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Joseph McCabe, who runs his own construction firm and co-owns a party boat business, was jailed for 46 weeks on Friday at Edinburgh Sheriff Court after admitting four sexual offences

A former soldier who sexually assaulted four Jet2 cabin crew during a flight to Tenerife has been jailed.

Joseph McCabe groped and slapped the buttocks of two flight attendants before grabbing a third around the waist and attempting to hug a fourth. A court heard McCabe’s behaviour forced the plane, which had left Edinburgh, to be diverted to the Portuguese island of Porto Santo.

Police there arrested the 40-year-old man and, last month, he admitted the four sexual offences. McCabe, who was a private in the Royal Logistic Corps for five years, was jailed for 46 weeks on Friday at Edinburgh Sheriff Court.

The court heard McCabe made sexual comments to one woman about her tights and make up, asked her age and where she lived and ripped up a written warning he had been given for his drunken conduct. The former soldier also threw his bank card at an air employee and began dancing in the aisle on the plane in March last year.

READ MORE: Student rapist, 26, jailed after four-year spree of attacks on multiple womenREAD MORE: Woman sexually assaulted at busy city centre bus stop as cops release CCTV

The defendant, who now runs his own construction firm and co-owns a party boat business called The Drunken Anchor, has been handed a lifelong ban from flying with Jet2 and has refused to pay the £5,000 fine the airline had imposed on him.

Sentencing, Sheriff Alison Stirling said the offence had involved “a high level of culpability and a high level of harm”. McCabe, who has two children, was also placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years and was made subject to non-harassment orders banning him from having any contact with the victims for an indefinite period. Solicitor Anna Kocela, defending, said her client is a self-employed building boss and had been drinking excessively at the time of the flight due to a family bereavement.

Previously, prosecutor Miriam Farooq told the court the Jet2 flight took off from Edinburgh Airport bound for Tenerife with around 110 passengers on board at around 8.30am on March 15 last year, reports Daily Record.

Ms Farooq said the flight was packed with families and children and shortly after take off cabin crew had noticed McCabe “making multiple trips to the toilet”.

The fiscal depute said around 90 minutes into the flight a female flight attendant was serving a passenger when she “felt someone behind her touching her buttocks”.

The employee turned round to find McCabe was “looking at her with a smirk on his face” and had asked her “where she bought her tights because he liked them”.

McCabe, from Glasgow, was given a verbal warning on the flight and then ripped up a written warning given to him by the air crew for his shocking behaviour.

“H Is for Hawk” is for the birds. And such majestic creatures they are, holding their own opposite the magnificent Claire Foy (“All of Us Strangers”).

The film, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and based on Helen Macdonald’s memoir, centers on Foy’s character Helen, devastated by the sudden loss of her father (played by Brendan Gleeson). In her grief, she turns to a childhood interest, falconry, and buys a goshawk. The wilder the bird, the tamer the name; Helen calls her Mabel.

Producer Dede Gardner and Lowthorpe had worked with Foy before (in “Women Talking” and “The Crown,” respectively) and agreed she’d be perfect as Helen. But Mabel was another story entirely.

Lowthorpe tapped Lloyd and Rose Buck, married bird specialists who had worked for decades on natural history documentaries with the likes of David Attenborough. Since they were conveniently located not far from her home in Bristol, England, the three got together to figure out how to make the film work.

Five birds were needed to play the character of Mabel at different points; the main two would have to be raised and trained by the couple long before filming began. Sisters Mabel 1 and Mabel 2 had the bulk of the work. “They’re from the same clutch, but they’re like chalk and cheese in character,” says Lloyd. “Mabel 2 is much shier and has more wildness in her,” so she was used in the nervous bird scenes early on. Mabel 1 was used to fly to and from Foy’s glove, and for much of the action depicting Helen cohabiting with Mabel in her house.

Jess, on loan from a friend in Scotland with a falconry center, was accustomed to people, so she was featured in Mabel’s calmest moments. Juha, the only male and much smaller than the females, was seen only in high aerial shots. And Lottie starred in the hunting scenes, traveling up to 45 miles an hour through the woods to capture her prey.

