The national pastime in the lower mainland of British Columbia for the last 10 years was to buy a 172, get your 50 hours and license quickly, fly 100 or so pounds of Marijuana to a destination in the United States, sell it for twice what you would normally get in Canada for that product (also in US Dollars which ten or twelve years ago was like doubling the profits nearly again), and then fly home. This was all done without flight plans filed obviously, and there were a number of crashes into the mountains near Abbotsford BC over the years, mainly pilots who were inexperienced running into weather or darkness. There would often be a hunt sort of like Eater Egg morning, but the prize would be a crashed plane, a dead body, and about a quarter million dollars of cash or weed up in those hills after a crash.
Well, with the advent of the Drones patrolling the border, there has been a LOT more arrests lately. A lot of criminals switched to rotary wing aircraft flying out of Kelowna in the interior doing the same crap but with more weight of marijuana going down, and cocaine or cash coming back up. There was some big stories about these pilots on Kim Bolans crime blog with the Vancouver Sun newspaper, pretty interesting stuff to read about. I can't wait for the first tard to get blown out of the sky by a sidewinder equipped drone.
