Drone With Gun Attached Leads to FAA Investigation
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is looking into a device built by a Connecticut teenager that combines a drone and a handgun.
Officials seek to determine if 18-year-old Austin Haughwout violated a regulation prohibiting the "careless or reckless operation of a model aircraft."
Haughwout had posted a 14-second online video that shows shots being fired from the four-propeller drone, onto which he had strapped a semiautomatic handgun. The teen's father told WFSB-TV last week that his son had built the device with the help of a Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) professor.
But CCSU assistant professor Edward Moore told the Hartford Courant that he had warned Haughwout that the project was "a terrible idea" when his student had proposed a gun-firing drone in a class the teen took at the college over the summer.
"I discouraged him," Moore said. "I tried to give him the same advice I would give my kids."
Police in Clinton, Connecticut, were also investigating the incident. But since the device seems to have been flown and the shots fired on private property, authorities said it may be "a case of technology surpassing current legislation," according to CNN.
"We are attempting to determine if any laws have been violated at this point," Clinton Police Chief Todd Lawrie said. "It would seem to the average person, there should be something prohibiting a person from attaching a weapon to a drone. At this point, we can't find anything that's been violated."
The gun-firing drone, meanwhile, was not the first pilotless aircraft with which Haughwout managed to cause uproar: Last year, police charged a woman with assault after she had confronted the teenager about flying a drone at a state beach.
Haughwout said he had been using quadcopter -- a remote-controlled drone -- to get footage of the landscape from about 50 feet above the beach when Andrea Mears confronted him. A video showed the Westbrook, Connecticut, woman calling him a pervert, striking him and ripping his shirt. Mears was sentenced to probation in July 2014.
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