> I would have to imagine it was larger than a quadcopter, and I guarantee you it was nothing like a quadcopter from how long it was up - it has to be satellite-driven because there’s no line-of-sight, there’s no cell phone coverage that could have dealt with that, so it has to be satellite-driven, which is pretty freakin’ sophisticated.”
So, setting aside this claim that there’s no line of sight, my bet is these guys have not kept up with what quadcopters and hexacopters can do: here’s one video from 6 days ago showing really unnatural acceleration, changing direction in ways that make you say “UFO” [0] - check out the other videos on the channel, there’s another one six months ago hitting 234mph [1] - granted these are LiPo with short dwell times but other larger heavier models can go 90 minutes… so somebody out there has something custom and is having fun freaking out cops and militaries. I’d say next time instead of trying to chase it they start sweeping for radio transmissions… if they’re not already programmed to autonomously play cat and mouse with police helicopters XD
Saw some guys racing drones like the first video in a local park. Every bit as fast and maneuverable, but they had them going through 6 ft gates on a course roughly the size of a football field. I assume they're not really human-controlled because I could barely track where the drone was, let alone give it precise controls for how to pass through the gate. Went home and told my wife "If we ever get into a war, humanity is fucked."
They handle like nothing else. There is literally nothing else to compare them to so they seem almost alien. You could dive bomb a gate yourself after maybe 10 hours of practice in a simulator.
Of course the first time you try you won't even be able to keep the drone in the air but really quickly the controls become second nature.
The irony is the guys at the park were most likely not even great pilots. Look up Mr Steele on youtube if you want to watch someone do really inhuman stuff.
Turns out humans are actually really great at controlling ridiculously fast aircraft, the drone races are controlled by a person looking through a camera pointed forward on the drone. You can think of it like speedrunning an N64 game, finding the timing that lets you act instead of react.
But +1 humanity’s fucked, don’t Google Slaughterbots but maybe Google how to build an EMP, it’s easier than you think.
Comms can also be laser, and the drones can be pre-programmed and self guiding. Though in either case, you can still always dazzle either the sensors or the comms (MEMS sensors used for inertial guidance are vulnerable to ultrasound IIRC). And I’m sure the military either have or are developing an anti-drone-drone.
Well the military has AESA radars that can be programmed to act as a microwave laser so there’s that. A Faraday cage won’t be of much help if it’s literally cooked.
No worries, a lot of people search about EMP every day. Smaller EMP devices were (are?) commonly used to rob poker/slot/vending machines. I have no idea of the truth behind this, but there are homemade devices being sold online, sometimes disguised as "research" devices with photos showing how they can turn on a CCFL lamp from distance, while others blatantly declare their purpose.
Usually they’re human controlled with an FPV camera setup. Lots of stuff on YouTube to check out related to it if you’re curious. The camera and live video feed to goggles greatly increases what you can do with the drone
This is why I love HN. Between this and animat's post, I've got four amazing RC/quadcopter videos to watch that are a lot more worthwhile than Drive's 5000th "But what if UFOs were real tho?" article.
Assuming that the story is true, the thing that rules out a traditional quadcopter is the fact that it was flying for an hour. You can make quads fast or long range/endurance, but AFAIK, nobody is even close to making a quad that can do 100mph for an hour. The battery weight for that kind of flight time would be too heavy for the quad to fly.
A (relatively) simple solution would be to use something with more dense power source, maybe fuel. RC enthusiast use fueled engines routinely, it isn't something special. There are various types of advanced fueled engines for RC use from traditional 2-4 stroke miniaturized engines to turbofans.
They are not very common on small quadcopters because of lack of response. Quadcopters depend on an onboard controller for fast corrections and for this to work you need a motor that can react very fast and precisely. A liquid fuel engine in a craft that does frequent changes in direction of g forces is not an easy thing to control precisely.
But this could be easily remedied by making this at least partly hybrid (use engine to charge small battery and use this to power additional motors to improve response to help stability and maneuvers).
I never said it was impossible, but I did say that I "ruled out" a quad. I meant very unlikely, not that it was impossible. There are quads that have >1 hour endurance, and there are quads that can do 100 mph, but none that can do both, even with gas. To make a quad that can go 100 mph and stay in the air for an hour is a crazy big stretch of existing capabilities. I'd love to see an example, because none of these come close: https://blog.dronetrader.com/list-of-the-top-hybrid-gas-elec...
I said in another comment that my bet is on an RC plane. A fixed wing is much more likely to achieve that kind of speed with the endurance. Considering that the pilots didn't provide a good visual description I think it's the safest bet. I'm not going to worry about how it might be possible to make a quad that can do this when an obviously feasible solution is staring us in the face.
Helicopter use variable pitched rotors. I assume a gas powered quad would as well. This would give very fast response and even let them fly upside down.
But still. This still doesn't solve why it wasn't visible on thermal and would still be an extraordinary drone doing all these things.
You can use a gas engine to hit that kind of time in a quad. There aren’t any great options on the market right now, but as a DIY project it’s not that difficult to use an engine to charge the batteries in flight.
What you say is absolutely true about quadrocopters and octocopters. It is much less true about fixed wing drones.
You don’t have to go all the way to a Global Hawk to get reasonable carrying capacity. Even hobby sized stuff could be used for this reasonably well. Parts are easy to acquire, they are easy to conceal, you can launch them with a catapult like setup, they can drop off their load and fly back autonomously.
I bet that it is already happening or at least there are smugglers experimenting with the tech.
> you can launch them with a catapult like setup, they can drop off their load and fly back autonomously.
This had me thinking about homemade disposable rockets. Either use them for cargo, or attach one to a strong enough glider, so that it can reach the desired area, release the glider (that can use maps + GPS and sensors to land safely) then proceed for a while fooling whoever would follow its heat trail.
