article derided drone armaments as “evil missiles designed by the devils of the world” but reassured readers that jihadists had been working on “various technologies” to hack, manipulate and destroy unmanned aircraft. At the same time, the magazine indicated that those efforts needed a boost, and it issued an emergency plea for scientific help: “Any opinions, thoughts, ideas and practical implementations to defeat this drone technology must be communicated to us as early as possible because these would aid greatly . . . against the crusader- zionist enemy.” In the absence of a high-tech silver bullet, al-Qaeda affiliates around the world have taken to sharing hard-earned lessons about the importance of basic defensive measures. Islamist extremists in North Africa this year distributed a photocopied tipsheet with 22 recommendations for avoiding drone strikes. Among the suggestions are several ideas for camouflage as well as dubious advice on using radio or microwave transmitters to “confuse the frequencies used to control the drone.” The Associated Press in February found a copy of the tipsheet in Mali, left behind by Islamist fighters fleeing the city of Timbuktu. It was written by a jihadist in Yemen two years earlier and has circulated among al-Qaeda franchises since then. In January 2011, U.S. intelligence agencies detected an unusual electronic signal emanating from near Miran Shah, a jihadist haven in North Waziristan, Pakistan. The DIA called the signal “the first observed test of a new terrorist GPS jamming capability.” The test apparently did not pose a threat to military GPS frequencies or encrypted communications links. In addition, whoever was beaming the mysterious signal mistakenly thought that jamming ground-based GPS receivers would interfere with drones’ ability to aim missiles or munitions at fixed targets, according to the DIA report. Despite such missteps, al-Qaeda has been undeterred. In a separate 2011 report, the DIA stated that affiliates in Miran Shah and the Pakistani city of Karachi were pursuing other “R&D projects,” including one effort to shoot down drones with portable shoulder-fired missiles, known as manpads. Army intelligence analysts uncovered similar projects, including attempts to develop laser detectors that could give warning whenever a U.S. Predator drone was about to fire a laser-guided Hellfire missile, according to a summary of a classified Army report. In 2011, the DIA concluded that an “al-Qaeda-affiliated research and development cell currently lacks the technical knowledge to successfully integrate and deploy a counterdrone strike system.” DIA analysts added, however, that if al-Qaeda engineers were to “overcome these substantial design challenges, we believe such a system probably would be highly disruptive for U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” The Air Force and CIA rely heavily on Predator and Reaper drones to hunt for al-Qaeda targets and other insurgents in several countries. Both aircraft can stay aloft for more than 20 hours to conduct surveillance missions and can be armed with Hellfire missiles. The drones are flown by remote control via satellite data links, usually by pilots and sensor operators stationed thousands of miles away at bases in the United States. Those satellite links are encrypted, which makes the connections extremely difficult to hack. It is only slightly less of a challenge for al-Qaeda fighters to spot a high-flying drone with the naked eye. Predators and Reapers loiter at altitudes above 20,000 feet, and their powerful cameras focus on objects several miles over the horizon, so their presence is hard to detect. The satellite links, however, are the Achilles’ heel of drone operations. “Lost link” incidents — triggered when a satellite moves out of range or a drone drops a signal — are relatively common. The connections are usually reestablished within seconds or minutes. The aircraft are programmed to fly in a loop pattern or return to their launching spot during prolonged disruptions. On several occasions, however, lost links have led to crashes. In September, an Air Force Predator slammed into mountainous terrain along the Iraq-Turkey border after the satellite data links were lost and the drone crew could no longer communicate with the aircraft. In December 2011, a stealth U.S. spy drone operated by the CIA crashed in Iranian territory. Iran said it downed the advanced RQ-170 drone in an “electronic ambush.” U.S. officials said they did not believe that the drone had been hacked or jammed. They said a technical malfunction was probably to blame. Although the navigational satellite links are encrypted, other drone transmissions are sometimes left unprotected. In 2009, the U.S. military discovered that Iraqi insurgents had hacked into video feeds from Predator and Shadow drones using off-the-shelf software. The drones had been transmitting full-motion video to U.S. troops on the ground, but the Air Force had not encrypted those data links, leaving them vulnerable. Air Force officials acknowledged the flaw and said they would work to encrypt all video feeds from its fleet of Predator drones by 2014. In their classified assessments, U.S. intelligence agencies sought to play down the insurgents’ hacking handiwork. Although analysts were concerned about the interceptions of the video feeds, they said there was no sign that insurgents had been able to seize control of the drone itself. “While the ability of insurgent forces to view unencrypted or to break into encrypted data streams has been a concern for some time, indications to date are that insurgents have not been able to wrest [drone] control from its mission control ground station,” a 2010 report concluded. The report went on to suggest that allowing insurgents to intercept video feeds might actually have “a deterrent effect” by demonstrating the extent to which U.S. forces were able to watch their movements. Still, summaries of the classified reports indicate a growing unease among U.S. agencies about al-Qaeda’s determination to find a way to neutralize drones. “Al-Qaida Engineers in Pakistan Continue Development of Laser-Warning Systems in Effort To Counter UAV Strikes,” read the headline of one report in 2011, using the military acronym for unmanned aerial vehicles. Beyond the threat that al-Qaeda might figure out how to hack or shoot down a drone, however, U.S. spy agencies worried that their drone campaign was becoming increasingly vulnerable to public opposition. Intelligence analysts took careful note of al-Qaeda’s efforts to portray drone strikes as cowardly or immoral, beginning in January 2011 with a report titled “Al-Qa’ida Explores Manipulating Public Opinion to Curb CT Pressure.” Analysts also questioned whether they were losing the rhetorical battle in the media, the courts and even among “citizens with legitimate social agendas.” One 2010 report predicted that drone operations “could be brought under increased scrutiny, perceived to be illegitimate, openly resisted or undermined.” In response, intelligence agencies floated their own ideas to influence public perceptions. One unclassified report said the phrase “drone strike” should never be uttered, calling it “a loaded term.” “Drones connote mindless automatons with no capability for independent thought or action,” the report said. “Strikes connote a first attack, which leaves the victim unable to respond. Other phrases employed to evoke an emotional response include ‘Kill List,’ ‘Hit Squads,’ ‘Robot Warfare,’ or ‘Aerial Assassins.’ ” Instead, the report advised referring to “lethal UAV operations.” It also suggested “elevating the conversation” to more-abstract issues, such as the “Inherent Right of Self-Defense” and “Pre-emptive and Preventive Military Action.”

