FAA documents give unprecedented look into Colorado drone swarm mystery
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
The recently released proposed rules for Remote ID raised a huge amount of concern in the model aircraft world, because it proposed restrictions that would effectively kill the hobby:
- All drones/RC aircraft must have a GPS-based tracking ("Full remote ID") on the aircraft, connected to a ground station and relayed to a subscription third-party service. These "Full remote ID" aircraft can be flown past line of site.
- Aircraft not constructed by a single manufacturer (For example, handmade RC planes) are not allowed to use full remote ID, and instead must use "limited" remote ID in which GPS can be on the ground station, but the aircraft must disable itself past 400ft from the ground station.
- Aircraft with limited remote ID can only be flown in a dedicated "FRIA" flying site.
- FRIA sites are "legacy" and after a short period, no new sites will be created. The stated intention of the FAA is to phase these sites out completely, meaning after a certain period all planes must comply with full remote ID, effectively killing hand-built model aircraft.
The end result of this regulation is _not_ safer airways: It's an airspace <400ft owned by commercial entities such as Amazon who are able to comply with the requirements of the Remote ID tracking and single-manufacturer requirements. It's an example of regulatory capture that will genuinely make the world worse for us by increasing noise pollution and drone traffic at low heights. Meanwhile, the model aircraft and drone hobby will have a large barrier to entry that pushes away the innovation of millions of engineers who got their start as kids flying affordable DIY planes.
As usual, a few bad actors ruin it for everyone else trying to do the right thing.
This framing is reminiscent of a lazy schoolteacher engaging in collective punishment. The few bad actors are not the ones ruining it for everyone else - let's keep the responsibility for the overbearing and inept response on the FAA itself.
To apply that to your classroom example instead of being easily identifiable the kids are anonymous, very fast, and appear and disappear quickly. In that case is it that weird to try to make a way to differentiate everyone?
Quads/drones/UASs are in a pretty tough to regulate sphere because they fly and can do a lot of damage it's not that wild for governments to try to get a handle on them.
In fact, the FAA has explicitly stated that they don't want to use a radio-broadcast system like ADS-B (the equivalent for general aviation). The solution being proposed involves a proprietary internet-based system that has privacy/security implications among other issues -- The system would send the location of any user to a third-party company, would require a subscription, etc.
The solution does very little to alleviate the concerns you are discussing and many more reasonable proposals have been suggested which DO involve radio ID. My favorite solutions involve a combination of a radio beacon broadcasting GPS and registration # in the style of ADS-B for larger drones/aircraft, and for smaller aircraft an app-based system where users "check in" with a flight plan. But keep in mind that the outrage is not over any regulation by the FAA, it's that their proposal completely disregards existing industry standards like those put out by DJI and creates an expensive, hard to enforce system that favors large corporate interests.
Let's keep in mind that there are millions of drones in the US (1.1 million registered with the FAA, and many more that have not been registered because they are <250g or custom-built.) and have not had a single incident involving injury or death. Every single incident involving a drone has involved the concern of violation of someone's privacy or violation of an airspace, and even in those incidents there has been a lot of hysteria involved in the media response. In my opinion this absolutely does not justify preemptively building an expansive surveillance infrastructure around technology that has, so far, proven to be very safe.
> have not had a single incident involving injury or death
That is... very wrong. Don't do an image search on "drone injury" unless you have a strong stomach.
Drone cuts off tip of photographer's nose: https://www.brooklynpaper.com/drone-strike-our-photographer-...
Drone injures Australian triathlete: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26921504
Drone injures bystanders in Virginia crowd: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/drone-crashes-into-virgi...
RC plane kills spectator at football game: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/15/archives/fan-hurt-by-mode...
RC helicopter kills 19-year-old: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/nyregion/remote-controlle...
And ADS-B style is probably the best and easiest option. It can be an easy add on to existing quads and probably done pretty cheaply. Places with airspace concerns can easily setup a base station to listen to their local area.
> Every single incident involving a drone has involved the concern of violation of someone's privacy or violation of an airspace, and even in those incidents there has been a lot of hysteria involved in the media response
They haven't yet (at least in a mass event, several have fallen on crowds etc) but violations of airspace, especially around airports, don't have to actually cause injury because the threat of an airliner engine eating one somewhere between their commit speed and their rudder authority speed or any time really during take off and landing requires airports be extremely cautious about drone sightings.
Speed limits don't stop bad actors either but that doesn't me we get rid of them.
I was just thinking about this some more today.
I think the analogy would be drone use laws are equivalent to speeding limits.
proposed drone RF ID is equivalent to vehicle registration + real time monitoring of vehicle location and speed.
