Drones Fell On Alabama

I have to admit, when I saw this story linked on Drudge today, I completely cracked up.

A bit of explanation: What you see in the picture linked above is probably an MQM-107 target drone (or possbily one of the new MQM-167’s, I can’t quite tell). Either way, they’re regularly launched out of Tyndall AFB (east of Panama City) for air-to-air missile evaluation tests. My last job was working for the Air Force unit that runs these suckers (although I worked on the shooting-them-down side as opposed to the drone-flying end).

Anyway, I thought the news story, and the fact that a long-since-splashed drone caused a beach to be cleared was pretty funny–although I can certainly understand the reaction of somebody who’d never seen one of those things before. At any rate, the only way one of those drones could hurt anybody is if it fell on them…