Declan McCullagh wrote: > >Or perhaps we'll see someone take a GPS-controlled small plane, which > >can carry 1,000 lbs, and turn it into a flying bomb or delivery system > >for something quite noxious. These planes can be rented by the hour at > >hundreds of small to medium sized airports around the U.S. Though I > >don't know if the autopilot is configurable enough to let an attacker > >program it to head to a certain altitude at a certain location and > >then bail out via parachute.
Another novel that came out with the idea - and the first one to explicitly mention GPS AFAIR - was "The Moon Goddess and the Son" by Donald Kingsbury from 1987 (incorporating parts from stories in Analog back in the 1970s) which has an Afghan refugee studying aero engineering in the US and setting up light planes to autopilot an attack on the Kremlin. (To be honest when I first heard the news about 9/11 that's what I thought might have happened - until I saw a TV screen I didn't realise they were passenger planes) A good book which got less attention than it deserved. Contains a brilliant idea for what should have been done in LEO after Mir. I suppose it has been eclipsed in the memory of sf fans both by really happened to the Soviet Union and perhaps also by Mary Jane Engh's "Arslan" (AKA "The Wind from Bukhara") which overlaps in subject matter a little. "Rumsfeld, Blix Barada Nikto!"
