New Details Emerge on the “Highly Modified Drone” That Outran Police Helicopters | Hacker News Reader

New Details Emerge on the “Highly Modified Drone” That Outran Police Helicopters

thedrive.com

127 pointsmaerek125 comments

My money is on a foreign hostile entity, but not for a scouting operation, this is an exercise in deterrence. This is someone who wanted to let the US know that they are capable of getting a high-end drone into the country and launch it near important civilian and military infrastructure. Which is also why they would affix it with a bright LED light, they wanted to get noticed and then show off its capabilities.

It might sound counter-intuitive to outright tell your enemy what you are capable of, but that's exactly how deterrence works. Winning a war is good, but it's better to convince your opponent that they shouldn't start a fight in the first place. Which means your opponent needs to have some understanding of what you are capable of. If they don't, if you develop significant capabilities but keep them secret, your opponent may initiate hostilities with you, under the mistaken assumption that they could win. You don't give them everything, but you give them enough to make them concerned, and even better make them over estimate the size and scale of the threat. Done right, you can get an adversary to devote far more resources to counter your threat than you put into it, or more than is warranted.

Why not do it like the U.S. and just show off the weapon on soil with domestic press coverage and not risk a diplomatic incident? You don't have to show your whole hand, iirc when they showed the press the B2 they didn't let them see the rear of the plane.

> Why not do it like the U.S. and just show off the weapon on soil with domestic press coverage and not risk a diplomatic incident

Because then you can’t probe unannounced/classified defensive abilities, strategies, and tactics.

Well, the fact that the one helicopter it got close to was a police helicopter is too unlikely to be coincidence. Maybe the drone operator knew the police helicopter location. Maybe these were other cops doing something stupid with their new equipment.

I think the big capability here isn't the technology, it's that they could get it into the country and deployed over a major air base.

>> it's that they could get it into the country and deployed over a major air base.

Just like guns, why bother smuggling it in? It would be easier to buy/build it within the US. As for deploying it, anyone can drive a pickup to within range of a variety of US bases. These aren't remote arctic outposts surrounded by tundra. US bases are generally near civilian populations. Nobody would think twice about seeing a pickup truck parked near a base at night. Any number of aviation enthusiasts do this regularly.

I wouldn't be surprised if portions of it were bought within the US, or if it was largely made from off-the-shelf components legally imported and then assembled. Unless there were capabilities demonstrated that haven't been made public (Like some new low-power high-intensity jamming) this doesn't seem too far off from the capabilities of a non-state actor. The main reason I think this is a state actor is because of the motivation (terrorists would have actually tried to use it as a weapon to do damage).

It doesn't need to be some super-advanced weapon or capability. Sometimes all it takes is a demonstration to make people aware of vulnerabilities that have long existed. Think about the billions spent on airport security after 9/11, that frankly aren't doing much to prevent future attacks. This incident, and others like it, don't have a body count and haven't provoked a massive public outcry, but they are unnerving people. You can bet funding is going to be diverted to securing airbases from this sort of threat.

The first most obvious state actor would actually be the USA itself. Some sort of red team test to demonstrate our own vulnerabilities and to secure that funding.

It probably wouldn't be necessary for someone like China to actually stage a demonstration, since its easier for China to just have some high up diplomat get themselves drunk and boast to or around a known CIA operative that they have hundreds of drones ready to strike facilities in the USA that can be activated on a moments notice. Then leave just enough of a paper trail lying around in other places to validate it (although probably a dozen or less, not a hundred), without compromising anything. Maybe even go so far to have a private military briefing (that a CIA operative was invited to) which displayed a particular model of drone built using off-the-shelf parts that could be acquired in the US ("we built this on our soil, we could be building another one very much like it on your soil").

So a lot of people are posting something about a red team test or some defense contractor. But is that really something a defense contractor would do? This thing violated federal and most likely state regulations in a bunch of different ways, there are serious consequences to this. I mean this isn't the days of MKUltra, are there any contemporary or recent examples of defense contractors blatantly violating regulations like this without consequence?

