Rc-26 Surveillance Aircraft - The aircraft is normally used to provide surveillance for big federal drug and gang busts — but flew over the Black Lives Matter protests in DC earlier this month, as well as over Baltimore during the protests following Freddie Gray's death.
It was fitted with video cameras in 2006, by a company called Alpha Research & Technology. Photos on the firm's website show the plane and the two-person, three-screen console used to control its surveillance cameras from inside the main cabin.
Rc-26 Surveillance Aircraft
The plane now carries a Wescam MX-20 steerable camera turret, described by its manufacturer as ideal for high-altitude, persistent surveillance. It can monitor targets day and night, see through haze, and provide infrared thermal imaging. In the fire-support role, aircraft sensors can detect fires at up to 80 miles and accurately map them from up to 3 miles away.
The Fbi Used Its Most Advanced Spy Plane To Watch Black Lives Matter Protests
An extensive communications suite allows communications from 29 to 960 MHz including provisions for plugged-in 800 MHz handheld radios and earphones. The aircraft is a one-of-a-kind spy plane operated by the FBI, fitted with sophisticated cameras for long-range, persistent video surveillance, day or night.
It repeated its late-night circling around the city as protests continued the following two nights, and made a shorter flight on June 6. Gillespie said Kinzinger, a lieutenant colonel trained as an RC-26 pilot, also sees the aircraft's value in assisting Customs and Border Patrol missions along the southern U.S.
border. Kinzinger deployed with his unit to the border for the security mission in February. "The congressman is pleased to see the RC-26 given an extension in the NDAA because he knows firsthand how important this reconnaissance resource truly is for the Air Guard," said Maura Gillespie, a spokeswoman for Kinzinger.
"The Air Force is leading the way with bold, and likely controversial, changes to our future budget. We need to shift funding and allegiance from legacy programs we can no longer afford due to their incompatibility with the future battlefields and [instead] into the
capabilities and systems ... required for victory. There's no way around it," he added. Ongoing upgrades include airspace compliance mods to meet FAA mandates. The ANG was barred from divesting the platform starting in FY20 unless it demonstrates the fleet's missions can be performed by other assets.
RC-26s notably supported wildfire fighting efforts in California, and law enforcement activities during civil unrest in several U.S. cities in 2020. The aircraft is equipped with specialized digital cameras, IR video, and communications equipment to enable domestic and international anti-trafficking.
The aircraft has a secondary role providing real-time video streaming to responders following hurricanes, wildfires, and other disasters. The Air National Guard told Air Force magazine that these flights were "responding to a District of Columbia National Guard request to provide airborne situational awareness of key lines of communication and critical infrastructure within the District."
Normally, this elite spy plane is deployed for some of the FBI's most important surveillance missions, providing eyes in the sky when federal agents arrest drug traffickers or violent gang members. But this isn't the first time it has flown over Black Lives Matter protests: A BuzzFeed News review of flight tracking records has established that the same aircraft circled above Baltimore in April and May of 2015, during the unrest that followed the death of Freddie
Gray from severe injuries sustained in police custody. "The FBI is supporting our state, local, and federal law enforcement partners with maintaining public safety in the communities we serve," the agency responded in a written statement.
"Our efforts are focused on identifying, investigating, and disrupting individuals that are inciting violence and engaging in criminal activity. The FBI respects those who are exercising their First Amendment rights, including the right to peacefully protest."
BuzzFeed News obtained flight tracking records for the plane going back to the beginning of 2015 from the website Flightradar24, linking several of its flights to high-profile raids on drug traffickers and violent gangs. These included major drug trafficking busts in Puerto Rico in 2018 and 2019, drug and money laundering arrests in northern Alabama in October 2019, and the capture of members of prisoner-led gangs in Woodland, Northern California, in February 2018.
In 2015, the Baltimore Police Department asked for the FBI's help in monitoring unrest in the city. But the DC Metropolitan Police Department said it did not request the flights above the nation's capital in early June.
Because the costs of operating, staffing and equipping the force have increased over time, the service has had to budget more money just to keep existing platforms going, according to Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project for the Center for Strategic and International Studies
. Harrison published his latest analysis, "The Air Force of the Future: A Comparison of Alternative Force Structures," in October. The surveillance flights over DC began the day after another branch of the Department of Justice, the Drug Enforcement Administration, was given the authority to "conduct covert surveillance" and collect intelligence on people protesting the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
The FBI can also equip its planes with devices called cell site simulators that mimic a cellphone tower and can be used to locate and track people via their phones. But Heath Hardman, a lawyer who used to operate similar devices for the US Marine Corps, could find no evidence of antennas that would be used for this purpose in the FAA documents for the Citation jet, and said that a plane tracking phones would be unlikely
to fly so high. "You want to be as low as you can without being detected," he told BuzzFeed News. The fleet is currently split between six Block 25R and five Block 20 configured aircraft. ANG priorities include bringing the fleet to a common standard with updated mission management, integrated comms, and upgraded antennas.
Critical needs include adding SAR to enable all-weather ground moving target tracking, LOS/BLOS-secure FMV downlinks, avionics modernization, and five-bladed propellers to increase range and short-field performance. "It should come as no surprise that the FBI uses planes to follow terrorists, spies, and serious criminals," said then-deputy director Mark Giuliano in June 2015, in a rare public statement on the agency's aviation program.
