So manufacturer says MTOW is 90kg, which likely means they barely got it in the air once at freezing temperatures on a very long tarmac strip. Max speed of 170 km/h would indicate that it's happy cruising at around 120-150 km/h. The place they found it in a barn is 170km away from the Morrocan coast around El Hoceima, so about two hours of flight including take-off and climb. Compared to a specified 7hr max flight time, they'd have to fill it up to about one third, so 9 liters of fuel, or 7kg.
An empty weight of 25kg and 7kg of fuel gives us rougly 32kg of empty take-off mass, and you then could load it up with not-quite 50kg of payload. Significant, but a far cry from the 150kg that was reported.
Unfortunately, the 26.5kg empty weight they specify is the bare airframe. That means it excludes the engine, VTOL powertrain (motors + escs + props), general wiring/electronics and VTOL batteries.
Their quoted "25kg" payload is likely about right for a shorter flight.
Yeah, likely. I'd still be confident that it can cross the mediterranean away from the Strait of Gibraltar. But maybe the overpromising is why they found it in a barn in mint condition, and not in the air.
$12k for the airframe. Each engine (4x) is another $8k. I wouldn't be surprised if the out-the-door cost of the airframe, engines, avionics and controls surpasses $50k.
I wonder what they're using as a flight controller? Is it linked to the ground (via cellular or similar) during the whole flight? Or autonomous for part of it?
I can't find any information on the data link, that they call: "Sprintlink Pro Data link & Video Link". So not sure if this uses cellular networks, or something else during flight. Hybrid products definitely exist: https://www.skyhopper.biz/products/communication-data-links-...
Besides "last mile shipping" and smuggling implications, I'm trying to think of how this could be useful today. Maybe some kind of search and rescue where someone activates a personal locator beacon, and you could send them supplies before you could reach them? A little under a gallon of water?
IDK, seems like a stretch. But I feel like there has to be more practical implications.
I looked up the cost of Warmates and they are also around $20k. Considering APKWS has existed for much longer and has a higher explosive yield and range and the fact that an Apache can carry a whole rocket killer swarm of 38 APKWS I honestly don't see how "slaughter bots" are supposed to be a threat when drones are that expensive.
The myth that drones are cheap should die. Crappy plastic toys with flight times measured in minutes are cheap. The real deal is just as expensive as everything else.
I spend about 1/3rd of the year each year in Spain and an "interesting" development related to drug trades is happening here: basically lots of people realized cannabis plants were flowering as well, if not better, in Spain than in Morocco.
The EU / Spanish polices also got apparently much better at intercepting cannabis dealers trying to pass from Morocco to Spain (hence maybe these new drones attempts).
So now there are both individuals and gangs (including gagns from Morocco and from eastern europe) growing a huge lot of weed in Spain. As in: it's becoming very big business.
Individuals have the right, legally, to grow up to two cannabis plants (I think two plants for one adult in the household is the rule and you can legally by flowering and auto-flowering cannabis seeds in shops). But quite some individuals are, illegally, growing much more than two plants as a way to meet months' ends.
Technically this delivery drone is impressive but dealers from Morocco have much bigger problems than trying to stuff ganja into drones without getting intercepted: growing cannabis plant and making hashish and ganja directly in Spain, at cheaper prices.
The article says they are smuggling cocain. I doubt cannabis would be profitable enough.
It's not just about the cost of the drone, it must be a serious undertaking for a gang to get a hand on one of those without anyone noticing. The thing is basically an ultra-light aircraft, and probably extremely illegal to operate anywhere in Europe or any sane jurisdiction...
It also doesn't say whether or not they actually had the drone in the air at all.
Maybe those guys just hatched a crazy-ass idea, financed it with their previous marijuana "business" but haven't so far gotten around to actually buying cocaine in Morocco, much less smuggling it with a drone...