It would need to be something like being authorized by a joint task force between the Pentagon and the FBI, not just a defense contractor gone rogue.

If it is an exercise in deterrence the actor responsible might see displaying a calculated degree of belligerence as a feature not a bug.

How would deterrence work when no one has any idea who the drone belonged to?

Have you ever played Hearts? That game plays much differently when you know who has the Queen of Spades vs if you don't vs if it's already been played. If somebody has a capability that deters you, it can be more effective in making you play cautious if you don't know who has it.

Two thoughts:

1. The public doesn't know, but the same may not be true of US intelligence services. There are various ways to drop hints. Have a colonel pretend to get drunk at a bar and ramble something about drones. Feed a known mole some hints about an operation underway. Maybe a unit stationed on that base recently was involved in some operation the foreign adversary didn't like, and they have a diplomat cryptically say something about reprisals. But most importantly you do it in a way that it isn't definitive proof, or publicly accusing them would require revealing important sources/methods. That way the US can't publicly respond or escalate.

2. Perhaps the goal isn't necessarily deterrence, it's misdirection. Reveal the vulnerability of civil and military infrastructure to attack in a public and embarrassing way, and the US government will be required to take actions to prevent this from happening again. And it's way more expensive to secure infrastructure than it is to attack it. You could get the US to spend billions on securing this infrastructure, which is dollars that aren't being spent on something that could be used offensively.

"Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." - Art of War 3:2

Unlikely. Everyone already knows it's possible to smuggle small amounts of military equipment into the US. So what. That kind of demonstration would have zero deterrence value.

A 6lb drone is not exactly a deterrent for war.

Don't automatically assume this is foreign, not all branches of the U.S. government play nice with the other branches of the U.S. government.

Well this wasn't a quad copter someone bought at a Walmart. This thing was allegedly 5ft by 3ft, had a range in excess of 50 miles, outran a police helicopter (though as other comments have pointed out, take that with a grain of salt) and was able to reach and cruise at 14,000ft.

I'd like to hear why you think some branch of the US government would be behind this. To what end?

Most likely explanation is that military was testing their secret drone from this AFB.

Seems like a weird choice. There's plenty of other air bases that are far removed from the public which are meant to be used for testing. Not to mention there's no justification for doing this in a populated area where someone could get hurt.

Yep, either the military or a defense-type contractor taking their new toy out for a spin. There could be a lot of reasons they didn't privately fess up afterward (at least that we know of):

* The flight was an "ad hoc training exercise" that wandered a bit too far (ie not specifically approved by higher authority).

* It was a capabilities test to see how well it could do stealthy observing of energy infrastructure in a civilian controlled airspace. While the US doesn't need to spy on its own infrastructure, it's convenient to trial run locally before deploying the capability over Crimea or Venezuela.

* It was a penetration test to measure response to a potential terrorism scenario. If they had warned the airport or police in advance, it wouldn't be an instructive test.

There are a few inconsistencies that lead me to not believe the numbers.

>>It was last seen climbing through 14,000’ and into the undercast, where it disappeared.

>>Department's helicopter was unable to observe the drone when looking through night vision goggles.

If this was heading up to 14k while being chased by helicopters, it wasn't a battery-powered quad. A medium sized drone would have to be powered by IC to perform like that. If it was IC, or even high-powered batteries, it would have been hot enough to look like a flare under night vision goggles.

Or, it didn't go to 14k. It sounds to me like the chase helo lost sight of it and assumed that was because it hit the clouds. The light was dim and the drone had a single flashing light. It is very difficult to judge distance to a single light in twilight. The helicopter could easily have misjudged the distance/altitude. I think the helicopter lost sight because the drone turned off the flashing light. Or maybe the drone lost power and fell. Either way, the chasing helicopter thought it had hit the cloud layer when it fact the drone might have been much lower.

And 14k is 4k above where the police helicopter would have stopped climbing. Aircraft heading above 10k are going to want pressurization and/or oxygen masks. A cop helicopter won't go that high willingly.

