Defense contractors took an explosive drone on a Delta flight

Employees from AeroVironment allegedly brought a drone with explosives attached to it in a carry-on bag, on a Delta flight in April 2015. As Bloomberg reports, the flight had 230 passengers and when another employee, Mark Anderson, discovered this and reported it to the Department of Defense a month later, he said he was punished, stripped of his responsibilities and then fired without a severance package. AeroVironment counts the US government as a major customer, Bloomberg notes. It's supplied the Navy with submarine-launched spy drones and made robo-hummingbirds for DARPA, for example. A recent report from the company said that over half of its income is from being a government contractor. It's pretty easy, if not more than a little predictable, to see why the company reacted to Anderson's claims the way it did.