Maybe it's a false flag op. The smugglers left a little something for the local agencies to find so they can do a nice bit of PR so the public feels good about it. Meanwhile, the smugglers continue using their normal trade routes.
This will also help spur more anti-drone legislation ruining for the rest of us that never intended to use drones in this manner.
Those drug dealers are pain in the ass. First they sell drugs to our children, and then go on to ruin our drone legislation. What the hell comes next?!
Sounds like they need to form a co-op. Each member signs their 2 plants to the co-op to manage/grow/etc. Pay the members something for their "license use". I'm guessing there are plenty of people that would never attempt to grow those 2 plants on their own, so don't let it get wasted.
Also, limit the co-op to be run by citizens of that country/city to keep it from becoming international rings (bwahahahaha, as if that would work)
Individuals have the right, legally, to grow up to two cannabis plants...
I believe that's a misconception. There were a few loopholes, fixed by a recent law (three or four year ago IIRC) that nuked cannabis clubs.
I'd say it's mostly safe to grow one of those auto-flowering seeds in your balcony, providing you use some translucid plastic, but telling the police "I have the right to grow two plants" seems like a weak defense.
Cannabis clubs have not been "nuked"; I'm writing this comment from one of more than a thousand across the country. Also growing plants on your balcony is forbidden; they can't be visible from outside.
It’s a de facto rule, it’s up to a judge to decide whether a person had intention of trafficking when found in possession of narcotics, trafficking is the only criminal offence. It’s common believe that 2 plants are OK for personal use.
Yes of course... but it still (used to?) mostly transit through Spain, where it then is passed into France etc. Heavy drugs coming from south america do also transit through Spain.
I found back the article (in english) I read earlier this year on the subject:
I'm all in for cocaine legalisation, but how do you make it safe? So much heart problems and overdoses that it's obviously would cause so much unnecessary deaths.
Most issues are caused by concommittant alcohol use, since it makes cocaine metabolize into cocaethylene (ethylcocaine), which is both more addictive and much worse for the heart.
Quoth Wikipedia: Some studies suggest that consuming alcohol in combination with cocaine may be more cardiotoxic than cocaine and "it also carries an 18 to 25 fold increase over cocaine alone in risk of immediate death".
People die from cocaine even now when it's illegal. The question is if harm would increase due to legalisation. I think there is a good argument that harm could actually be reduced since quality and dose control would be much better. Treatment is also easier when those with substance use disorder are not seen as criminals.
Maybe if you sold in fairly limited doses in pharmacy by prescription at which point it would loose fun and create another market for aggregators/resellers. It's not like weed where it's impossible to OD (tho it can be very stressful).
People generally don't want to overdose. ODs happen when people are mistaken about the quality and purity of the product they get hold of. Legalisation would reduce the risks significantly.
Many Colombian people would agree to do this, many will look at you in bewilderment.
The main issue is that too many people in government institutions are profiting from the status quo.
Colombia itself has a rather massive drug use problem, or, the people of the younger generation are pretty open minded about consumption.
Any country that legalizes cocaine will get on the US sanctions shit list which would cost the Netherlands hundreds of billions per year.
Also there would be massive drug tourism.
That is a pretty advanced design. It's hybrid gas/electric and the manufacturing looks excellent as well. I was expecting something patched together along the lines of the semi-submersibles that we have previously been shown.
On another note, I really don't see that thing carrying 150kg (330lbs) of useful payload. That would be an aerodynamic marvel for forward flight, and there is just no way those 4 electric motors can support vertical flight with a 150kg payload.
I am just an r/c hobbyist and would love to know if I am off on the payload somehow.
I wonder what the radar cross section on this thing is? It's going to be at least comparable to that of a small light aircraft – which are easily detected by primary radar. I think flying this across the med with no flight plan, no transponder, and no legitimate paperwork would be a very good opportunity to get it filmed extensively in-air for free by a friendly European airforce. Quite possibly including an explosive and quick landing, too!
