If I were on that cutter I'd have a lot of really good photos and they'd be plastered all over the news: well, after I cleaned my shorts.
I went back and read the article which you,
@eEridani, referenced back in
post#180. It is interesting and well-written, and it reiterates a lot of things that
@mavic3usa keeps preaching. It actually is worth reading!
I post this article as a reference point prior to the current November on NJ wave: but folk worried about the US being overrun by drones should read it. It'll make you even more anxious.
December's rash of mysterious drone flights over Langley Air Force Base has changed how the U.S. plans to defend against such threats domestically.
www.twz.com
There's no denying that "drones" are being used to great effect in the Ukraine war, leading everyone to seriously rethink they're defensive strategies. So when some dufus [
or many dufii?] keep flying their hobby drones into restricted airspace over military bases, it justifiably generates cause for concern, as is eloquently described in that referenced article.
Despite all those reasonable and credible things said by Air Force Gen.
Gregory M. Guillot,
why why why did they then need to ruin everything by also including this next bit in the article?
Everything before and after this bit in the article makes sense. But this quote from
Mark Kelly instantly triggers all my B/S alarms.
However, earlier this month,
Air Force Gen. Mark Kelly told
The Wall Street Journal that at least one of the drones was “
roughly 20 feet long and flying at more than 100 miles an hour, at an altitude of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 feet. Other drones followed, one by one, sounding in the distance like a parade of lawn mowers.”
First off, "
other drones followed, one by one". That's not "
a formation of drones", as is so often reported elsewhere.
One by one sounds a lot more like the "airport landing light syndrome" of seeing bright lights, one by one, lining up on approach to an airport.
Furthermore, 20ft long, 100mph, at 4,000ft, all "
roughly" estimated, is a very interesting combination of numbers. For the purposes of this illustration, perhaps Kelly overestimated the speed, and it was maybe only "roughly" 75mph and not 100mph.
Like with so many other reported sightings on news media showing only FAA-mandated nav lights blinking in a dark sky, perhaps
Gen. Mark Kelly has difficulty accurately estimating the
scale of objects at night.
If you scale up the perspective of a 20ft length, 75mph, and 4,000ft high "drone", by a factor of x7.5 each, you would instead be seeing a perfectly normal full-sized aircraft "
roughly" 150ft long, speed 560mph, at 30,000ft altitude.
And, just by some freak coincidence,
THAT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME! Even over Langley Air Force Base! Day & Night! Check it on FlightRadar24, or ADSBexchange.com.
Forced to choose between a normal aircraft vs. a 20ft drone powered by anti-gravity technology, I'll choose the one that's
most likely to be real. It'd take a pretty convincing argument to prove anything else.