I heard a blurb on the news in passing that some potential terrorists were stopped from gaining access to a crop duster. But, the men had nothing on them, like biological weapons, or maybe even a harmless powder - just as a scare.
Does anyone know any more details? Maybe they were trying to flee the country?
First of all Jinx, they were not trying to escape the country in a crop duster. No one is going to fly one of those things any further than maybe three hundred miles, and personally any crop duster seen anywhere besides flying over a crop will most likely be reported and dealt with.
It is not just a scare, people are genuinely worried that some terrorists would take a crop duster and load it with anthrax or some other bio-chem weapon and dump it over a major target. This is a ‘far fetched’ yet serious concern. one glint of hope is that the gov’t is tightening its reigns on where and who the ‘other’ terrorists cells are in the US and they are dealing with it very fast and quite efficiently .
Um, it has been reported in the LA area that modifications turning a crop dusting aircraft into an aerial launch vehicle for a bio weapon would be extensive, and technologically challenging.
I’m trying to picture “how” though, consdiering the planes do drop vapor as it is…
Crop dusters are designed to spray chemicals (liquid or powder) of a certain molecular size in such a way that the stuff falls mainly down. In addition, one reason those guys fly so low is to get the stuff on the crops without dusting the neighborhood or having the stuff get blown to the wrong place.
Bio/chem weapons require a different sort of sprayer, because their particles are of a different size and also require wide dissemenation of massive amounts. That means from a higher altitude, which means it’s more likely to be dispersed by the winds aloft and diluted to a harmless concentration.
That Aum cult in Japan actually did dust cities with both anthrax and botulism, with no apparent effect. Hence, they switched to sarin in subways. No doubt ariel spray attacks are possible, just not as easy as it first appears.
An op-ed piece in today’s LA Times pointed that the Aum cult would have done a lot more damage in the subway system if they had just used a bomb instead of sarin.
Regular old explosives are still more cost-efficient.
Yeah, I realize this would not be the sole means of transportation, but three hundred miles is a good leap when you’re trying to “beat feet”.
Certainly they were up to something - perhaps hoping to bring the crop duster to their bio-source?
Last I heard, investigators believed that the crop duster was merely Plan B – if they couldn’t hijack planes, they’d rent crop dusters and ram them into the WTC.
I also heard it said on that news piece that 99% of most bio weapons would be killed or destroyed if processed through a crop duster.
That doesn’t make any sense at all. A crop duster is a small plane, with a small fuel tank, travelling at a low speed.
If you hit the WTC with one, it would have punched a small hole in the side, killed or injured whoever was sitting directly in front of that hole, and caused a small fire. That’s it. There might have been five or ten people in the building killed or injured, and that’s about it. You could have hit the WTC with a hundred of them and it wouldn’t have come down.
There are plenty of other planes out there that would have been far better to use to ram the WTC, but nothing short of an airliner would have brought those towers down.
If they were looking at crop-dusters, it was a virtual certainty that they were thinking of dusting something. That’s about all they are good for. If they decided against it, it was probably for the engineering reasons mentioned above.
Yeah, except a Piper Warrior (which apparently Mohammed Atta was found of renting for practice and/or sightseeing) is cheaper to rent or buy, does not stand out in any way when flying along (unlike a crop duster), is easier to fly, seats at least twice as many (4 times as many as single-seat cropduster) and has a range of 400-500 miles if you know how to manage your fuel and speed. So if they were going to flee anywhere they’d use a standard GA plane. These guys were madmen, not idiots.
If Mr. Bad Dude was checking out cropdusters it was because he wanted to use them for spraying.