Not that I wanted to become a drug smuggler, just brainstorming. We will need all that stuff when the next reptilian invasion occurs:^)
My company owns one, the same make as the one that shot the dragon battle scene in game of thrones. It's a single rotor, and you're right on with the specs. It's not super expensive though, about as expensive as a high end luxury car. Definitely out of range of most consumers, but not crazy for a small business to have. You also need a small team to operate it, and because of its weight there's more aviation regulation applicable, at least here in Europe.
I'm sure the premium charged by broadcasting drone sellers has more to do with stabilizing drones even during manoeuvering than it has to do with maximizing payload and range. Drones used in broadcasting can do pit stops pretty much at will.
Unless you have a thousand drones. If any one drone gets taken out then you just lost a negligible quantity of product. If a traditional mule is caught you lose millions. A single bust would pay for a fleet of drones.
Hell I live in a Western country and people are getting assassinated for just 10000 euro. Plenty of desperate losers out there to exploit for crime cartels.
Unwilling humans, and humans getting paid less than the cost of their legal ruin, are a liability to criminal enterprises. Those humans are at risk of tattling. Yes, such enterprises can invest in buying prosecutors, prison guards, prisoners, etc. to punish tattle tales -- but robots don't talk. Sure, maybe parts can get traced, but it's bound to be easier to "secure" a part supply (make them yourself if you have to) than to "secure" your human liabilities.
> Why even use drug mules if you can just drone everything over the border?
A few weeks ago there was a news article on how drug cartels were using cheap Chinese VTOL drones to smuggle drugs across the Mediterranean between Morocco and Spain.
> it has to be satellite-driven because there’s no line-of-sight, there’s no cell phone coverage that could have dealt with that, so it has to be satellite-driven, which is pretty freakin’ sophisticated.”
Definitely not accelerated, just ridiculous thrust to weight ratios on those mini quads. You can tell from the sound - the pitch corresponds to RPMs you would expect from those specs (which are listed in the description BTW)
The person you dismiss as a "high school bully" is also a helicopter pilot. That may not make them an authority, but they have fair odds of being more knowledgeable than the average person...
There's a lot of interesting material in the ATC recording.
- Helo pilots felt that it was intentionally staying nearby as it came very close on multiple occasions and did not seem to be trying to evade. They had visual contact most of the time but sometimes had a hard time tracking it against the city lights.
- Pilots initially describe it as a quadcopter but become skeptical of that due to the performance. No one ever gets a very good look at it to confirm.
- It's described early on as having a dim green light. A green light on the drone would be odd for a position light (they did seem to see it from multiple angles) but it seems like a lot of drones have nonstandard lighting.
- CBP pilots say that it is hard to see on night vision goggles and has a low heat signature. NVGs are not necessarily any better than human vision for discriminating dim lights in the city due to dynamic range, so that doesn't necessarily mean anything. The fact that they couldn't seem to pick it out on the thermal camera might mean something interesting if you looked at different drone types.
- The drone was first described as being at about 4k feet and climbing, to around 12k. That's pretty damn high for anything small.
- I don't hear the controller indicating that they had it on radar at any point, the altitudes are all estimates by the helo pilots.
- Pilots felt that it was not being controlled from the ground due to the large distance it covered, beyond line of sight from any one point. By my estimations it covered over 20 miles during the course of the recording. Given the terrain, that it passed over decently high ridges, I don't think it's a sure thing that it was not being controlled from the ground but it would be surprising.
- The CBP helicopter had a hard time getting it on their camera due to its rapid climbing (the cameras on these helicopters are usually under the nose and can't point up very much) and maneuvering that they seemed to feel was intentionally evasive of tracking. But it sounds like they may have successfully captured it on camera at times.
- The speed bit is confusing as no one ever tries to estimate it directly, I think because the drone was seldom flying straight. The article's suggestion that it did 105 knots in airspeed is not unjustified but also not a sure thing. It was definitely somewhere in the 100kts range though, I'd say, based on the difficulty the helicopters had in pursuing it.
- Both helicopters hit their endurance limit as the drone disappeared into clouds. One helicopter was able to stay airborne later and dwelled for a time hoping to see an operator or recovery team on the ground.
- The TPD pilot, speaking after the fact, seemed confident it was not the size of a light aircraft but appreciably smaller.
My analysis:
- Perhaps the most extraordinary thing, I think to the pilots as well, was the way it was maneuvering in such close range to the two helicopters. It suggested not just recklessness but also excellent situational awareness, the kind of thing I have a hard time believing an operator on the ground or by FPV could achieve. It suggests that the operator had help from a targeting system of some kind, whether based on open-source radar/TIS-B/ADS-B or radar on the drone. Visually tracking aircraft over a city at night is already notoriously difficult, even more so by camera, and this thing was coming within 100 feet abeam the helicopters and often flying between them.
- The altitude and speed demonstrated by the drone make me think it's fixed-wing rather than rotor, and fairly powerful. The endurance suggests fuel, not electric. Probably turbine powered.
- It's not at all surprising that a CBP and TPD aircraft were tracking it despite the proximity to the AFB. Most HN users seem to really overestimate the level of security at most military installations, there probably weren't any Air Force acft up at the time or even pilots readily available. Most of the time stuff like this happens at AF bases the response you get is force protection standing in their truck beds with binoculars, not some elaborate air defense operation. Law enforcement conducts far more patrol activity over cities than the military does, and getting an Air Force aircraft in the air would have taken long enough it probably wouldn't have mattered. These kinds of drone incidents are considered more of a civilian matter than a military one anyway as it's almost always just idiots messing around.
- The CBP aircraft at least and probably the TPD helicopter as well will have fairly sophisticated camera packages including thermal. I'm not totally clear on whether or not either of them got useful footage but you hear in the after-action call that the FAA is requesting all the video TPD has. The cameras on these helicopters are designed for tracking things on the ground, not moving fast in the air, so it's unsurprising that they had a hard time capturing it.