>>the fact that it outran two law enforcement helicopters is also concerning

That doesn't mean much. Law enforcement helicopters are nothing special. A fast car or motorcycle can outrun a helicopter in a strait line. And cop helicopters aren't meant to enforce air rules. Every Cessna-172 can outrun a police helicopter. Heck, at night a Cesna-152 could probably evade them, especially if the helos are trying to obey the rules for flying near airports.

Lastly, given the collision risk involved in "chasing" anything in the air, I'm surprised these helicopters were even allowed to give chase. If I were ATC and saw a cop helicopter chasing another smaller helicopter/drone over a populated area I would do my best to stop this before both crashed into a school.

It's in the article:

> A source with direct knowledge of the incident's details told The War Zone they believed the drone was highly unlikely to be battery-powered based on the altitude, distance, and speed at which it flew.

Or the reported speeds/altitudes are simply incorrect and rather than a low-IR stealth superweapon this was a smaller battery-powered drone at lower altitudes/speeds.

> If it was IC, or even high-powered batteries, it would have been hot enough to look like a flare under night vision goggles.

I think you're thinking of thermals, unless it's on fire or something it's not going to emit the NIR/visible spectrum light that would be picked up by night vision.

The border patrol helo is an Airbus AS350 with cruising speed around 152 mph and do not exceed at 178 mph

120 knots is normal cruise, 140 knots is fast cruise but that's at sea level. This drops off by 3 knots per 1,000' of density altitude. Airfield elevation at Tuscon is ~2400' and it was 58⁰F at 10 p.m. on Feb 9. Which puts density altitude at ground level around 2900', so the cruise speed drops around 9 knots, to 111 kias and 131 kias.

I agree this UAS would need to be IC-powered due to the range and altitude the UAS supposedly reached, but I don't think the speed was as fast as many folks have been thinking.

It could be interesting that the 4-6 rotor configuration, range/time of around and hour and 50mi, and the 14,000ft+ performance strongly indicate a fuel-powered device, but that the night vision goggles couldn't see it. It didn't indicate if the NVGs were of the ambient-light-enhancing type or IR type.

This probably tells us that the NVGs were the ambient-light-enhancing type as there would be very little ambient reflective light up there (considering it was last seen flying up into an overcast), and IR NVGs would probably pickup some image from the heat of the rotor motors even on a battery-only device, and any un-stealthed exhaust would glow like a spotlight.

Still, it'd be good to know what device they were using.

I also have to wonder why it flew so close to the police helicopter... and then over the AFB deep into a Class C airspace. Seems too deliberate, trying to get attention, not avoid it.

I've been involved in designing & building gasoline-powered drones, and that range & flight time is very doable. But the performance indicates sophisticated control links and so this is very likely more than just a casual wealthy hobbyist idiot. The NatSec implications are very serious, and at least it appears that they're paying attention to it.

Would it be possible to have a gas-powered drone that has some amount of time it can run on batteries? I'm thinking similar to the old diesel submarines that would go on battery when they wanted to be stealthy.

Gas, gas? Or American Freedom Juice cough?

The least sophisticated way to engineer a drone like this would be to use a consumer grade heavy lift electric drone with an onboard generator and fuel source to charge the batteries

Yup, lightweight, high-powered gasoline engine, powering a generator, the output hooks into the regular battery and ESC (Electronic Speed Controller) loop. All the rest of the control is the same

The benefit is the energy density of petrol is ~2500Wh/kg, vs about 250Wh/kg for Li-Ion batteries. This is significantly offset by the weight of the ICE engine & generator, but it is still enough to get very good flight times. It is enough to do using selected off-the-shelf components, but to get really outstanding results, everything needs to be optimized for excellent power-weight ratios.