The dry weight of the [steel/aluminium] engine for a Cessna 172R (117kg) is about four times the dry weight of the entire recommended setup for a Mugin-5 Pro, and the airframe of this UAV is carbon fiber. Some of its steel/aluminium fittings/fixtures that need to handle high stresses look like they would be difficult to replace with low-radar-cs materials, and there is a fair amount of avionics dotted around plus the four VTOL motors, but it's a really paltry amount of radar-reflective material compared to the average light aircraft, and I'm sure you could mitigate that somewhat with radar-absorbent materials/structures.
The idea of relying on fighter jets/attack helicopters/SAM systems shooting these things down sounds like an entirely asymmetric and unsustainable state of affairs.
Reading the article I thought they should have started in VTOL mode somewhere near the cost, then dive down onto the sea and fly like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-effect_vehicle over the mediterran, climbing up at the other coast and again land in VTOL mode. Now I know ground effect vehicles are a lost art, but I would think collision avoidance and evasion would be simpler to implement by computer vision on-board, while operating autonomously between waypoints and without remote control.
Yeah, I'd bet that'd fly perfectly safely at 10m altitude for all of the 200-ish km sea crossing between Morocco and Spain. Set a waypoint a few hundred meters off shore at the destination end and have it climb high enough to be difficult to hear at ground level, without ever looking on radar like it'd come from that far south.
Practically speaking, for the uses they're going to put this drone to, silencing its two-stroke engine is infinitely more important than doing something about its radar signature.
The article mentions it does show up on radar. But it also depends on the altitude it's flying at.
The friendly European airforce must have been sleeping because the article never mentions any attempted investigations or interceptions by the same. I imagine just like the US in 9-11, they'd be caught with their pants down if terrorists actually tried to use a fleet of these things.
Three things. First, the distance between a likely launch site in Morocco and a national park in Spain is less than ten miles. Second, the rated top speed of the thing is over a mile a minute. Third, you're talking about the Spanish Air Force, in southern Spain, in peacetime, not the Israeli Air Force or something.
I imagine it's always going to be police doing police work that catch these guys, as happened in this case, and not jet fighters.
I'd expect the British have a better view on it, as on Gibraltar they have quite an extensive military presence. After Brexit though, I'd imagine if it's not coming towards them, they aren't going to do or say much.
Am I completely off-base in thinking almost everything about a submersible drone is a better idea? No radar signature, much bigger haulage, can idle in location for much longer when needed, and presumably supports somewhat surreptitious unloading at sea if needed?
The Straits of Gibraltar has a strong net inflow current, which might make drone submersibles a bit prone to getting lost.
Also, the prior art for smuggling across the straits were fast launches which would bump upon to beaches and be quickly disgorged. This means that the Guardia Civil take a lot of interest in what happens along the coast.
Also, let it be said that the coast up East from Gibraltar is very much not as empty as it is from Algeciras Westwards, with a lot of development on the Costa del Sol. Makes it hard to have slower than launches/ribs submarines do their thing.
> The Straits of Gibraltar has a strong net inflow current
Just a fun fact, I heard that during WWII most of the U-boats that made it through the Strait of Gibraltar never made it out. A combination of being sunk and not having powerful enough engines to make it back out.
From a documentary I watched something like this is one of the preferred techniques for the Colombian cartels now. It's called the torpedo technique.
They design torpedo style units that get towed behind a fishing boat or such. At a desired location they detach it, and it just loiters below the surface. At some pre-arranged time it pops up to the surface and activates a radio beacon, so that a pickup ship can snag it.
It's less complicated than building an autonomous AUV, and far less likely to be spotted by arial surveillance than a narcosub. Lower capacity but still very lucrative I imagine. And very nearly risk free.
These narco-submersibles have a much higher entry cost, apparently. And you'd probably need something a few meters long, just to house the motor necessary to fight the currents.
The drone was apparently off the shelves. And the police didn't say if they ever actually got it into the air at all.