- It doesn't mean much that it doesn't seem to have been tracked on radar. Primary radar doesn't consistently detect light aircraft at those altitudes, and this thing was much smaller. In general the US does not have a capability to reliably detect non-cooperative small aircraft, it's just way too expensive to build that out.
Right, primary radars designed for 0.5m² radar cross section aren't going to see these things. Especially if they're 3d-maneuvering like mad. You need very different radars for drone tracking and I'm not sure the US's radar infra has caught up. Even less on civilian surveillance mission's.
Perhaps not civilian, but that floating radar the Air Force has can see a softball across the country, I have trouble believing that there isn't an installation within range that wasn't able to track it - leads me to think if the military can track it, but the police weren't given help, then its likely a military craft.
The SBX is perhaps the most sophisticated long-range radar the United States possesses, and testing has cast doubt on whether it can even reliably detect missiles, the application it was built for. It's pretty much still considered in testing and not an operational piece of equipment despite being 15 years old.
Long-range radar is a really hard problem, the working models are so expensive than the USAF and FAA struggle to afford to install them, and the military has a long history of being, uh, optimistic about the capabilities of their radar equipment when talking to the public. Saying they can detect a softball over the horizon and then failing to detect a widebody jet at seven yards is pretty much the history of the Missile Defense Agency in a nutshell.
For air space surveillance purposes, the FAA and USAF share their radar network, because neither can really afford to have their own. The radars are bespoke, mostly built by Raytheon, and replaced very infrequently (many are hitting 30 years old) due to the high cost. They struggle with detecting light aircraft and anything below 15k feet or so, which is why we need to use secondary radar for ATC purposes. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it), this is basically the only general airspace surveillance measure in the US short of getting a fighter in the air to use its targeting radar.
Well raytheon isn't the only provider of psr systems, just in the US.
The economics of primary surveillance radars is strange. Reliable service (the war on nines), robust filtering of false alarm (even tough multi-sensor ATC trackers have made huge strides...) more and more requirements on the 'high speed + maneuvering' kinematics (replace mil psr radars in some missions) and in the 'slow or static small rcs' (drones mostly but also helps). Processing latency is getting squeezed to 'almost impossible with COTS HW' levels and regulatory requirements only increase like mad. But you're only selling & installing what, at most 100 a year? Good luck recouping any R&D.
The entry in such a market is hard too, as ATC operators are conservative as hell, and Chesterton's fence tends to be respected a bit religiously by customers.
The US have a huge territory, even near sprawling cities and the looong borders, and primary surveillance radars capable of seeing and tracking that kind of targets, even for military applications are not installed everywhere. You can't, too expensive in so many ways.
You're not going to see those targets with long range military surveillance radars either, maybe in the first 10-20kms, maybe. That is the actual problem with drones. Easy to build, very hard to detect with actual infrastructure. Whomever finds a way to track them on the 'cheap' is gonna make a buck. Even if you made actual, existing radars, able to track them (which would be a tall-order) it won't be on the whole range and it won't be reliable, because some of those things maneuver like crazy. Say good bye to your clean 2d/3d-with-realistic-aerodynamics Kalman filters and say hi to very high rates of false alarm...
Yeah if it had like a turbine engine it should have been pretty obvious on the thermal camera unless it had some kind of countermeasure. The pilots seemed to think it had very low thermal emissions, but I do wonder if they were also just having a really hard time getting it within the sight of their thermal camera. I would personally tend to guess operator error (unable to keep the camera pointed at it due to its fast motion) over it having very low thermal emissions, because hiding the exhaust from something like a small jet engine is not at all easy.
This is my mental debate. On one hand it seems like the endurance of the aircraft would suggest it had to be combustion based. But that would make it appear on thermals, so the fact that it is invisible to thermal would suggest it has to be electric.
How about some examples? This thing was apparently pretty small. I'd like to see how they managed to pack in all these abilities in something just a couple feet across.
Exhaust will always mix with ambient air. You make it sound trivial to develop a turbine engine that won't show up on a thermal camera. If have figured out how to make doing so simple I'm sure many militarys are willing to pay billions for your ideas.
There are R/C model aircraft with more than enough performance to fly circles around a helicopter. Here's one going over 400MPH.[1] It's powered by a small jet engine that costs around US$6000. That's from 2017. Here's one hovering, standing on its own jet.[2] That's from 2010. These things are quite impressive. So is the piloting, by the way. The one in [1] is just being hand-flown with an ordinary Futaba R/C joystick controller.
Put a modern drone camera and nav system in one of these, and it's not hard to make longer range flights and do what someone did in Tucson. You can stay up longer if you're not trying for the R/C aircraft speed record.
Also note the resemblance to the "flying pyramids" sighted near a U.S. Navy ship in 2019.
It's easy to build something specialized that does one of the things the object the helicopters chased. But really hard to build something that does all of the things. If you can find an example of that then please show me.
And while you are at it also find me a car that: can go 300 mph, 3 seconds 0-60, 1000 mile range, has all the safety features of a Volvo, costs $5000 to build.
"There's no line of sight...it must be satellite controlled."
Oh FFS. There's a lot of real estate on the ground where an operator could have been sitting and flying the thing with a high-powered FPV rig. FPV systems don't require satellites, and you can put a basic one together for less than $1000.
I don't think that's super clear - it seems to have covered somewhat over 20 miles but more importantly passed over a substantial (4k feet prominent) mountain ridge. That would make reliable control by line of sight radio very suspect and I don't think the operator would have risked it unless they had control by satellite or a high degree of confidence in its autonomous capability. Around the point it passes over the ridge the pilots briefly speculate that it may have encountered some kind of control problem due to its behavior, so perhaps it was being controlled from the ground with an autonomous safety capability... but that still indicates a high level of logistical sophistication since it departed the scene away from where the operator would have been (if we go on the autonomous safety theory it was presumably returning to autonomously land at a site north of Tucson?).
