Charlie Kirk: What are the drones looking for?
News Updates
Audio By Carbonatix
Por Salem News Channel
Charlie Kirk and John Ferguson discuss the drones that are flying over the country and causing a stir. Transcript below.
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Kirk: And you're speculating that the drones are trying to sniff out radioactive material? And has that been proven to be a successful strategy to find radioactive material before?
Ferguson: It is. We have radioactive material sniffers on our unmanned aircraft. That's absolutely a capability of an unmanned aircraft. And if you look at what these drones are doing, they seem to be, there is some conflicting stories, but they seem to be trying to follow the FAA guidelines. They have navlights on them. If they had a nefarious intent, then they wouldn't have navlights on them. But they're concerned about obviously hitting other manned aircraft in such a busy airspace area.
But it is a very successful operation or a very successful capability to be able to detect gases or other materials on the ground. We have what we call methane detection systems where we mount them on our unmanned aircraft, and we fly along pipelines and we can very accurately pick out pretty much almost 100% of every single gas leak.
Now these drones are flying at night because they're seem to be flying under cover and they do not want the shape of the drone to be well known because then you can track down what manufacturer is actually producing the aircraft, right? So they seem to be following some rules. They're flying at night. There's no reason really to be flying an unmanned aircraft at night unless you have a very specific purpose because with a standard camera on a drone, you can't see anything at night unless you're using thermal optics or some form of sensor like that.
They're flying at night also because the winds are down. They're not as aggressive as they are during the day. So you would get a much more accurate reading at night when you're trying to smell chemicals or some type of gas.