Except you are wrong.
We had dipshits taking pictures of fires in California with their drones--IN THE MIDDLE OF ACTIVE FIREFIGHTING ZONES. It was sufficiently bad that the firefighters grounded their aircraft.
So, how do we set up a system to deal with that?
For what it's worth, the craft I make are in the "Ultra-micro" category which are only a couple ounces flying weight.
What’s the evidence that these were not birds?
Clearly the drones stopped because it was a limited term contract.
NASA's Orion spacecraft
NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-R) weather satellite series
NASA's MAVEN
NASA's JUNO
NASA's OSIRIS-REx
NASA's InSight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_Space#Civil_Sp...
There are a lot of space/satellite companies in the Denver area, but not many drone companies. As you may know, design of a satellite is different from design of a quadcopter drone. Satellites are launched by rockets, powered by solar panels, and orbit earth. Drones fly in the atmosphere using rotors to move air, controlled by humans on the ground. So it would seem odd to associate satellite-building engineering operations, often completely civil, with clandestine drones.
The projects you listed may not be top secret but I'm sure they still fall under ITAR. Either way if a defense contractor was out testing stuff on drones, then I doubt they would coordinate with anyone.
Satellite detection tech of drones could be a thing...
A conspiracy would be more like they are testing remote monitoring drones on unsuspecting farmers and are not supposed to be spying in the United States because they are under government contract. But there would be no need for something like that for some tests.
Or its aliens.
Or just use Lockheed's test facilities in the desert in California, which are far more remote and have better weather.
There's a reason aviation companies operate in SoCal, and not Colorado.
As with the death of Fahim Saleh, HN is trending towards shadowy, dramatic reasons that just don't make sense in the face of numerous mundane explanations.
Edit - Just to be clear: this is not about drones being spotted, there may have been small drones flying at night. This is about reports of drones with a large wingspan flying in formation around a 'mothership'. These sightings have been investigated and dismissed [2].
[1] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/884xv3/the-colorado-myste...
[2] https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/publicsafety/news/updates-i...
I don't know what people saw out there. But I don't think one three-night investigation is enough to completely discredit all of those very detailed reports, especially given (1) how close together they are in time, (2) that reporting dropped off in multiple states at a similar point, (3) that there are matching descriptions from people who were quite far apart, and (4) that some were from pilots and others using night vision.
It could still be imagination, I just don't think your links provide enough to conclude that.
If you would read the second link I posted carefully you would find out that the investigations started in November, field investigations went from the 6th of January to the 13th.
If there was an activity of large groups of drones flying in grid patterns - let alone ones with a 6 feet wing span - these would have been easy to confirm.
Add to this that there is no video or photographic evidence of any of these activities. Of 90 reports in a couple of months none of the witnesses had a phone on them to shoot anything that's not a single light in the sky?
Eg: https://twitter.com/justin_fenton/status/385040854920204288?...
Reality: https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2013/09/27/eye-in-the-sky-nav...
I fly small tinywhoop quadcopters around my house. Its a 21gram palm sized quad with fpv camera. Some people have a hysteria about drones and assume that you must be spying on them. If they could see what I see in my camera they would realize you cant see much detail of a person unless you get pretty close.
Here’s an amateur video... https://www.denverpost.com/2019/12/31/drone-video-yuma-count...
A larger 'swarm' could be any number of even non defense companies testing.
https://www.stratusleds.com/module
Stratus Light in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvDXjC-_7uo
Funny the video quality is very UFO-alike : it could be anything.
The news crew video was a little better as they had some sound of the propellers lending some credibility. I just can’t seem to track it down.
You're exaggerating now. My point was simply that the imagery is entirely unconvincing, and could be trivially faked.
Do drones like this even exist that are available to civilians? Even $30,000 commercial grade drones are only a few feet wide and have sub hour flight times.
Instead of people being physically present, they all have drones and fly them in a formation? Bored, smart, rich kids will definitely be able to pull this off.
Would appreciate confirmation or contradiction from someone who knows better.
that isn't amateurs, nor does it look like any small business/start-up. That smells like defense contractor.
I grew up in the country, I don't see any teen/young adult spotting one of these over their farm/ranch and resisting the urge to grab a 12 gauge and take a shot.
A legitimate article could simply say "There were some curious drones flying around, which the military doesn't claim. The FAA knows something they aren't telling." Then we'd all know the score without scrolling through 100 pages of obfuscated rambling.
What concern?
> ... absence of evidence of criminal intent, or of a proximate threat to military assets or other critical infrastructure. Once the aerial activity stopped, it appears that both federal and state agencies quickly dropped the matter
And rightly so. Interesting oddity, but pointless use of federal investigatory resources.