4g towers transmit downward to users in the city below them. They do not transmit upward.
That is why if you leave you phone turned on during a commercial flight, it will stop working after take off anyway. The towers don't send signal upward. You might still collect some residual signal for a little bit if you are near a tower and directly above it for a thousand feet or so, but not at 14,000 ft.
> the drone... proceeded northwest at high speed and climbing, with the helo and another LE helo in trail. The copter began to climb and flew out of the TUS area about 50 miles to the northwest of town into the middle of nowhere desert out by the mine west of KAVQ. It was last seen climbing through 14,000’ and into the undercast, where it disappeared.
> the mystery craft was essentially playing with them by repeatedly positioning itself directly above their helicopters’ rotors, some 1,000 feet above them
> the drone maintained a speed of 75 knots in a 30-knot headwind
To my memory; these things have been repeatedly popping up in the southern US; Arizona and Texas.
Maybe not for under $1k. But under any price? Is it physically possible? Yes.
We're not talking about a hobbyist guy in his garage here. We're talking about either US Military accidentally caught in a game of cat and mouse with local law enforcement, or more likely: drug cartels.
Both organizations operate heavily in the southwestern US, clandestinely without the need or desire to inform local law enforcement of their operations, and have practically unlimited budgets to accomplish their goals.
The real goal of a press release like this is to drum up a little FUD to take up to the governor and secure more funding, maybe even get your local precinct another helicopter, a cool drone, or a task force. And hell, maybe that's what they legitimately need here.
This was my conclusion too. This isn't a hobbyist. This isn't even a rogue professional drone pilot that flies drones for Hollywood movies or something.
This is a real UAV that is military grade.
It was either the actual military (it was first discovered just outside of an AirForce base) or a drug cartel that got their hands on a drone. Military Grade drones are pretty available at this point to any group with enough means (money). For example the Elbit Hermes 450[1] is a long-endurance tactical drone that has been sold to many countries outside of the big militaries. For example Georgia (the country), Azerbaijan, North Macedonia, The Philippines, Zambia, Botswana, Thailand, and even Mexico, Brazil, Columbia. Columbia bought a ton of drones from Elbit in the range of "tens of millions of dollars". The benefit of the Hermes 450 is the cost, it is supposed to cost only around $1M, which makes it very affordable for countries without massive military budgets like the US. I don't think it is a stretch that a drug cartel bought one ($1M is a small price to pay if it can save a single $10M drug run from being captured), or that they bought it from another country like Georgia or Columbia.
They are satellite controlled and have a 20 hours flight time, meaning it could have easily flown from a long ways away.
Oh and even the US Customs and Border Patrol own two of these same drones. Which I find also interesting.
These helicopter pilots were either chasing a drug cartel drone like this or a USAF drone. Because they first spotted it nearby the Air Force base, it seems to me that most likely it was actually an Air Force drone (most likly a MQ-1 Predator drone) that was conducting a training simulation near the base when it was discovered by the helo pilots. Then it just proceeded to play around with them. The one pilot talked about how it would fly in front of the helicopter and then maneuver to get behind it and follow it, staying in the helicopter's shadow. That sounds like a military move. I bet this whole thing started off as a training mission and then went off course and they decided to train on the helicopter pilots. They even said that the average speed of the drone was an estimated 70 knots. Well the MQ-1 UAV has a cruising speed of... surprise, surprise... 70 knots!
Agree with your analysis here. I don’t think this could be military otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing a press release and release of audio under freedom of information. If this was under serious investigation doubt we wouldn’t of seen the audio released as well. My bet would be the helicopter pilots got overexcited and the FAA is comfortable this is just advanced hobbyist equipment.
Unlikely, but they probably could for under $10k. The expensive part is the long-distance high-bandwidth radio system. The aircraft itself is trivially easy, assuming it's a liquid-fueled fixed-wing craft.
You'll notice I used the word "basic" above to imply a starter or hobbyist capability.
Don't underestimate the scale of wealth, $10k for a few moments of joy/adrenaline is far from unheard of for those with the means. If you have others, or can reproduce that piece of equipment with mere currency and you're sitting on a mountain of it.. why not?
I don't underestimate it, but if I wanted to play around with an expensive drone I could afford to lose, it would be during the day when I could see what I was doing or in a more interesting place. Dangerously flying a large/experimental drone near an air force base goes from "lose my $10k drone" to incurring the wrath of serious entities. Take down a chopper and if it's traced back to you, you're in some sort of trouble.
I just don't think private drone is the angle here. More likely to be an experimental agency thing, and someone flying a work gadget they haven't personally paid for, IMO.
> Dangerously flying a large/experimental drone near an air force base goes from "lose my $10k drone" to incurring the wrath of serious entities.
Messing with the armed forces or police seemed to be part of growing up as a teenage boy for some of my friends. (I was tempted to write rite of passage here but that would imply that it happened once for each.)
Of course they like me wasn't too well of so it was all about illegal fireworks, sneaking, swimming or canoeing into military or naval bases etc.
No doubt in my mind they could have tried something similar to this if they were young today and had the tech skills and money for it.
I know you're responding to the single point as a conversational thing, but it gives a collective theory of: teenagers mucking around, who have enough money that throwing away a $10k+ experimental drone is no issue, and they just happen to live near an air force base where there are definitely no actual experimental drones being tested. My issue then with that is that the modern teenager typically films things for credibility, and this sort of stunt isn't going to be very satisfying at night. (I fly drones. Flying at night, I try to get the footage I'm paid for and then land.)
IMO, either the story as reported has been exaggerated in many dimensions (altitude above the chopper, size of drone, time in the air, distance before landing) or it's something from the air force base that's not commercially available.