The sea is flat and you can see a long way. Radar can see a long way. These people could choose a landing spot in a hilly area with few people and many roads, where few people could see the drone land and they could unload, drive off and mingle with traffic after only a few minutes' driving.
Maybe the drone could even finish charging unattended and take off to fly back to Morocco.
It is extremely likely that the Spanish Navy or Intelligence Agency has an whole array of underwater listening devices, due to the Strait of Gibraltar.
So if you're coming from Morocco with a homemade sub (probably woefully unoptimized for being quiet), I'm gonna assume that those listening will pick up your signature.
The main downsides will be that it has much more drag to fight against and also if you're actually underwater you can't just use GPS like you can in the air making navigation much harder.
I suppose it would have to take off for Pizza delivery before they become inconspicuous enough to make illegal deliveries. Like my sibling comments say, a delivery driver or bike courier is a lot stealthier than a drone for now.
First they need to get Amazon delivering things via drone to acclimate everyone to the idea of drones buzzing around everywhere dropping things off. Post that, no one would blink an eye.
"The drug gang was flying the drone using an electronic system that relayed the exact takeoff and landing points, and used waypoints – i.e. places during the flight where it had to change course. It could also be flown using remote control." - Does that mean it was likely using GPS to follow a particular route?
Just guessing: A waypoint in a fairly lonely part of the Spanish coast, then a few points so the drone won't fly over cities on its way inland, finally a lonely spot to land.
This is a really good example of technology being used by criminals to circumvent law enforcement while putting the public at risk. While I personally think drug laws need to be updated, the more interesting discussion here is about creating technologies that can cause serious harm to the public and making them cheap and easy enough to be used by anyone with a small amount of financial backing and a strong insentive.
Is that really the interesting discussion here? It seems like the same ground journalists tread all the time when they want to waste a bunch of time opining on nothing. What's the alternative? Waste money on purpose? Make shittier user interfaces?
But article makes no sense. They write about the drone used for smuggling cocaine because it is the most lucrative thing, but they found only a few dozen kg of marijuana and hashish each where it was stored?
The police could intercept 90% of the drugs and the price of the remaining 10% would go so high that the smugglers would keep making billions.
The police has a thankless never ending job until society's attitude changes.
> Fly lower to save fuel? How does that make sense?
Propellers like lower speeds and altitudes; fans like higher speeds and altitudes [1]. This is because propellers hit the air at the true air speed. Compressors in a turbofan modify the incident pressure and air speed, letting the engine purr away without concern for creating shock waves.
> Turboprop engines are most efficient at speeds between 250
and 400 mph and altitudes between 18,000 and 30,000 feet
Ignoring the detail that your source is talking about turboprop (so, turbine engine with a big fan attached) and not a small piston engine, that's still not low altitude. That's class A airspace!
Even in a piston aircraft, you have to adjust your mixture as you climb, right? You have to add _less_ fuel per unit of air. And there's still all the drag from the aircraft itself, it's not just about propellers.
Sure, I doubt this drone would have a turbocharger, so performance (or rather, horsepower) is expected to drop above 10000ft. But not efficiency.
Reducing the fuel/air mixture doesn't increase efficiency, yes you need less fuel per unit of air, but you need more units of air too.
The problem is the air gets thinner as you go higher, meaning you need to fly at higher speeds, which means you need to fight more drag. Really it's not flying at low altitude to save fuel, it's flying slow to save fuel.
Jet engines become more efficient at higher speeds which compensates for the increased drag, and thus jet aircraft fuel efficiency goes up at higher altitudes. Piston engines are unaffected by airspeed, so at higher speeds they are doing more work at the same engine efficiency. Thus the aircraft fuel efficiency goes down.
