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" It&amp;#039;s a crisp autumn night, and the Detroit Tigers&amp;#039; stadium is filled with more than 40,000 spectators watching a World Series game. Suddenly, a swarm of small remote-controlled aircraft swoops in to buzz the crowd. Panic ensues, and so does a deadly stampede. The idea of terrorists using small, commercially available planes in an attack gained mainstream attention last week 26-year-old Rezwan Ferdaus was arrested for allegedly planning to use toy aircraft to attack the Pentagon. Defense experts have largely dismissed the threat posed by Ferdaus&amp;#039;s plan, but the military has been thinking seriously about such attempts for years. The World Series example was posed by an Air Force major writing a research paper for the Air Force Institute of Technology. While small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) might cause only a few injuries or deaths, the paper says, the ensuing panic could kill or injure many more. Used against a military base, tiny planes could conduct surveillance to prepare for a larger attack, or carry a small bomb. These aircraft present the Pentagon with a problem as most air defenses are focused on shooting down much larger threats. &amp;quot;Can you imagine scrambling F-16s out of Andrews [Air Force Base] for an RC airplane?&amp;quot; says Mark Lewis, a former chief scientist for the Air Force and now a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland. &amp;quot;And it turns out model airplanes can be really hard to shoot down unless you have really good aim.&amp;quot; So, since 2003, the Pentagon has held an annual exercise called Black Dart, which tests the potential threat from off-the-shelf aircraft and possible ways to defeat them. Participants have experimented with guns, but shooting down such a small aircraft is quite difficult. They&amp;#039;ve tried to shoot down small UAVs with a laser, but as with other laser weapons, it&amp;#039;s a huge challenge to fire enough energy into a target to blow it up. Another idea: intercepting the radio signal used to control the plane, and perhaps even taking over the toy aircraft and using it against the enemy.  Black Dart isn&amp;#039;t the only military effort to counter the threat of small UAVs. Daniel Jensen, an engineering professor at the Air Force Academy, says that last year Academy cadets conducted a simulation in which an enemy tries to infiltrate a U.S. base using commercially available small planes. Assuming that the adversary launched the planes from at least 3 miles away and had an average incoming speed of 30 mph, the cadets calculated that they would have just 6 minutes to respond before the adversary&amp;#039;s aircraft entered the target area.  Their solution to this problem was surprisingly simple. &amp;quot;We deployed a net from our aircraft, dragged it through the air, and positioned our aircraft into a spot where we could tangle the enemy aircraft,&amp;quot; Jensen says. &amp;quot;And then both aircraft would come down.&amp;quot; Plane-mounted nets and radio jammers seem a little low-tech for the Pentagon. Still, these defenses could be better than conventional solutions at countering smaller threats.  According to Lewis, an Air Force scientific advisory study has looked at possible attacks by tiny planes and also by small UAVs, but found that they didn&amp;#039;t pose much of a threat\u2014at least not to a building like the Pentagon. But just because small UAVs may not present a significant threat doesn&amp;#039;t mean, however, that the easy availability of such technology should be ignored, according to John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. Anything a full-size UAV could do\u2014spying, dropping bombs, targeting individual people\u2014a small plane could do on a smaller scale. &amp;quot;Could you bring down the World Trade Center with a 6-foot-long model aircraft?&amp;quot; Villasenor says. &amp;quot;No. But could you do an awful lot of harm? I think you could.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a7239/the-pentagons-plan-to-thwart-a-model-airplane-attack/>