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A father shot was arrested after shooting down an $1,800 drone that was hovering over his sunbathing daughter. William H. Merideth, 47, from Kentucky was charged with first degree criminal mischief and first-degree wanton endangerment. The owner of the drone claims he was only trying to take pictures of a friend's house, when Merideth shot at the device, sending it crashing into a field near his yard last weekend.

Merideth allegedly told the police that a drone was hovering over his house, where his teen daughter (he has two) was sunbathing. So he pulled out his gun and gave it a merry death. Merideth was arrested for wanton endangerment and criminal mischief. There is, apparently, a local ordinance that says you can't shoot a gun off in the city, but the police charged him under a Kentucky Revised Statute.

Sweat the small stuff. That’s the unofficial motto for this year’s edition of the military exercise Black Dart, a two-week test of tactics and technologies to combat hostile drones that begins Monday on the Point Mugu range at Naval Base Ventura County in California. The military categorizes Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) by size and capability, from Group 5 drones that weigh more than 1,320 pounds and can fly above 18,000 feet like the Reaper, down to Group 1, mini- and micro-drones less than 20 pounds that fly lower than 1,200 feet. Previous Black Darts have covered threats to troops overseas...

Freelance camera operator Harrisen Howes lost a small camera drone two months ago after his roommate “drunkenly” crashed it onto a neighbors roof high overhead. After recently purchasing a larger, camera-equipped drone, Howes decided to try and rescue his old drone with his new one using some rope and hooks fashioned from coat hangers.

A recreational drone temporarily halted air drops Sunday in an area of southwest San Bernardino County where firefighters were battling a brush fire, officials said. The Mill 2 Fire broke out about 2:30 p.m. and burned 35 acres within 90 minutes near the intersection of Highway 38 and Bryant Street (map), east of Mentone and North of Yucaipa, according to the U.S. Forest Service. No injuries were immediately reported. Homes in Yucaipa and a Southern California Edison plant in Highland were threatened, said Carol Underhill, a spokeswoman for the agency. Four residences were evacuated on the west end of Yucaipa...

The drone was spotted about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday flying between two fixed-wing aircraft battling the massive wildfire burning south of Big Bear Lake, according to Mike Eaton, forest aviation officer for the San Bernardino National Forest. The sighting of the illegal aircraft prompted authorities to recall all aircraft battling the fire. “We don’t want to deal with unknown aircraft in our airspace,” Eaton said. “They’ve got enough on their mind already … difficult terrain, difficult weather, winds and other things. They don’t need to be worrying about model airplanes or drones.” Authorities could not figure out who was flying the...

At around midday on Saturday, a drone will touch down in Słubice, a small town on Poland's western border. Its cargo? Several doses each of the drugs Mifepristone and Misoprostol, which, taken together, constitute an abortion. “This is not an air drop,” Rebecca Gomperts tells me over the phone, days before the delivery is due to take place. “This is an individual delivery method – we’re not dropping bags full of abortion pills into Poland.” At the moment, Gomperts and her team at Women on Waves are planning to deliver “less than five” doses to individual women who need them...

When lifeguards at a popular Southern California surfing spot decided to use a high-tech drone to keep swimmers safe from shark attacks, they got a chilling eyeful. The drone flies up about a 100 feet, looks down at a wide area and when they see shadows they can focus on them. In a matter of minutes the lifeguards can see just how many sharks may be lurking just yards from the shoreline. “This morning, we launched it and 10 minutes later, we knew there were 10 to 12 sharks in the Surfside [Beach] area,” said Chief Joe Bailey, a Seal...

If quadcopters haven’t yet caught your interest then maybe the B-Unstoppable hybrid drone will be the first. A Kickstarter project created by a company named ‘B’ aims to introduce the first commercially available hybrid tank-quadcopter to market. With the flip of a switch, your drone can transform from a dirt-barreling tank into a sky-flying aircraft while capturing footage the entire time via an optional 720p HD camera.

