Dear Dirty America

Jay Lindsay writes:

Model airplanes are suddenly on the public’s radar as potential terrorist weapons. A 26-year-old man from a Boston suburb was arrested Wednesday and accused of plotting to attack the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol with remote-controlled model planes packed with explosives.

These are not balsa-wood-and-rubber-band toys investigators are talking about. The FBI said Rezwan Ferdaus hoped to use military-jet replicas, 5 to 7 1/2 feet long, guided by GPS devices and capable of speeds over 100 mph.

Counterterrorism experts and model-aircraft hobbyists said it would be nearly impossible to inflict large-scale damage of the sort Ferdaus allegedly envisioned using model planes. The aircraft are too small, can’t carry enough explosives and are too tricky to fly, they said.

“The idea of pushing a button and this thing diving into the Pentagon is kind of a joke, actually,” said Greg Hahn, technical director of the Academy of Model Aeronautics.

Rick Nelson, a former Navy helicopter pilot who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Ferdaus would have had to hit a window or other vulnerable area to maximize damage, and that would have taken precision flying.

Could model airplanes be a possible terrorist threat? Yes! Of course they could be. Just like canning peas and beans in the old days could be a possible threat if they weren’t canned correctly. Botulism! And botulism could take out an entire family with stealth that even a radical fundamentalist religious nut would admire.

North Dakota still haunted over 80 year old botulism horror story

I’d be more afraid of not having a job next month. Or losing your home. Or getting robbed because there are 46 million Americans living a kind of desperate impoverished lifestyle right now. But if you want to keep watch for a gliding model airplane, buzzing low past third and fourth story windows waiting to crash into something important, then go ahead.