Two big ones in that space, going back-&-forth and beating each others' records are:

Skyfront: www.skyfront.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXFoBUR_jqY

Quaternium: https://www.quaternium.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvBjCejUmvY

And yes, at least the units we built had significant batteries in the loop. The main purpose was to be able to land if the ICE engine/generator failed, but also could be used for a less-noisy mode ("quiet mode" is a bit much for most multirotors, as the rotors themselves are quite noisy).

I thought gas didn't really work with quad/hexa/octorotors because gas motors can't cycle up and down as quickly and reliably as electric, and fine-tuned control of rotor speed is essential to how a quadrotor works

EDIT: nope I'm stupid

It could either be a hybrid with the engine running a generator or use variable pitch props.

A fuel powered drone uses collective pitch propellers. The blades all spin at fixed RPM but the angle of the blades on each propeller can be adjusted individually with a servo. It actually far outperforms electric motors in maneuverability.

there are a few examples of those, but they are pretty much one-offs. This is mostly because one blade pitch mechanism is messy enough with a helicopter, 4-8 with a multi-rotor is just too many critical moving parts to be effective.

Most of the fuel powered drones will be basically an internal combustion engine powering a generator, which then feeds into the regular battery & ESC circuits (that's the type of machine I was working on).

EDIT: Also important is that much of the yaw control of multirotor drones is done by changing individual rotor speeds to create a net yaw reaction from the acceleration/deceleration of the rotors. With constant-RPM motors, that goes away, along with a lot of yaw control authority.

You're overlooking one critical point in your deduction about type of NVGs used. The drone was visible with the naked eye due to a green position light, which should have been enhanced and been visible under through the night vision goggles. The article says the drone was last seen entering IMC at 14,000MSL while the helicopter's ADS-B track shows it reached 12,000MSL which means the helicopter could see the light at least 2,000 feet away, which suggests a bright light that should have been visible through light amplification.

It's more likely that the night vision device was either malfunctioning or pilot error made its use ineffective.

excellent point - I had a nagging thought about that, but just figured the LED had turned off when it started to evade?

But yes, NVD malfunction could be a possibility.

The other possibility is that it was and IR NVG, and the device is very well heat-shielded, which puts it in an entirely different class...

Yea, I’ve also built largish drones that could easily get close to these specs - sans endurance and control, and this was years ago.

These days they have off the shelf LTE modems that can stream both video and telemetry, and it sounds like you’re saying endurance is also a solved problem.

This really doesn’t seem like it would take nation state investment.

I’d just like to think any hobbyist capable of getting one of these off the ground would avoid airports and tangling with police helos…

Is there any conclusion to reach here (assuming this report is correct) besides a hostile entity scouting U.S. infrastructure?

US testing it’s own drones against known defenses?

Yes. A (secret?) US military project testing drone surveillance on unwitting US navy assets.

Could be any number of defense contractors, military, or LEO recklessly testing out a high end drone, then breaking the rules to avoid consequences.

Is there any intelligence that a drone that size could provide that you couldn't get from a combination of satellites and just driving around a decent camera? It seems really risky for a foreign adversary for limited gain.

Right, this is why I'm confused. There's no play by any sufficiently advanced adversary that makes sense. Except domestic terrorism. A fairly rich / savvy domestic actor with bad intent might be interested in seeing if they can fly about with a fast / large drone. Prior to, you know, equipping that drone with something bad.

Why domestic? The US isn't lacking in international adversaries that would be interested in the ability to execute low cost attacks against critical infrastructure.

If it was domestic terrorists it seems likely they would have seized the opportunity to do damage immediately instead of showing their hand like this. An "advanced persistent threat" (such as a foreign country) to borrow from the computer security world seems more likely to take this sort of "test but don't actually damage anything" approach.

Foreign states have the resources to build their own field tests.

But time will tell. In fact it already has. We just need to wait for the investigation to complete.

My own money would be on a terrorist organization. A bit less certain that it would be domestic, but domestic is still more probable than foreign in my mind. The past few years, and the past year in particular, has shown me that our domestic terrorists on the left and the right are bat$#!t crazy.

But as I said, we'll see.