> you need to fly at higher speeds, which means you need to fight more drag
I could not find a non-technical source for this, thank for explaining well. In summary, drag increases quadratically with mass flow while thrust increases linearly to density. So a slower-turning prop in denser air moving the air frame slower keeps the frame aloft and works more efficiently than the same frame running higher and (necessarily) faster. The power plant (turboprop or piston prop) is independent of all this.
The distance that needs covering to fly from northern Morocco to Spain is just a few km... probably would be a waste of energy to get it to 2km altitude
Probably mostly by not expending energy to climb and then descend.
Helicopter lift efficiency varies heavily with altitude, but how it varies depends on the weight of the helicopter. Heavy helicopters require quadratically more torque to hover at higher altitudes, but lightly-loaded helicopters can actually require less torque to hover at higher altitudes. Here's a (complicated but really cool) diagram to calculate on page 7, figure 7-6. https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
Since electric motor current draw is approximately linearly proportional to their torque, heavy-lift electric helicopters/drones would almost certainly conserve energy by flying lower. I'm not sure how that applies to this drone, which probably weighs below the lowest line on that diagram, and also has more, smaller, higher-speed rotors.
This vehicle probably spend most time traveling as a fixed-wing aircraft, and for those, efficiency almost always increases with altitude. (Except that their combustion-powered engines may require compressors to continue operating at higher altitudes. This aircraft's ICE may actually suffer from this, if it is an inexpensive engine not designed for aircraft.) So if the statement is correct, it's probably referring to the energy saved by not having to climb in the first place.
The picture is rather deceptive, making the drone look huge compared to the men standing behind it. When you play the video you'll see it's not that big.
Every time someone mentions flying cars, I wonder what they have in mind that a helicopter isn’t the answer to.
I remember helicopters for sale in Farnborough Air Show, probably 30 years ago now, the cheapest there cost about £100k. I assume inflation has quadrupled that, but I don’t follow that market and the stuff on eBay I am unqualified to gauge the quality of.
Hmm. I am not even slightly a mechanic, but people do seem to say electric cars need less maintenance than ICE cars. Would electric helicopters (and not just quadcopters) “take off”? I do see a lot of news-or-press-releases about passenger drones, but I can’t tell how realistic any of them are.
Electric helicopters would be facing the same problem as electric planes - energy density. Right now fossil fuel energy density is still some 40 times greater than batteries and I don't think conventional batteries will ever come even close to matching it. There would have to be some radically new type of a battery, if such a thing is even possible.
That becomes relevant precisely when the the battery mass is a significant fraction of total mass; for long distance flights, this would clearly be the case because even hydrocarbons are barely sufficient density on the longest flights; for point-to-point within a single city, which is how I expect Average Jo to use one if they were safe & available at affordable rates, I expect it isn’t an issue.
Less maintenance for the engines and a few other systems. Just as much maintenance for other components. For instance, the rotor blades have to be replaced every X hours and can cost as much as a car, each.
Mass production allows for more optimization than small production runs. Modern cars can go a long time with minimal maintenance, but it took a lot of R&D to reach that point.
The most successful small aircraft the Cessna 172 Skyhawk has averaged than 1,000 produced per year and runs ~400,000$ new. They could easily drop that to under 100k with modest levels of automation, but can’t justify automation with current levels of demand. Similarly only minimal levels of R&D is worth is at when the market is tiny.
It’s even worse in the Helicopter market. Presumably someone designing a flying car is going to take the R&D and automation risks assuming they will pay for themselves.
It's not even just the automation. There's so little demand that GA is really stuck in ancient standards.
I flew 172s for a while and I was really surprised how old most of the tech was. Built with rivets, engines still using leaded (or lead replacement) gas, still using manual mixture like an old car with a choke. Even the wired microphone in a modern (manufactured in the 2010s) C172 still has this ancient feel about it (not to mention that you couldn't use it anyway as the prop noise is way too loud to use a radio without headphones).
