Ok, so it was a bit of a large toy airplane, but still, could you actually fit enough bomb in there to do any serious damage?
http://news.yahoo.com/feds-us-man-planned-blow-pentagon-210116487.html
It seems terror plots have started getting really lame in the past couple years. First a Times Square bomber who used the wrong fertilizer in his car bomb, now this.
The guy was serious enough to warrant a bullet from Uncle Sam.
I think it was just a mistake. He has a 1/12th scale model of the Pentagon behind the minivan.
MadScientistMatt wrote:Ok, so it was a bit of a large toy airplane, but still, could you actually fit enough bomb in there to do any serious damage?
Any pyrotechnician would tell you, "yes." it doesn't take much of certain compounds.
It also doesn't need to be a huge explosion to create "terror". A dozen of these things hitting public places across the country and killing a few people at each would create all sorts of havoc.
Remember the beltway sniper? People were afraid to pump gas and were calling the cops about every unmarked white cargo van on the easy coast.
He was buying C4 from the FBI, these cops aren't as stupid as we'd like to believe.
I agree with Hocrest. Terroism was first coined after the 1972 Olympics massacre. You don't need a lot of terror, just a lot of reaction to make your point.
Dan
In reply to 914Driver:
In reply to Hocrest:
That was basically what I was thinking. Trying not to land on a federal watch list, I doubt the fully loaded RCA plane could cause much damage, but it would get the reaction indeed.
MadScientistMatt wrote:It seems terror plots have started getting really lame in the past couple years. First a Times Square bomber who used the wrong fertilizer in his car bomb, now this.
If that guy had the right stuff it would have killed my son and his girlfriend. They were next to the truck when it started smoking. They got questioned by the police for a few hours for being a witness. It messed with their head pretty good...
knee-jerk reaction from Congress/DHS in
3...2...1...
N Sperlo wrote:Any pyrotechnician would tell you, "yes." it doesn't take much of certain compounds.
I might see it blowing out a window and killing a couple people behind it, but his goal to blow up the capitol dome with the amount of explosive that plane could carry - did it seem a bit delusional?
A lot of the recent terror plots seem like they could have killed someone if they'd worked, but this one seemed like you could have accomplished as much terror with a room in a tall building and a hunting rifle.
this is creating a bit of a stir in the RC flying community, especially since the AMA was just recently dealing with an FAA proposal to regulate RC flight as if they were all UAV/drones.
i'm sure this means there will be even more sillyness trying to fly rc planes soon...
"You can have my Tyco AirHogs when you pry them out of my cold, dead fingers."
Waste of a nice F-4 jet if you ask me.
In reply to MadScientistMatt:
It would be enough of an explosion to cause terror or kill multiple people. I think the pentagon is pretty well protected these days.
Per Schroeder wrote:"You can have my Tyco AirHogs when you pry them out of my cold, dead fingers."
Lawlz.
N Sperlo wrote:In reply to MadScientistMatt:
It would be enough of an explosion to cause terror or kill multiple people. I think the pentagon is pretty well protected these days.
In the hands of someone with a realistic assessment of what he had, it certainly could. The Beltway Snipers are a good example of when terrorists have enough brains to go for a simple plan they know they can get away with. Flying a bomb on an R/C plane into, say, the crowd at a sports stadium would be a bloodbath.
But this guy doesn't come across that way. He wanted to use the five pound bombs to attack the wrought iron dome on the Capitol, or the bulletproof glass on the Pentagon. I'll admit I don't know just how powerful C4 is, but that sounds more like it could, at best, punch a small hole in the dome rather than bring it down. Instead of learning combat or demolition in the military, or terror at an Al-Qaeda camp, he seems to have learned about terrorist plotting from G.I. Joe cartoons.
As both a life-long resident of the Washington DC area and model aviation enthusiast of many, many years, I'm not pleased by this. All 3 clubs I fly with receive notifications from the FAA several times a year forcing us to suspend flying while, say, the G10 summit is happening, or there's a big gummint' sumpin'-sumpin' or a coronation or whatnot.
I reckon we'll need a background check to buy propellers or receivers or glow fuel. Maybe they'll outlaw turbines. I hate jets - all the cool guys in one club have 'em, and you can't get a flight in edgewise when they're taking turns one after the next doing their "take off, zoom back and forth @ 150mph, slow roll, approach, land, repeat thing.
Also - The noisy, conspicuous jet is so the wrong way to do this. A nice slow electric high wing trainer like a Telemaster w/ a point of view camera so you can see where you're going which has plenty of lifting capacity.
The TV news report I saw said he wanted to crash the model plane into a building, hoping people would run outside. Then he and some accomplices would shoot at them with automatic weapons.
I would hate to see this result in restrictions on model aircraft. I'm a big fan of what these guys do. (Grassroots version of electric R/C).
