During a rainy morning on Jan. 6, Fengyun Shi parked a rented Tesla near 65th Street and Huntington Avenue in Newport News, Va., 11 miles from the Langley base. The car was outside a shipyard run by HII, the company that builds nuclear submarines and the Navy’s newest generation of the Ford Class aircraft carrier.
Shi, a student at the University of Minnesota, told nearby residents around midmorning that he was flying a drone that got stuck in a tree. As he tried to free it using his controller, a neighbor called Newport News, Va., police. Officers asked Shi why he was flying it in such foul weather, and they told him to call the fire department for help.
Shi instead returned his rental car an hour later and took an Amtrak train to Washington, D.C. The following day, he flew to Oakland, Calif. By chance, the drone fell to the ground that same day and ended up with federal investigators. FBI agents found that Shi had photographed Navy vessels in dry dock, including shots taken around midnight. Some were under construction at the nearby shipyard.
On Jan. 18, federal agents arrested Shi as he was about to board a flight to China on a one-way ticket. Shi told FBI agents he was a ship enthusiast and hadn’t realized his drone crossed into restricted airspace. Investigators weren’t convinced but found no evidence linking him to the Chinese government. They learned he had bought the drone on sale at a Costco in San Francisco the day before he traveled to Norfolk.
U.S. prosecutors charged Shi with unlawfully taking photos of classified naval installations, the first case involving a drone under a provision of U.S. espionage law. The 26-year-old Chinese national pleaded guilty and appeared in federal court in Norfolk on Oct. 2 for sentencing.
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