Jet plane pitched and rolled before hitting Maryland house in crash that killed 6

In the final seconds before it careened into the houses below, pilot Michael Rosenberg fought to control a pitching, rolling airplane that was losing the ability to fly. During the last 20 seconds of the flight, an automated warning in the cockpit chanted “stall-stall, stall-stall” in staccato rhythm. Those preliminary findings on the crash that killed Rosenberg and two passengers as well as a mother and two young children in a house Monday were gleaned from voice and data recorders examined by the National Transportation Safety Board. Although the plane’s twin jet engines continued to function normally, the plane slowed too dramatically to reach the runway. On final approach to landing, with flaps extended and landing gear down, the plane should have been flying at 120 mph. The cockpit data recorder downloaded in the NTSB’s Washington laboratory showed it was going 101 mph in the final seconds of flight. “At that point, the flight data recorder started showing a large pitch and roll excursions,” said NTSB member Robert L. Sumwalt III in a news briefing Tuesday. In keeping with NTSB regulations, Sumwalt did not speculate on what caused the crash, a conclusion that may be revealed in a final report some time next year. He did, however, provide revealing details on the final seconds of the flight. (Air traffic control audio: ‘There’s nothing left’ of this house) Near the point of impact, the Embraer EMB-500/Phenom 100 was positioned in an aerodynamic stall, with its tail sharply down and nose elevated. At that extreme angle, normal air flow that keeps a plane aloft ceases, and the plane loses the ability to continue flying. Sumwalt said the investigation appeared to discount an early theory that birds may have caused the engines to fail, much like the famous 2009 incident when birds sucked into the jet engines of a US Airways Airbus 320 caused stalling, and the plane made a forced landing in New York’s Hudson River. Sumwalt said the engines functioned normally until impact; there was no evidence a bird had been ingested in either of them, and pilots who were heard reporting birds in radio communications at the time later said that the birds were on the runway, not in the air. There was no evidence that the plane had disintegrated in the air or that any portion broke away in flight. The nose, tail and both wingtips were recovered at the crash scene, Sumwalt said. “We want to locate the four corners of the aircraft to verify that the aircraft was intact prior to the impact,” he said. Neither did the weather — scattered clouds at 2,100 feet and a 7-mph northeast wind — appear to play a factor. Rosenberg was a highly qualified and well-established pilot. In addition to 4,500 hours of flying time, he was certified as a commercial pilot and as a flight instructor. He also was rated to fly the Phenom, a sophisticated six-passenger jet that costs more than $4 million and is capable of speeds in excess of 400 mph. But Monday’s crash was his second in less than five years, and the 2010 crash came as he approached the same airport — Montgomery County Airpark in Gaithersburg — while piloting a single-engine turboprop plane. In that instance, according to an NTSB report, he approached the runway with stall warnings sounding as he touched down. The plane drifted to the left side of the 75-foot-wide runway, and Rosenberg attempted to lift off again with the intent of circling the airport for a second landing attempt. Instead, the plane went about 100 feet to the left and crashed into trees. He escaped with a minor injury. The NTSB concluded that the cause was pilot error. When a pilot is involved in an accident, the Federal Aviation Administration reviews the circumstances to determine whether action is warranted. Pilots who blatantly violate FAA rules could face revocation of their licences. “If circumstances raise a question about a pilot’s skill or competence, they can send a letter and an [FAA] inspector will take them on a check ride,” said a former federal aviation accident investigator who asked not to be identified because he was not familiar with all the circumstances of Rosenberg’s 2010 crash. The FAA did not respond to a request Tuesday for Rosenberg’s pilot history. Rosenberg, 66, died after a 57-minute flight from Chapel Hill, N.C., near the Durham headquarters for his medical research firm, Health Decisions. Two colleagues aboard the plane — David Hartman, 52, and Chijioke Ogbuka, 31 — also were killed. Hartman was the vice president of Nuventra, a North Carolina pharmaceutical consulting firm. “We are deeply saddened by the loss of David and will miss him both personally and professionally,” Nuventra chief executive Geoffrey Banks said in a statement. “On behalf of all of us at Nuventra, our thoughts and prayers are with David’s family as well as others affected by this terrible tragedy.” There were three victims in the house set afire by the crash: Marie Gemmell, 36, and two of her children — 3-year-old Cole and 7-week-old Devin.