"We have an obligation to follow those people who want to hurt our country and its citizens, and we will continue to do so." Earlier this year, the lawmaker spoke out against the Guard's potential cut to the RC-26 ISR fleet.
In an op-ed published in Air Force Times, Kinzinger wrote that the ISR plane could be the boost that border security needs when other resources are scarce or troops are limited by other means. The Air Force cannot spend money to retire or realign funds meant for the RC-26 surveillance plane until the Air Force secretary "certifies to the congressional defense committees that other platforms or technologies provide equivalent capabilities," according to the bill.
Shortly before 11 p.m. on Monday, June 1, just hours after federal police used tear gas and batons to clear protesters from the front of the White House for President Donald Trump's Bible-wielding photo op, a Cessna Citation jet took off from Manassas Regional Airport in Virginia.
Until about 1.30 a.m., it flew in a 7-mile circle around central Washington, DC, surveilling the protests, flight tracking records show. The FBI's Cessna jet wasn't the only sophisticated government spy plane to fly over DC in early June.
On June 3 and 4, an RC-26 surveillance aircraft operated by the Air National Guard flew in tighter circles at altitudes of less than 7,000 feet. These planes, like the FBI's jet, are commonly used in counter-drug trafficking operations.
They vary in capability: five are Block 20s and six are Block 25s, which have different avionics packages. Since at least 2009, the Guard has overseen all 11 of the medium-altitude ISR aircraft, which are used for domestic response, counter-drug operations and disaster relief, as well as to respond to assistance requests from local governments.
The fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that passed both houses of Congress this week contains provisions to halt the planned retirement of an Air National Guard intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance plane flown by a U.S.
congressman In 2015, the FBI Cessna Citation's identity was masked on public flight tracking websites, but from the Flightradar24 data BuzzFeed News has now confirmed that the same plane that flew over the BLM protests in DC in June following George Floyd's death also conducted surveillance in Baltimore after
Freddie Gray was killed. But the plane's recent outing above DC is not the first time it has watched BLM protests. In May 2015, the ACLU noted that an unidentified Cessna Citation had circled above Baltimore during the unrest triggered by the death of Freddie Gray.
An FBI propeller-driven Cessna was also tracked circling over the city at that time. "When you have a large fleet, the cost per plane goes down, [but] small fleets, the cost per plane goes way up because you have huge fixed costs with each of your aircraft types," he told reporters when the report debuted.
"It's now been well documented that a number of federal agencies wildly overreacted to protests in DC in deeply troubling ways," Nathan Freed Wessler, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Project on Speech, Privacy, and Technology, told BuzzFeed News.
"To learn that the FBI deployed its state-of-the-art surveillance plane to watch these historic protests raises additional troubling questions." Other FBI planes carry less capable cameras requiring the aircraft to fly at altitudes of around 5,000 feet, where they would more easily be spotted from the ground.
Those planes watch suspects in FBI investigations in the same region as their home airport. The Citation jet, by contrast, is deployed across the entire nation, and often circles its targets at altitudes of 15,000 feet or more.
During the flights above Washington, DC, in early June, it flew at between 13,000 and 17,500 feet. "Despite the important abilities of this reconnaissance plane, Air Guard officials announced they'll be removing it from use, and will do so quickly," he said in the Jan.
27 op-ed, following a 35-day government shutdown. "Their announcement was made quietly, as the country's attention was drawn to the government shutdown focused on the issues on our southern border." Then-Acting Air Force Secretary Matt Donovan (most recently named to become the under secretary of defense for Personnel and Readiness at the Defense Department) said Defense Secretary Mark Esper has been open to "divesting ... legacy capabilities that simply aren't suited
" for future battlefields. The vast majority of the FBI's planes are small, propeller-driven Cessnas, according to Federal Aviation Administration registration records for the agency's front companies. The jet that flew over BLM protests is the only aircraft of its type operated by known FBI fronts.
It is registered to the National Aircraft Leasing Corporation, identified as an FBI alias in the 2012 book Intel Wars, an analysis of the "war on terror" written by the former intelligence analyst Matthew Aid. The address given on the plane's registration documents is a UPS Store in Greenville, Delaware.
Contractors: Fairchild (airframe); Elbit Systems (avionics upgrade).First Flight: 1990.Delivered: March 1989-1996 (delivered as C-26A/B).IOC: N/A.Production: 10 (C-26A); 33 (C-26B); 11 (RC-26).Inventory: 11.Operator: ANG.Aircraft Location: Des Moines Aprt., Iowa; Ellington Field, Texas; Fairchild AFB, Wash.; Fresno Yosemite Arpt., Calif.;
Key Field, Miss.; Kirtland AFB, N.M.; Montgomery Regional Arpt., Ala.; Truax Field, Wis.; Tucson Arpt., Ariz.; Yeager Arpt., W.Va. Active Variant: •RC-26B. Surveillance version of Fairchild C-26. Dimensions: Span 57 ft, length 59.5 ft, height 16.6 ft.
Weight: Max T-O 16,500 lb.Weight: Max T-O 16,500 lb.Power Plant: Two Garrett TPE331-12UAR-701 turboprops, each 1,100 shp.Performance: Speed 334 mph, range 2,070 miles.Ceiling: 25,000 ft.Accommodation: Two pilots, navigator/mission systems operator. Although there had been violent clashes and looting in the days before the FBI planes were deployed above Baltimore, more than 18 hours of video footage subsequently released by the agency showed peaceful marches and people moving around on the streets at night.
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