Armed drones on US soil?
Now I have to figure out what to do, and if there is a better place to go.
I wanted to organize a Tea Party rally in my community, but now I’m having second thoughts :)
Wonder what God is thinking about doing to the people who fire on Americans?
Cameras are the new "weapon".
Just ask the cops who don't want to be videoed in public.
Besides the dubious sourcing for this thread there is a lot of background here that is missing.
The FAA and DHS have been battling UAV regulations for a while. It seems the military has stopped trying to get use of their UAVs in dual use airspace and does most of their training in exclusively military restricted air space.
DHS jumped the gun and started buying Predator B for border security, but has been locked into narrow tracks, at prescribed altitudes and are escorting them back and forth with manned aircraft. They have crashed a couple of them already including one where the contractor paid to operate the thing inadvertently shut the engine off. For the same amount of money and arguably fewer people they could have bought 3 Cessna Caravans per Predator with cameras and gotten a lot more flexibility.
Predator B will be great for patrolling deep into the Caribbean and East Pacific, but it will be a while before it can do anything helpful in the U.S. Unfortunately, the former Air Force general running that agency in DHS loves his fleet of UAVs so a comparatively large portion of his budget goes to the Predator.
The other issue barely mentioned in the article was Ag spraying. I don't see this as an issue. These are large remote controlled helicopters with spraying equipment. You plug in the coordinates of your field and it sprays your crop. You take the thing to the field on the back of a truck.