Second, how do you know they can't identify it, when there are several emails being withheld from the FOIA request?
To me, that's a dead giveaway it's a CIA project or something.
Third, if a foreign adversary has the capability to maliciously land and take off from rural airports in Nebraska then US national defense has bigger problems than some quadcopters doing formation flying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatwick_Airport_drone_incident
> The lead investigator from Sussex Police questioned whether there had been a drone at all.[18][19] Giles York, Chief Constable, later said police thought that original sightings were of an unauthorised drone, but it was possible that later sightings may have been of a drone used by Sussex Police
Starting an investigation while the activity is on-going in an attempt to ascertain potential threats: fine.
Continuing an investigation for unfounded “concern” and curiosity’s sake after the activity stops and there was no crime committed: wasteful.
I'm not sure anybody really wants a number of unidentified flying objects (in their literal sense) in the air at night with noone knowing where they came from or what they might be doing. I don't consider that "unfounded" concern, think it's quite valid on the spectrum of concerns actually.
Seems like a reasonable use of resources to get to the bottom of it (albeit, perhaps not their full-time work). Not every investigation will succeed, and the outcomes can often be that nothing can be done. You can only get to that by doing the work though.
I do.
I also want unidentified cars driving on dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. At night. And unidentified boats on remote lakes and in remote parts of the ocean. At night. And unidentified pedestrians, swimmers, skydivers, bicyclists, kites, campers, photographers, robots, lawn mowers.
What isn't fine for a lot of people is something completely unknown just buzzing around when they don't have the context of what it is or what it could be doing.
I'm not saying "ban it", just it's valid for people to report something like that happening and have an expectation they'll be taken seriously.
Let's not over estimate the frequency with which people have seen or come into contact with drone flight here, we've had boats for millennia, cars for over a century. Heck, even micro scooters have been around for decades.
Personally, I don't want random, unidentified things I've got no clue about flying around where I live at night. The military helicopters that go past every day are annoying, but I know what they are and know it's all good. And one day "oh, it's just Dave's flying drone swarm" will be just as accepted. Today is not that day.
For me, that's part of the role of these bodies, ensure that something that looks sketchy actually (or potentially in this case) isn't. It's unchartered territory for people to have random flying things buzzing over the skies at night (and feel it's an entirely valid thing to be concerned about), whereas an annoying neighbour with some tools is well established.
Anything that isn't specifically illegal is legal by default.
They determined no illegal activities were conducted by flying a fleet of drones in a low-population rural area so...
And they determined that by investigating (which is what we're discussing here). I'm not arguing about it's legality, just that they determined its legality by investigating something reported by genuinely concerned people.
Sure, I'll dive in with a few responses. I'm always tech forward, but never been a "small government" person, so that's my stance. I have a small toy quadcopter myself which because of the UK's 250g rule now, I'm annoyed I can't use freely.
But just because we use and understand these things doesn't really mean it's accepted. It's not that I'm playing devil's advocate, but on HN we do need to understand we don't live in a tech utopia and need to bring other people along with us, not force new tech on them.
> She called the drones creepy. Why are they creepy?
I don't find drones creepy myself, but you've got to remember these are still novel to most people. There's accepted rules about most vehicles (manned or unmanned, large and small) that are just not clear to a lot of people when it comes to drones. If you've even seen one flying in person at all.
If I'm not aware really of what they are, having an ALTA 8 or something come buzzing through the night sky is going to be creepy - this is a flying machine being operated by a random (potentially unlicensed, if they're flying at night and no one knew who it was) person. I don't see how that's not creepy to most people.
> Also you think it is a good use of public resources to drive around and identify people not committing crimes flying drones after the fact.
I know it'll get short shrift here, but yeah, I do. In this instance it transpired it wasn't illegal and probably completely fine, but if a number of people report seeing random stuff in the air that spooks them, I'd hope that someone at least goes and tries to find out what it was. Even just to work out and explain to people what it was.
Admittedly, it's not the best use of their time, but I don't see it as an invalid use of their time.
I don't believe you normalise people to drone usage simply by just flying them around.
> Otherwise it sounds like harassment for something they don’t like.
Diff'rent strokes, but if it's not bothering me, I'd have though having someone official tell someone complaining that actually it's all fine would be better?
But what they were still stands at what we knew they were when first reported, hysteria. (aka stars, planes and maybe, perhaps an occasional domestic DJI drone)
Go have a look at the drones being used by independent militant groups (with some state help) around they Middle East, they are much more interesting and real.
Link to get you started - https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1255821485979176962