The cruise missiles so often used to destroy ISIS installations and other enemy targets descend like a flash out of the sky, traveling up to 600mph as they approach unsuspecting terrorist compounds, hideouts, and ammo storage facilities. But the impressive speed at which a cruise missile is propelled will seem like a proverbial stroll in the park when an awesome new generation of hypersonic “birds” take flight as an operating Air Force weapon system. The website military.com reveals updated details of the progress the Air Force is making in the development of the X-51, the hypersonic air vehicle that’s...

ALKMAAR, Netherlands, - A Netherlands public broadcaster shared a clip of its video drone being smacked out of the sky by an aggressive goose. RTV Noord-Holland, which shared the clip on YouTube, said the Egyptian goose apparently saw the drone as a rival when it was flying over the Oudorperpolder area of Alkmaar. The bird came in low to knock the device out of the sky. The drone did not appear to be seriously damaged and was able to make a relatively smooth landing.

A US operation has killed the senior al-Qaida figure who issued the claim of responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, according to US sources familiar with the matter and a reported video posted by the group. Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) said that its ideologue Nasser bin Ali al-Ansi was killed with his eldest son and other fighters in Yemen in a US air strike, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which cited the online video. Reuters could not independently verify the video. Ansi's death would suggest the covert US drone program against the Yemen branch of...

Credit: NASA Langley/David C. Bowman A team at NASA's Langley Research Center is developing a concept of a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly efficiently like an aircraft. The prototype, called Greased Lightning or GL-10, is currently in the design and testing phase. The initial thought was to develop a 20-foot wingspan (6.1 meters) aircraft powered by hybrid diesel/electric engines, but the team started with smaller versions for testing, built by rapid prototyping. Imagine a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly...

The skies above the U.S. military's counterterrorism hub on the Horn of Africa have become chronically dangerous, with pilots forced to rely on local air-traffic controllers who fall asleep on the job, commit errors at astronomical rates and are hostile to Americans, documents show. Conditions at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the base for U.S. pilots flying sensitive missions over Yemen and Somalia, have become so dire that American warplanes and civilian airliners alike are routinely placed in jeopardy, according to federal aviation experts and documents obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act. Unlike other major U.S....

Drone footage recorded over the Nepalese capital Kathmandu shows the scale of destruction following a major earthquake.

Jane’s Defence Weekly reports that Hezbollah has built a runway in the morthern Bekaa Valley to be used for drones, likely Iranian-made UAVs. New satellite images shows the runway in an area 10 kilometers south of the Lebanese village of Hermel.
Jane’s states: The short length of the runway suggests the facility is not intended to smuggle in weapons shipments from Syria or Iran as it is too short for nearly all the transport aircraft used by the air forces of those countries. An alternative explanation is that the runway was built for Iranian-made UAVs, including the Ababil-3, which has been...

  An American drone strike in January killed four people in Afghanistan: An American and an Italian held hostage by al-Qaida, as well as two Americans working with the terror group, were inadvertently killed in U.S. counterterrorism operations earlier this year, the White House said Thursday. The White House said that Warren Weinstein, an American held by al-Qaida since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian held since 2012, were killed in a January operation in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The operation targeted an al-Qaida-associated compound and there was no reason to believe either hostage was present,...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WPVI) -- Need a new way to keep tabs on your child? A father in Tennessee may have the answer. Chris Early uses an eye in the sky to watch his eight-year-old daughter. Early, from Knoxville, is a techie and he loves to play with his new drone. He owns a production company and loves to see what new things he can do with it. A few weeks ago he used it to when his daughter Katie asked to walk to school on her own. As she was walking out of the door, the father got out his...

A Mansfield man says a drone was hovering outside his first floor window. He called police and was told there was little they could do about it.

Flying a kamikaze drone armed with explosives from the back of an MV-22 Osprey aircraft, and directing it right into the insurgent’s fighting hole. The Marines tested a small unmanned aircraft known as the Switchblade recently at Twentynine Palms, Calif., flying it directly at targets from both the ground and the back of the Osprey, a long-range aircraft that has rotors like a helicopter, but can fly like a plane once they rotate forward. They were “inert,” with no explosives on board, but the mission went off without a hitch, said Col. James Adams, commanding officer of Marine Aviation Weapons...