Far Beyond the Rocket Pods

The Security Aviation in Anchorage saga is getting much stranger: huge numbers of weapons, some boasting of connections to the White House, fake medavac flights with automatic weapons in the floorboards.

Sure fine, another Alaskan nut job, right? Yet the company has 45 pilots, its own building, a fleet of vehicles and weapons and apparantly, mysterious, unlimited supplies of money.

The windowless room was "just floor-to-ceiling weapons," Bucknall said, with an area for a gunsmith to work. "Rob Kane was in the building, but Dennis showed it to me. It was kind of his hangout."

She saw "silenced .22s," she said, and "fully automatic weapons with silencers."

As far as she could see, they all had price tags, she said.

There is of course a whiff of supposed White House connection:

Adding to the aura of government sanction, Avery, Hopper, Kane and other top company officials wore credentials inside the building that carried the White House logo, Bucknall said. "They claimed to have a direct line to George Bush and said they had a government credit card, and that's how they were buying these aircraft," she said.

The principles are clearly bragging, and evidence is better that these are a bunch of fruitcake weapons fetishists. However, you may recall during the Iran-Contra hearings that Anchorage's Mark Air, Southern Air Transport contracted aircraft - presumably with U.S. Intelligence agencies - to supply the Contras. It's an awfully big operation -office buildings, helicopters, and hand grenades - and a huge amount of money for weekend warriors.

The Daily News is clearly interested and will be following up; it's a very entertaining story, private jet squandrons, fireball crashes into mobile homes, and running guns out of Anchorage. I'm going to guess that this will make a national spash within a few weeks. I'll just note that they aren't accused of being terrorists.