> Does the government have the right to destroy whatever it wants in the air? Hashtag-its-complicated. To a first approximation: no. The US scrambling a fight

> Does the government have the right to destroy whatever it wants in the air? Hashtag-its-complicated. To a first approximation: no. The US scrambling a fighter to blast a plane full of people out of the sky would be a huge mess and incur significant lawsuits. Refining the approximation: militaries accepts the burden of responsibility to protect their people from threats, including airborne threats. Airborne threats are already traveling with significant potential (and often kinetic) energies so they are default-threatening. So militaries have wide discretion to presume an aircraft with no transponder is hostile and respond appropriately. A lawsuit on that topic would land somewhere between "no compensation" and "Sorry kids; Uncle Sam had to blow up your project to protect mom and apple pie; here's the money for the cost of the mylar and radio parts." At the boundary-limit of the responsibilities, you can find disasters like the tragedy of Korean Airlines (KAL) flight 007, where Soviet planes failed to establish contact with a commercial airliner and shot it out of the sky.