Thanks, both for your insight and the way you presented it :-)
And yes, you are right that I'm only talking about young people playing games with police/military and I don't have any idea if this is feasible or not.
But it could be a demo flight to prove to cartels this drone tech is above the law. "Look, we flew circles around a police bird and casually strolled into military airspace, imagine what we could do if we tried".
Flying a work gadget sounds way more likely a way to get yourself caught. And lose your job. No, I'd rather risk a $10k toy than risk getting fired.
All kinds of exciting things can get people into serious trouble but they still do it. For example, drifting and street racing expensive cars at night. Some even taunt the police. Here's a good series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clf-KhniImw
In my mind flying a remote controlled drone over an air base seems way less risky than hitting the streets in a car.
Yes, the cartel is very concerned about following laws and wouldn’t want to risk anything like upsetting the police to test a thing that might be specifically designed to avoid them.
Not sure the cartel would be testing in the US with a drone that has its lights on and is capable of novel flight movements, and hang around circling police helicopters, rather than just pick a place away from an airforce base and prioritise carrying a load without notice. I could see speed being an advantage, but not aerobatics.
What fixed wing craft can hover 1000' directly above the rotors of the helos? Don't fixed wing aircraft need to be constantly moving to stay in the air?
FPV just means that the drone has a camera with a first person view and doesn't rely on the user being able to see the drone to fly it.
Yes, it can be easily done for under $1k. This is not $1k for the drone, just for making whatever drone FPV capable, if that's what you were misunderstanding.
If you build a basic quadcopter yourself you can even include everything for $1000. This would buy you a fun hobbyist FPV rig, although it wouldn't have the range, speed, or endurance of the drone in the article. For that you'd have to pay more, but even then we're talking "serious hobbyist" money, not "nation-state" money.
No. Just like CB radio truckers don't need them. In fact, most people don't just to use radios. Really even a lot of drone pilots aren't getting HAM licenses. Though of course any HAM would know what I said above.
> FPV systems don't require satellites, and you can put a basic one together for less than $1000
This is a strawman argument. While technically yes it is true that an FPV drone can be put together for $1,000. But such a drone would not have the characteristics described in the observations.
A drone with capabilities matching the observations could certainly NOT be put together for $1,000. In fact, it would rival the capabilities of American military drones like the MQ-1 and MQ-9 which cost $10M and $28M respectively. These collective observations are why the two trained and experience pilots, who understand flight mechanics and capabilities, are so dumbfounded by what they saw.
The assumption made by the pilot suggesting that it must be satellite controlled is actually a valid conclusion. The pilots followed this drone from TUS area all the way to 50 miles outside of town, up to an elevation of 14,000 ft. Not only did they cover that distance, but they crossed over a mountain range. They were outside of the airport's radio range which is only transmitting low fidelity audio from one of the tallest towers in the area at presumably a ton of power (electricity...wattage) behind the transmission.
So for a line of sight transmitter we would need a low latency, high fidelity transmission capable of those distances. This MIGHT be possible physically, but not practically. The pilot of the drone would certaintly require a massive tower with a ton of power more powerful than the airport has. They would need to be doing it at a higher frequency (which degrades even faster over distance). This type of transmission would HAVE to come from a tower and it would require FCC licensing to transmit on the power and/or frequency required to make this happen (if its even possible to begin with, which I doubt). I am not even addressing the absurd claim that this could be built for $1,000. It simply can't. Full stop. I am addressing the actual capabilities, even if money were no object. This type of thing (if it were possible, which I don't think it is), would require significant infrastructure. This isn't somebody with a FPV they built off a video they watched on YouTube.
So then we get to the conclusion... how do you communicate with something at these distances and elevations? Satellite. This isn't possible for line of sight. At the $1,000 pricepoint or any other pricepoint.
There are a lot of other claims, such as the fact that it was outmaneuvering the helicopters. It had no thermal profile. But it had the ability to outlast the helicopters in flight time. It also was able to fly up to 14,000 feet which is actually another impressive feat for a smaller aircraft. I suspect it was fixed wing in order to accomplish these elevations and endurance.
Really this type of drone doesn't sound like something a civilian would be capable of building, it sounds like it matches the capabilities of a military grade UAV. Since it was first discovered near the AirForce base, I wouldn't discount the fact that it was a military UAV on a training exercise that just decided to harmlessly fool around with the helicopters after it was discovered.
I think what they were chasing was an MQ-1 UAV (popularly known as "The Predator"). The military is mostly replacing these now with the newer MQ-9 (Reaper), so it is common for the military to send all the shiny new equipment overseas to fight in wars and the older ones come back to the states to be used as training equipment. The helicopter pilots estimated that the drone they followed was averaging 75-80 mph. This is actually a peculiar speed because it is faster than a quadcopter is capable of, but even an old high-wing Cessna would fly closer to 100mph. But surprise surprise the MQ-1 has a cruise speed of 80 mph. The MQ-1 can also climb to 25,000 ft. It is operated by aviation fuel (so it can fly for hours), but has a low thermal profile (to avoid Surface to Air missiles). It also switches between satellite transmission for general flight and line-of-sight transmission for take-off and landings.
That's just my theory, but I think they were chasing a $10M MQ-1 military UAV. Not a $1,000 FPV someone built off a Youtube video. Everything just seems to point to that. It matches the capabilities perfectly. I can't think of anything cheaper that could do what the helicopter pilots observed. The drone should have been flying with full aviation lighting since they were flying in American airspace, but maybe they had turned off those because they were simulating a night strike training mission.
Somewhat off topic, what I find curious is that gangs have not yet started really making use of drones. I've heard of them being used to drop drugs and phones into prisons, but not much else. Some of the higher end hobby drones can fly just as high as general aviation aircraft and really fast and carry a lot of weight. Or perhaps I have missed the stories?