Before filming was set to begin, Foy visited the Bucks for two weeks of intensive falconry training. “That was a crucial moment for the whole project, because unless they’ve taken to Claire and she’s taken to them, I don’t think it could ever have worked,” Lloyd says. “But because she was so amazing, it works. She’s interested, clever, intelligent, but above all she’s just a lovely person, and that’s what they see. You can’t fool them, they’re not silly; they can see if someone’s pretending to like them but they don’t really.”

Foy was delighted to work with the birds and with the Bucks. “They’re incredibly kind people,” she says. “They’re so tender and so beautiful with their birds, and therefore they are with other human beings as well. But also they just threw me in. At the end of the first day I was with Lottie hunting, letting her release off my arm. Learning with the birds was the last piece of the puzzle of Helen and the experience I was going to have, so it became a really profound experience.”

“Claire put her heart and soul into that training,” Lowthorpe says. “She has great physical instincts as well as emotional instincts.”

Everything on set revolved around the hawks’ well-being. Filming took place between October and January, to avoid molting season. Everyone in the crew wore drab, dark colors, because that’s what the birds were used to. Microphones were hidden because the birds didn’t like booms, and most of the crew hid upstairs; even Lowthorpe hid behind a piece of furniture with her monitor. Lloyd or Rose would either hood or remove the scene’s Mabel, and give the all-clear, before the crew could reappear to work between takes.

“I told Charlotte Bruus Christensen, our fantastic DP, we should just film everything,” Lowthorpe recalls. “If you pin it you might kill the flavor of danger or surprise. Claire was so in tune in those scenes, she was able to react in an improvisational way, and she would be in her character at all times during those long, long takes. Like I was capturing the hawks, I was capturing Claire, allowing her to move wherever she wanted.”

“It wasn’t like having another actor who had another agenda or actions or a perspective that they wanted to get across in the scene,” Foy says. “I was along for the ride with these animals.”

When Helen takes Mabel for her first walk around the house, she talks gently to her. “This is my kitchen,” she says. Mabel flaps her wings wildly. “It’s not that bad.” The bird poops. “Oh, thanks very much.”

Mabel becomes both salvation and addiction to Helen. “To feel that alive, chasing a goshawk as it’s hunting, you’re part of this extraordinary experience, which feels spiritual and meaningful,” Foy explains. “I do think that we try to avoid the ugliness of grief at all costs, like that’s something you’re supposed to do alone in a cupboard that isn’t witnessed. We just are so afraid of that expression of it. The journey with Mabel is the most vivid expression of that experience.”

Back home in London, Foy says she intends to visit the Mabels. “Whenever you drive on the motorway in the U.K., you’ve birds of prey everywhere, and now I can identify them,” she says. “I see them everywhere I go. There’s an owl out the back of my house. I feel like I’m constantly looking upwards now.”

The U.S. Navy may soon be required by law to only consider designs built from the keel up to sail without a crew ever being on board for at least its first batch of Modular Surface Attack Craft (MASC). The service wants to acquire a new family of larger uncrewed surface vessels readily configurable for surveillance and reconnaissance, strike, and other missions using modular payloads through the MASC program. Being able to dispense with features necessary for even optional human operation does offer potential benefits, especially when it comes to cost and production at scale.

A provision explicitly about the MASC program is contained in the most recent draft of the annual defense policy bill, or National Defense Authorization Act, which the House Armed Services Committee released this past weekend. The legislation, which is a compromise between previous House and Senate versions of the NDAA for Fiscal Year 2026, could now be put to a vote as early as this week.

The MASC provision contained in the current version of the bill is brief but to the point. It stipulates that “the Secretary of the Navy may not enter into a contract or other agreement that includes a scope of work, including priced or unpriced options, for the construction, advance procurement, or long-lead material for Modular Attack Surface Craft Block 0 until the Secretary certifies to the congressional defense committees that such vessels will be purpose-built unmanned vessels engineered to operate without human support systems or operational requirements intended for crewed vessels.”

The Navy laid out a host of details regarding its plans for MASC this past summer, including initial requirements for a baseline design, as well as high-capacity and single-payload types, all of which you can read more about here. As mentioned, the Navy is primarily looking to configure MASC drone ships to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance and strike missions. The service has also expressed an interest in unspecified capabilities to counter adversary intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting activities. As TWZ has previously noted, stated power generation requirements could also be particularly relevant for any plans to integrate laser or high-power microwave directed energy weapons, as well as electronic warfare suites, onto future members of the MASC family.

