I like how this has been posted as a sort of implied Christmas extra credit assignment from the professor in Dr. JPF. I want to start calling you the Dr. J. of ancient knowledge speculation, but i digress. This is one of those assignments i used to dread in college over the Christmas break, the undeclared assignment to write some thoughts on the professor’s ramblings and turn it in once back from break and on to part 2 of the lecture series in the spring semester. In this case however and at my age in my advance awakenedness, I’m going to thoroughly enjoy this undeclared Christmas break assignment.
I’m going to tackle this in 2 parts: part one will be the mundane and perfectly logical explanation in my opinion; part 2 will be of the wild speculative kind, allowing my thoughts to go down the proverbial rabbit hole, like Alice.
Part one:
As far as the drone shutting down the runway in NYC, this has been solved, three guys from a near-by island, flying a private drone, not very large, at least as big as the ones near AC, NJ. Two guys have been captured and at the time of my writing one is on the loose. IMO (in my opinion), these are your typical instigators. You know the type of person, they are the voice in the ear of the two other guys about to come to blows. Talking trash, did you hear what they said about your mama and what not. They probably are mafia underlings, maybe being used by the intelligence community, no proof just saying. Perhaps, this is a test to see how effective the programing has thus been. I.E. how fearful everyone has become, including civilian response agencies.
The drone that crashed near hillsboro township nj, the story needs more details. Here is a local FM station reporting of it. Drone crash reported in Hillsborough - what did search find? My, initial reaction, just kids flying a drone at night. More probing for how well the fear campaign is setting in? Duck and cover drills anyone?
The Sheriff’s story seems really wishy washy. They launched an “industrial grade” drone into the air to chase it. Who’s flying it? What kind of technical spec’s are on this “industrial grade” drone? If it’s night time and the 13 8ft wingspan drones are capable of moving at hundreds of MPH, of which the article doesn’t mention speed other than following a boat, then yeah if it takes them a minute to wake the drone pilot and get the thing launched into the air from the station i assume? They are going to miss it completely, that’s perfectly logical. The Coast Guard i assume equals “the maritime agency” in the article, “reported seeing spotted 13 drones following their boat.” First off this coast guard boat being followed had zero cameras on it, no thermal sights and no radar? Secondly, who made the sighting? The Captain or Jimmy standing at the back smoking a cigarette on a break? Unfortunately, we are relying on the human element here, to whit i say, i heard from bill that he saw mark walk on water yesterday!
Onto, the AC drone swarm, and them coming out of the sea!? To say, " for if they are coming [“from the direction of the ocean”] then that implies an ocean-going launch platform - a ship - from which to be launched and controlled," is not necessarily true and I’m going to differ with you here a bit. Depending on fuel availability/storage on the drone itself, these 50 could have each been launched from separate ground based airports, military or civilian, and then flown without lights out into the sea maybe 20 miles out just over the horizon, however far that is depending on altitude, into a designated holding zone. Where they held for however long it took for all of them to gather then turned around and flown, in formation, with their “Disco” lights on over AC. Only giving them the appearance of coming from a Sea based platform.
If we are going to move forward with construction drones in the commercial airspace above cities and the rest of the country we are going to need the civilian regulation/manuals/guidebooks on how to deal with them from an air traffic controller point of view. The first story, we see even a private small drone can shut down an airport because the ATC guys in the tower don’t have regs to deal with them, or can’t communicate directly with the operators to tell them to get out of the area, so they are forced to shut the airport down, until the drone can be dealt with. I don’t have the link right off, but if memory serves me still, there was a couple of weeks a few summers back where there was a drone flying around the Los Angeles airport causing havoc with their ATC guys. I believe they also had to shut down the airport and divert planes elsewhere.
There are 2 specific agencies in the US that deal with the airspace. One is military and based out of colorado springs CO. It’s abbreviated NORAD, and here is the official link. https://www.norad.mil/ These guys were probably the first ones to develop the regs for drones in operation over US airspace, but their drones aren’t going to be flying at 1000 ft altitude. No no, they are up in the 10k’s ft altitude. Having no pilot, you can put those drones as high as you want, depending on the camera package or weapons systems installed on board. 100k ft, yep you bet no problem, would you as a civilian ever see or hear those i ask? Never, you’d have zero clue they were and are currently flying over head right this very second, at the time of my writing and whatever time your reading this! This is fact. That is the realm of the reconnaissance drone! Construction drones however are a whole different ballgame altogether. They are going to be flying in and around building in highly populated cities doing all sorts of mundane task, like delivery for instance! Multiple levels of flight corridors are in need of being created, remember three dimensional, height is allocated in airspace. As an ATC operator your going to need to be able to track every single one of those from the tiny one delivery doughnuts to Chris Christy, to the one lifting the pallet of 2 ton steel I beams at the construction sight on 3rd and Walbash, they are getting rid of the hard line into the Matrix! Anyway, the military arm is not going to need to be involved on that side of the house, at least until there is a problem. So naturally it’s going to fall onto the Civilian side of the house and that, my friends of which I’m sure your all aware, is the FAA, or https://www.faa.gov/ their official page.
Whether we like it and agree with it or not, commercially work style drones are coming and as such we are going to need to be able to integrate them into the civilian airspace. The place where the FAA test anything technical or regulatory, is done here, both https://www.faa.gov/data_research and https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies pages i am assuming, 99% of that data comes from https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ang/offices/tc which is located here Google Maps
Notice the proximity to Atlantic City, this is Ocean County NJ by the way. So they gather up the 50 drones and the bring them on shore to see at which distance they can identify the individual drones in the mass swarm. We have to remember our civilian radar is currently configured to find civilian size aircraft down to Cessna 150 size aircraft, things smaller than that, need to be tested for and experimented with to find the best phased array system to begin to decipher the individual small drone out the large pack. So, you build a phased array radar system you place is somewhere and you bring a swarm of drones to test it, you tweak it, reset the test and do it again. Depending on the outcome of the test it might take several weeks to get it fully tweaked. Perfectly legitimate reason for a 50 size drone swarm coming on shore with their lights a blinking and everything.
Posting this and moving on to part two in the future, the wild speculation side of the brain! I’ll give a hint it has to do with a multiple level operation like Dr. JFP talks about with the 3 phase 9/11 operation.