A cafe I used to frequent became a meth-dealers' hub of operations.
One exceptional day he seemed to be coordinating receipt of some large shipment, and he started freaking out about some truck driver not being where he was supposed to be who apparently had a tail to monitor his whereabouts.
Over the phone with the tail, quite loudly despite being on public display, he instructed the tail to "deploy the kite". Once deployed, he monitored a video+audio feed on his laptop from what must have been a kite surveillance drone. From the feed he seemed to discover the driver was on the phone arguing with his wife, and apparently this was the reason for pulling over.
Based on this experience I'm under the impression gangs are definitely already using drones. You probably don't hear much about it, because they're being successful.
He told the tail something along the lines of "He's pulled over on the side of the road? He has meth shit in the back!"
Up until that day I had no idea what he was dealing, but he was obviously a drug dealer; every week a cadre of scummy looking people would meet him in the cafe and give him their burner phones, he'd toss the phones into his backpack and give them all new ones.
This story has way more ridiculousness to it, especially from that particular day... maybe for another time.
Sounds like you've been watching Better Call Saul! Although, they were handing over stacks of cash instead of swapping burners, but yeah, essentially the same premise.
I really wish I were inventing all this. It eventually became quite a nuisance when the guy vanished and undercover police took his place thinking I was tied to it, due to being a regular with no apparent occupation.
I think it might have been on the show, Drugs Inc. that I heard this -a gang member explaining how they'd use a drone with thermal over residential college areas, where students would often grow pot; then they'd knock on the door and either take it all, or conscripted them into growing for the gang.
Jump 20 by AeroVironment with a wingspan of 5.7m and a payload of 13.6kg[0].
A tweet from Spanish police with a video of the compartment[1].
A Vice article about the same drone[2]. At the end it says, "Police found seven drones, each with load capacities of between four and 25kg," which puts the biggest at 1/6th the capacity of this one. Allegedly.
For perspective, the Aerolite-103, a single-seat ultralight aircraft with a maximum fuel+pilot+cargo takeoff weight of 147kg and a wingspan of 8.18m[3].
Of course, it's not like police would over hype[4] a drug bust[5].
I don't see typical commercial drones carrying major shipments but they could be used for small drops or for ISR operations to check on border crossings or overwatch during other activities.
All the "drone delivery" startups and big co projects have outright failed or been nothing more than PR. There might be something about this that is a lot more difficult than can be seen prima facie, starting probably with the flight time of battery powered drones..
The biggest barriers are the law and liability. There is a lot of red tape, and rightfully so. Flying heavy items over residential areas comes with a lot of risk, risk that someone doing so illegally, with an untraceable aircraft, likely would not care about.
1.) competing against the economics of standard delivery vehicles
2.) Ref: law/liability. At scale you're possibly violating airspace of people's property and, while I don't expect people in non-rural areas to start using them for skeet practice in general, I would expect lots of complaints to the government if they become annoying.
Clearly people have some rights to the space over their property. Case law isn't well established but, outside of airport landing rights, the consensus seems to be something like 400 feet which is in general uncontrolled airspace.
I probably won't shoot down a delivery drone though I may file a complaint. But if a drone starts poking around at low altitude over my property, it will definitely be skeet shooting practice time (on a rural property).
The article at your link is very old, and almost none of it is still correct today.
> Clearly people have some rights to the space over their property.
According to the federal government, they do not.
> Case law isn't well established but, outside of airport landing rights, the consensus seems to be something like 400 feet which is in general uncontrolled airspace
Incidentally, 400’ is the maximum height a UAS may fly under 14 USC 107 without special authorization.
> But if a drone starts poking around at low altitude over my property, it will definitely be skeet shooting practice time (on a rural property)
As “drones” are considered aircraft under federal law, shooting at them is a federal crime:
Property rights in the US are particularly funny. You don’t own as much as you think you do. The land deed you have is a 2D plot of land. There are also mineral rights, air rights, and raparian rights. That last one is the rights to collect water in your land. Most likely there is a water management authority who owns the rain water in your property. Unless your deed specifically states you own mineral rights a mining company can dig or drill right under your land.
I was told that I own my land and everything up to “the sky”. Granted, for practical purposes this means that if a neighbors tree over hangs my plat I have the right to trim it up across my property line.
For the US, there's no such thing as private property rights to airspace, and all the laws controlling airspace are exclusively federal. There can be temporary and permanent flight restrictions for events or protected areas, and there are restrictions about flying too close to buildings when operating manned aircraft that don't apply to drones (the opposite, in fact, you can fly at higher altitudes if you are close to a building). Now you can get busted for flying in an unsafe manner, harassment, or any number of privacy violations, but not trespassing.
To make matters confusing, there are "air rights," but those have to do with zoning and how tall a building can be made. Nothing to do with flying.
There are parts of the country where you can buy unincorporated land. But most people don't want to live there. You are responsible for building and maintaining your own roads, pumping your own water and treat sewage. Police, fire, and public schools are a monthly fee. And if you don't pay and change your mind it's a retroactive charge.
It's the kind of living only the most dedicated can afford to do. Everyone else simply pays city/county taxes and assume the problem is going to get sorted.
I thought (more relevantly) there were also laws about shooting without a backdrop to catch stray bullets, since this sounds like a densely populated area, also perhaps shooting towards people: bullets that go up, come down again somewhere else at nearly the same speed.
Do you claim to be able to understand the second link? Here is a sentence from that paper: “The mortality rate from falling bullets in general is about 32% that is significantly higher than nonfalling bullets 2%–6% although the latter's impact is much more potential to kill.”
I read the first one too. The problem with these anecdotes is that none of them rule out that the injuries were caused by a bullet on a shallow trajectory, with velocity much greater than terminal velocity. The only evidence is that no one heard a shot, but this is not convincing.
