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Comment by irunbackwards | Hacker News Reader

I thought this was like a for sure thing already.

Yeah, the army already issued a memo saying that they were not using DJI until this was resolved. That was back in August.

That the Army is considering using them at all is interesting.

Aren't DJI drones the best? The military applications of quadcopters seem obvious.

Quadcopters are in the lower tier of all drone types. Fixed-wing drones are more suited to military applications due to greater range and payload capacity, not to mention speed.

There are too many different "military applications" to say that. For sending a drone into a building with possible enemy soldiers, a rotary-wing is definitely better than a fixed-wing.

Who says the only use case the military has is to carry weapons and/or perform remote surveillance? Just as plausible they’d use them to survey military owned buildings looking for structural defects, promotional videos of military life, or any other use case that a normal commercial user of DJI products might have.

Fixed wing drones require missions, procurement, permissions etc. rotor drones give you plenty of airborn vantage and photography ability for next to no money and minimal risk.

The VTOL and hovering capabilities are very useful platoon-level tactical capabilities. Typical usage example from Donbass war - the first 30 sec. of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHo7x2Vcjjg

But Raptor/Predator drones aren't man-portable.

Highly maneuverable portable drones are going to be a key part of urban conflict in the next century of the ongoing war in the middle east, just as the RPG and IED have been.

The army uses man portable fixed wing drones very often.

> Fixed-wing drones are more suited to military applications due to greater range and payload capacity, not to mention speed.

Ah, yes. The same reasons the Army no longer uses any helicopters at all.

I get the impression that the Chinese government constantly violets intellectual property of American companies. I'd have no problems if the US government copies DJI designs for military purposes. Return the favor.

The basic stabilization work was done in American universities (Stanford 2004 to be precise), so I think it is more of a value proposition (mass produced, cheap).

Replying to this thread as a whole. I talked to a General in the army netcom a week after that ban, specifically, I was presenting on the commercial drone market uses. At the time of the ban, the army indicated that they had several thousand DJI drones grounded by that order.

Quality per price is pretty good, and they are the lion's share of the consumer market. Other drone companies hire DJI to consult on, or even design, components of their hardware and controls. So while it's interesting, and probably unwise, it's not altogether loony for groups within the US Department of Defense to use their technology.

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