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.