Nevertheless, there is a potential for serious injury and nobody should be shooting into the air for fun.
If they go straight up they come down at terminal velocity, but if they go up on a shallower angle they maintain a lot of speed. Mythbusters: https://mythresults.com/episode50
This hasn’t really been well tested in court. If I hover a drone for 20 minutes at 6 inch altitude in your front lawn in front of your toddler and you blow it to smithereens with a 12 gauge you’re not likely to be prosecuted for it.
I was also going to mention zipline in Rwanda, last video I saw was two years ago but it looks like they’re doing well enough to be hiring interns in San Fran. Really cool tech, the way they have a sort of assembly line for getting ready-to-fly parts on the package in the space of minutes - these are life and death deliveries out here!
There was a time when I was seriously considering a taco delivery drone business in Austin, TX. North and south of downtown (where most people live) it's a very short city. So it seemed perfect.
Anyways, after talking to a lawyer and learning about FAA regulation I decided it was too much work.
The short version is a drone with line of sight can fly under x' (think it was 600). Over that it must have first person cameras, and is technically an aircraft so it must be flown by a licensed pilot and get FAA clearance... but you can't drop a taco from 600', and you can't go below 600' without the operator having line of sight.
- Have a licensed pilot fly the tacos remotely above 600’ to the delivery address.
- Fly in a holding pattern at 600’ until the user indicates in your app they’re available to receive delivery.
- Pass off control so the user (who has LOS) becomes the operator and uses your app to maneuver the drone down to drop the taco and then back up to 600’ where it returns to the remote pilot’s control.
It would probably be a really expensive taco delivery but I think I’d pay a premium for a taco if I got to pilot a drone for a minute?
Gangs use of surveillance would ride on the back of their increasing awareness of counter-surveillance.
They are increasingly using flight tracker tools to check and see if privately contracted aerial SIGINT services to local/state/federal government are orbiting overhead.
Likewise, autonomous drug subs. Seems like it'd be impossible to interdict something like that between the Mexican coast and any arbitrary spot along the US west coast.
If the cartels aren't already using autonomous subs, it seems surprising.
Those are crewed, or occasionally towed behind a normal boat. It should be relatively straightforward at this point to build a sub that can navigate entirely by itself.
GPS doesn’t work underwater. Almost all the drone tech navigates by GPS; converting over to an inertial nav system and making that reliable for autonomous underwater operation is a good bit more than “relatively straightforward” I think.
I remember that one of the Colombian drug gangs tried building a submarine in the jungle for ferrying drugs under water. I'm sure they'll try other such things. Drones mean not losing a human who might tattle.
The main activity of gangs is transporting drugs. They do use autonomous aircraft to transport drugs but except for synthetic drugs, generally the volumes are high enough to require sea transport (narcosubmarines).
I'm surprised no one has been assassinated by a drone. Train a computer vision model for the target, attach a gun, and let it fly around until the person is found.
The US has killed 10-21k people with drone strikes since 9/11, including 1-2k civilians and hundreds of children [0]. Of course, real numbers are likely much higher.
Hopefully, their "AI" facial recognition doesn't pick the wrong person. That would be worse than looking for all of the Sarah Conners in the phone book one by one.
I'd like to call out the problem with these things. From the transcript:
> ATTEMPTED TO CAPTURE CAMERA FOOTAGE BUT UNABLE
I assume it's slightly harder than duct-taping a smartphone to a helicopter, but I'm still confused at how the military does not, by now, have high-fidelity panoramic video recordings figured out. They've had fifty years of UFOs nonsense and they still can't film the airspace around them in panoramic HD on command?
(Also, to whoever was torturing helicopter pilots by hovering above their rotors, that's just mean. Be nice. Yes, you're superior, but don't put their lives at risk to show it.)
EDIT: I read the article and somehow took away military, which is wrong. They're not military, so I can be a little more forgiving. But not much. Hit button to start recording video 60 seconds ago should be standard aviation equipment in the time of drones.
The capabilities of cameras are remarkably poor compared to human vision. Building a camera that covers a large area with the ability to resolve a small object at a mile distance is an expensive proposition, and I don't think the military has tried it. And, in general, aviation is averse to new technology and the military is averse to new technology. Combine the two and you get the present situation where most military aircraft have only limited imaging.
The police helicopters have very nice stabilized cameras but they're on the bottom (can't look upward more than a small amount) and hard to aim at things moving in the air. It seems like the drone was intentionally maneuvering to be difficult to track with a camera... the pilots both report it hovering around 1k feet directly above them, which is pretty much the place that it's least likely the helicopter would be able to image it.
These were CBP and Tucson PD helicopters, not military ones. For all we know the military might have their own separate footage, or perhaps it was even a US military drone.
So how do they know it was a drone? Sounds like textbook, literal UFO if they're unsure.
In previous discussions about terrestrial origins, either it's a hobbyist, an industry professional, a criminal, a terrorist, black ops domestic military, or a foreign state actor. I don't see 70+ minute flights without the resources of a state actor, foreign or domestic.
Another possibility is such stories are concocted to throw shade on drones to legitimize FAA's overreach and/or police-industrial complex wants to sell new toys to counter whatever this supposedly was.
There were two helicopters involved, border patrol and tucson police. They also phoned into the FAA as it was going down.
They also made visual contact with the light on the underside of the drone: "From what I can tell just from its position light, you know, I would have to imagine it was larger than a quadcopter"
It's not necessarily that they can't, it's that the precision in altitude is very poor unless the target is close to the radar. This happened with MH370, the data released in the investigation shows altitude values varying wildly by 10000 feet in a short time. Of course conspiracy theorists picked up on that as proof of lizard people involvement.
No commercial aviation radar system even tries to output non-transponder altitude infomation. Many are secondary only and don't even pick up targets without transponders.
