A few days ago, the
FAA closed all airspace over El Paso,
Texas, for 10 days, catching everyone by surprise. A few hours later, they rescinded that order, but a lot of damage to air travel had been
done. And, during the closure, even emergency services like air ambulances
were grounded. This caused a lot of
problems, and created the uproar we have
seen in the news recently.
Lies and misinformation and wild speculations immediately
flooded both the internet and the news.
There were mentions of laser weapons,
of drug cartel drones, of
military involvement, and more, all of it very confusing. This initially was made even worse by lies
about what happened, from Trump
administration figures.
As usual, there were
grains of truth in many of these speculations,
but how it all fits together is very different. The drug cartels really do use drones to
smuggle drugs across the border. That
really is the best way for them to do it.
Which brings up the next question:
how do you stop the drones?
Somehow, Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) obtained a military laser weapon intended to shoot down
incoming drones. How they obtained
it, and from what agency within the
military, is still unclear. What they did with it, is the start of a big problem.
Without notifying the city of El Paso, the airport,
the FAA, or anybody else, CBP started trying to identify and shoot down
some drug cartel drones. They did this
in close proximity to the airport, which
is quite close to the Rio Grande border,
actually.
That was the first big mistake: not telling anybody. The second mistake was misidentifying a party
balloon as a drone. Given the small sizes as seen from a
distance, that is quite understandable. They shot it down with the laser.
Exactly what happened next is unclear, but somehow the FAA learned of lasers being
used near the El Paso airport, probably
from their air traffic control employees in the tower, and maybe the pilots flying near the
airport. Even low-power lasers near
airports are already a forbidden and illegal hazard nationwide. That is what prompted the FAA to close the
airspace over El Paso entirely, because
they did not know what was going on.
It is not clear exactly who finally called whom and when, but when the FAA learned it was CBP trying to
shoot down drug smuggling drones, and
their activity had ceased, FAA rescinded
the shutdown. About this same time, the administration figures started claiming
that their border agents shot down a drug smuggling drone with a laser
weapon, as if that would “justify”
disrupting air travel around El Paso so badly.
Then, the “party
balloon” thing surfaced, as it
inevitably would, if CBP had misidentified
a balloon as a drone, and shot it
down. Most likely, that is why they stopped firing the laser
weapon, when they realized they had made
a target identification mistake. There
are a lot of drones flying over the border,
so confusion and mistakes are easily understandable.
Since the event, I
noticed that no administration or CBP people have admitted to what really
happened. The administration has ceased
lying about “shooting down a drone”,
which indicates the veracity of the claim that CBP downed a party
balloon by mistake.
What this episode really indicates is the extreme
incompetence of Trump appointees heading various agencies. This was evidently an experiment to see if
CBP could actually shoot down drug-smuggling drones with a military laser
weapon. If they could, that would certainly be something we all can
agree that they should be doing, if they
can do it “right”.
But doing this dangerous experiment right next to a busy
airport in a big city, was stupid in
the extreme, because it endangered
significant commercial air traffic!
Doing it without telling anyone they were going to do it, was even stupider! Not understanding that the main difficulty
would be target identification, plus ignoring
the hazard of laser injury to innocent bystanders, was egregiously stupid!
The proper place to have done this was many miles further
downstream, away from El Paso and its
airport. There would less drug drone
traffic to shoot at, but the risk to air
travel would have been far lower, and
the local airspace closure to do it “right” would have affected far fewer
people.
So why did they not do it “right”?
I already told you:
incompetent appointees.
Appointees willing to do anything Trump wants, but demonstrably incompetent to do anything
right. Our government is rife with
such. We see it almost every day in the
news.
You can fix that, at
the mid-term election, by voting out of
office all of Trump’s enablers in Congress.
You can, unless he can
successfully steal it with voter suppression and gerrymandering, something all of you have also already seen
going on in the news.
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Since I first wrote this, I did find out that the laser weapon was Blue Halo’s LOCUST weapon, pictured. Supposedly, this is a 20 KW laser system. Blue Halo has been acquired by Aerovironment. The weapon was seen at a conference mounted to an Army Strycker vehicle. It was also seen near El Paso last August, according to Axios.
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