The instrumentation side definitely has caught up (like the Garmin G1000 glass cockpit) but the whole airframe + engine combo seems to come straight out of the 1950s. I imagine this adds to the cost as a lot of this tech is no longer mainstream so there's no economy of scale. You can see this in part costs too, and in the price and availability of AVGAS (some airports here really don't want to carry it anymore and if they do it's really expensive).
I've heard of C172s been retrofitted with modern turbodiesels with full FADEC but I really don't get why they don't come like this out of the factory these days. I did see that some of the lighting tech was upgraded though: The later ones did have LED beacons. But most of the tech was very old.
GA aircraft used to be way cheaper than they are now. Regulatory changes in the 80s (I think) shifted liability to the manufacturer in the event of an accident and everything got more expensive. It's not really fair to compare an uncertified UAV to a certified GA aircraft, because the electric aircraft is going to get a lot more expensive once you certify it for passengers.
I briefly worked with the FAA on their certification system and it’s surprisingly optimized for mass production. Which should be obvious as many aircraft components are needed in massive quantities even if the total number of commercial aircraft are quite limited. Aka the number of turbine blades is larger than the number of engines which is larger than the number of aircraft.
Unfortunately, this hits GA harder as they have vastly fewer components to worry about and small production runs are discouraged. That said, assuming flying cars are going to come from or limited to the US seems unlikely so the EASA also has a significant role.
With enough demand to produce 100k units per year, that would amortize well too.
But light aircraft are a hard thing to sell for really practical reasons. They have a lot of real world limitations for small overall improvements in performance vs ground travel.
This might be different for some air taxi services within metropolitan areas.
Most helicopters use jet engines. I think that is where a large part of the maintenance cost comes in. The rotor assembly is fairly complicated mechanically, but I don't know how often it needs to be serviced.
I think the pro-electric people are underestimating the maintenance requirements though, especially since anything flying has very conservative requirements put on it, so just saying "these electric motors will run fine for 10,000 hours" or something like that isn't going to cut it.
It costs >$100k (potentially much more) per overhaul of a turbine engine. That's a lot more than it costs to overhaul a reciprocating engine (probably 10x more).
I agree that they are more reliable though (part of why most helicopters use them, since loss of the engine is much more serious problem than in planes)
My understanding is that a "flying car" is pretty much just a lower-maintenance, easier-to-use, safer and less noisy helicopter. Any helicopter that doesn't have these properties wouldn't work as a flying car, but once (if) someone figures out how to do it, I guess it'll become a feature of other helicopter designs as well.
I’m surprised that this doesn’t happen more often. With drone technologies advancing so fast, it was truly inevitable. The next step is just to use the right coat to become invisible to radars and you’re GTG. Unless that’s already happening and they are just getting away with that and we simply don’t know.
I'm 99% that sort of paint is very very "government secrets" by the US and doesn't get out much.
Now could someone make a drone shaped like an f-117 and make it invisible to civilian radar? probably. That sort of engineering is easy with todays technology.
Can carry up to 150 kilos. Article doesn’t mention street value. I’ve no idea. If it’s cocaine, is that millions of dollars? This is Morocco though, so more likely hashish, which would be worth considerably less. How much though? Just trying to visualise cost of drone vs reward ratio.
I don't know how much of that would be profit, but seems quite likely there's an excellent cost vs reward ratio - potentially even so high that these drones could be used almost disposably if they are intercepted less frequently than boats.
I think cartels started shipping cocaine to Morocco, and from there they smuggle it to Europe. It's much easier than to send it directly to the EU considering how porous the Gibraltar straight/maritime routes across the Mediterranean are and that there are tons of very well established routes and networks already used to smuggling tens of tons of hashish/weed.
The obvious disadvantage is that the drone is programmed with a source and destination point which are easily extracted from the machine. Cleaver LEOs could probably get to the receiving point within the window when the drone is expected and, if not, the points are probably pretty close to their base of operations.
When interrogating a pilot the pilot can clearly signal distress to compatriots and is likely going to take longer to actually disclose their intended destination.