Military primary radar, like the one that picked up MH370, obviously can.
But I don't think any of those are designed for really accurate altitude measurements. That job is usually done with targeting radar which (at the expense of not being able to see multiple targets) can lock a single target and get it's exact position.
we don't know it wasn't; it's only mentioned that night vision didn't illuminate it.
night vision systems are , most typically, very low-light sensitive cameras that occasionally have specific-wavelength illuminators -- they aren't generally thermal cameras.
I tend to think something with a run-time like that is liquid fuel based, too.
Right. A lot of night vision goggles used by pilots like this will be more along the lines of an image intensifier [0], an NVD [1]. Not thermal imaging, though some models also let you see near-infrared they're not, strictly, infrared goggles.
They said it was "no standard quadcopter" due to it's capabilities.
In the report[1] they explicitly list it has as a rotocraft with an unknown (-1) number of rotors. They also list the UAS type as "quadcopter". At one point in the article they describe it as "hovering"
My bet is something like a large scale RC plane with no real time video link. The tech is already here:
1. Gas engine would allow for >1 hour flight times
2. Flight management systems like Ardupilot means it could have been flying a pre-planned mission with little/no real time control. The helicopter pilots may have been mistaken thinking that it was reacting to them at all.
3. Or maybe it was reacting: two way radio links are nearly trivial with low enough bandwidths. The controllers could have been monitoring the ATC picture and had the RC plane also reporting telemetry. When the police helicopter got close they may have inserted waypoints into the flight path of the RC plane to make it fly away.
There are thousands of serious RC hobbyists in the USA alone that could make something like this. Most of them follow the rules, but I wouldn't put it past a drug cartel to pay/coerce someone to make one for them. Maybe foreign spies, but I think that's unlikely considering Davis-Monthan AFB doesn't have any interesting research or test units. The Chinese wouldn't smuggle in a RC plane to watch A-10s or F-16s training in a MOA.
If this was reported as a “police chase UFO” story, would a super advanced drone really be the best explanation? I wonder if they were being fooled into thinking they were chasing something that wasn’t really there.
Quote: "... it has to be satellite-driven because there’s no line-of-sight, there’s no cell phone coverage that could have dealt with that, so it has to be satellite-driven, which is pretty freakin’ sophisticated."
It baffles me how narrow minded people can become once the mainstream technology is ubiquitous on every corner, it's like thinking of other possibilities is a hard wall. If I would do that with a drone I would use analog transmission using a Yagi antenna with a good reflector and I could definitely steer the drone more than 30 Km away from it:
not really, the most advanced comercially available digital fpv video system can do at most 10km range (these systems are latency limited, sure there are 4g systems that can do more but you end up with hundreds of ms latency) also to maintain the high power draw these drones require you end up using lipo batteries that can give you at most 15 minutes of fight time, more typically somewere around 2-6 minutes. you can go with liion to get around 30 minutes but then you lose a lot of manouverability. this ofcourse assuming it was some sort of quadcopter. a plane can do more but is not as agile as the article suggests.
4g? battery? My friend, I would rock a drone that has a gasoline motor, not battery, so I would be up with it hours at a time. And I would use an analog transmission in 100 MHz range, like PAL system in the 60's - 800x600 resolution is enough to be able to view/control it. Do you think before digital era the analog was not good and fast enough?
If latency is a big challenge , isnt it even worse for satellite driven ones ?
Unless it is a state actor it i LEO is very tough ( until starlink anyway), GEO latency can't handle video calls latencies, not sure if they can handle like you describe.
My guess would be a semi-autonomous military vehicle was being tested in the most real-world scenario possible. As others have said it likely had liquid fuel rather than battery reserves which would allow such operation.
I imagine they’re referencing the re-occurring stories where sleep or oxygen deprived infantry can’t tell the difference between planets and incoming aircraft
Guess I hadn’t considered that if I were a foreign entity that wanted to surveil an AFB, it could be as easy as just, like, hauling a UAS and tracking antenna out into the desert.
it apparently behaved more erratically as it got away from its original position. Of course doesn't exclude that it's autonomous but makes it more likely that it was remote controlled
It's weird that the pilots had to estimate the object's size by eyeballing it. I would expect those helicopters -- let alone the military base below them -- to include all kinds of imaging devices that would beat a human eyeball.
I doubt this story is true. There's no drone that can fly so fast for 70 minutes that does not have heat signature (i.e. is not using jet engines). 70 minute flight time excludes electric drones automatically.
> stating that its high speed and impressive maneuver ability made it difficult to get a decent visual identification.
The orbital velocity of Venus is 35.0 km/s so pretty quick, but no real manoeuvrability.
The solar system it's within is 200 kilometers per second. But it's all relative so that's being silly. I guess this is it, a relatively slow looking planet looking like it's going fast from the observer who's moving and missing a frame of reference. The way we move through space is pretty interesting, Earth doesn't go in circles, controversially called a Vortex, a frames of reference thing again - http://rhysy.net/solar-system-vortex.html
The .pdf is actually sort of interesting. Not something that will get you put on a list, but rather, it's by the people who make the lists, describing how some of the people on their lists got there.
So, setting aside this claim that there’s no line of sight, my bet is these guys have not kept up with what quadcopters and hexacopters can do: here’s one video from 6 days ago showing really unnatural acceleration, changing direction in ways that make you say “UFO” [0] - check out the other videos on the channel, there’s another one six months ago hitting 234mph [1] - granted these are LiPo with short dwell times but other larger heavier models can go 90 minutes… so somebody out there has something custom and is having fun freaking out cops and militaries. I’d say next time instead of trying to chase it they start sweeping for radio transmissions… if they’re not already programmed to autonomously play cat and mouse with police helicopters XD
[0] https://youtu.be/f4kJud-ZS4s
[1] https://youtu.be/Sgum0ipwFa0