For years now, the Navy has been using optionally crewed vessels to help lay the groundwork for future fleets of medium and large uncrewed surface vessels (MUSV/LUSV). This has included the test-firing of a containerized missile launcher from one of those ships, as seen in the video below.

The MASC program reflects a larger shift in focus away from those previous efforts, which were defined primarily by very rigid length and displacement requirements. Modular, containerized payloads, rather than specific hull designs, are central to the new MASC concept.

The Navy has also been fielding a growing number of speed boat and jet ski-type USV designs through programs separate from MASC.

As mentioned, USVs that are designed from the outset to only sail in an uncrewed mode offer benefits when it comes to development, production, and operational employment. They do not need berthing space, galleys, toilets, or any other features needed to support human personnel on board. All of this, in turn, can allow for more radical design decisions optimized for the performance of the missions, as well as help reduce overall complexity and cost. This can further translate into USVs that are faster and easier to produce in larger quantities.

With all this in mind, the Navy has already been openly talking about moving away from optionally-crewed designs for MASC.

“When you introduce that capability to operate with people on board, it creates a lot of other requirements and cost and complications,” Navy Capt. Matt Lewis, program manager of the Unmanned Maritime Systems program office within Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), told USNI News on the sidelines of an event back in August. “The [MASC] solicitation that went out for industry… it was open, and we are eager to get proposals as we review them, to look at the proposals that don’t have people on board.”

“We definitely want unmanned. Period. I mean, it’s that simple,” Navy Capt. Garrett Miller, commander of Surface Development Group One (SURFDEVGRU), also said at that time.

SURFDEVGRU is currently a focal point within the Navy for work on operationalizing USV capabilities and has two unmanned surface vessel squadrons assigned to it. The Group also oversees the two Zumwalt class stealth destroyers that the Navy has in service now. The third ship in that class, the future USS Lyndon B. Johnson, is also set to be assigned to the unit.

Larger USVs intended to sail for protracted periods without even a skeleton crew on board to provide immediate maintenance and other support do also present certain challenges. These vessels have to be highly reliable and be capable of at least a certain degree of safe autonomous operation in areas that could be full of other ships. How force protection might be ensured, especially during more independent operations, is an open question, too.

Underscoring all of this, the recently release draft NDAA for Fiscal Year 2026 includes a separate provision that would prevent the Secretary of the Navy from awarding “a detail design or construction contract or other agreement, or obligate funds from a procurement account, for a covered [medium and large USV] program unless such contract or other agreement includes a requirement for an operational demonstration of not less than 720 continuous hours without preventative maintenance, corrective maintenance, emergent repair, or any other form of repair or maintenance,” for a variety of key systems. It would also block the Navy from accepting delivery of any “articles” produced under any such contract or agreement before the successful conclusion of that operational demonstration.

The Navy has already been cooperating with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on a program specifically intended to prove new USV capabilities with a demonstrator designed from the start to operate without humans ever being on board. The Defiant drone ship that was developed for DARPA’s Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) effort, also known as the USX-1, kicked off an extended at-sea trial in September that has included a demonstration of its ability to be refueled at sea using a system that does not require personnel to be present on the receiving side. You can read more about the Defiant, which prime contractor Serco also developed to be a lower-cost and readily producible design, here.

USX-1 Defiant fueling at sea demonstration

USX-1 Defiant begins at-sea demonstration

The stated plan is for Defiant to be transferred to SURFDEVGRU after DARPA’s testing with the ship wraps up. The Navy has said that it sees the vessel, which is also designed around carrying containerized mission payloads, as a key technology ‘feeder’ into the MASC effort. Prime contractor Serco has already been developing an enlarged derivative, currently called the Dauntless, as well.

Other companies are already lining up to compete for future MASC contracts, including Eureka Naval Craft with its Bengal-Module Carrier, or Bengal-MC.

U.S. shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries (HII) unveiled its own plans for a new line of USVs, called ROMULUS, in September. HII says ROMULUS designs will be highly modular and capable of carrying containerized payloads, which is all in line with the Navy’s current vision for MASC.