I suppose I mis-spoke. Could easily be a domestic ally of a foreign adversary.

I can't imagine a defense contractor imperiling their flow of money when they could certainly arrange to test at White Sands or some such. This kind of thing is straight to jail, do pass Go, do not collect $2 billion.

LEO, same; perhaps they might play loose with the law, but around refueling infrastructure and airports? That brings the Feds in 100%. Again, straight to jail. What is the risk/reward here?

A three-letter agency doing a "red team" penetration test, perhaps. But why do it with a secret modified drone? And buzzing a CBP helicopter?

So the argument is "no one commits crimes except for terrorists"? I'm afraid I'm not convinced.

I may be mistaken, but I think the argument being made is more like, "no one commits crimes, or any acts really, without a motive." These people, at least their leadership, have significant motive to not commit an act like this.

My money would be on terrorists as well, but that's why we have investigations. Let's see where the satellite photos take us.

But that's the same argument, right? The "motive not to commit an act like this" which the article provides is fear of prosecution; so if this argument went through it would just as well be an argument against any crime ever occurring.

Why would anyone ever rob a bank when you can earn money legally?

Also everyone is rational--but isn't it a happy surprise "nation-states" didn't come up again?

No, the argument is that the incentives aren't really there for other possible groups to commit this crime since they have legal alternatives to what was done. Doesn't make it impossible, just less likely.

Someone in the article comments pointed out that everything described could be accomplished by a $25,000 off the shelf drone from lockheed [1].

Now that's not something you find on every street corner, but well within the range of 'training some bored enlisted guys' or 'contractors on an evening test mission'. I'm not sure if they sell those to energy companies, but if so that fits as well.

I've heard many stories of crazier shenanigans from those types than "we were fooling around with the drone off flight-plan then got too close to the airport, and they called a freaking police helicopter so we took off lol."

I'll admit that it's a low risk-reward scenario, but especially given all the test infrastructure in the desert out there, it seems more Hanlon's razor appropriate to me than a foreign adversary testing high-end surveillance technology deep in enemy territory completely obliviously. They even left a running-light on!

[1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-martin/r...

That drone is battery powered and has a ceiling of hundreds of feet. So no. You would also be able to see it with night vision. They reported that they weren’t able to see it with night vision which seems impossible at first. But they probably were able to do that by painting it with something like vanta-black.

Nobody is building something like that with 25k. Sure you could build it, but it wouldn’t work. And it wouldn’t be anywhere close to reliable enough for a mission as crazy as entering into restricted military airspace. It would take lots of testing and iteration for someone to produce something that worked reliably and has been shown to be able to do things like evade night vision detection. It’s a specialized price of hardware developed specifically for this kind of task. Nobody is their right mind would do anything like this unless they already had access to the hardware and flippantly decided to take it for a cruise over and air force base (idiot employee at government contractor) or if they had an interest in doing this (China/Russia).

Fair enough on the flight ceiling, I misread that, so it's a substantially higher spec drone.

> idiot employee at government contractor) or if they had an interest in doing this

I guess that's where my Hanlon's razor comes in. Idiot employee(s) just seems so much more reasonable to me.

China is testing a hardcore stealth drone over a military base, but chooses one in CONUS in a highly civilian accessible major metro area, and then leaves the running lights on? It strikes me as far less likely than domestic alternatives.

Holy shit it was China after all. They linked to this in the article.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36085/troubling-drone-...

That is terrifying.

They commit brazen acts of cyber espionage targeting our infrastructure all the time so it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for them to do something like this.

>flew out of the TUS area about 50 miles to the northwest of town into the middle of nowhere desert

Tucson sits in a plain surrounded by tall mountains. Whoever was controlling the drone must've had a much stronger radio than the one with the Lockheed 10km line of sight limit.

It could be probing the response to a drone intrusion for the purpose of using drones as weapons in the future.

> Is there any intelligence that a drone that size could provide that you couldn't get from a combination of satellites and just driving around a decent camera?

Dropping disguised sensors for espionage comes immediately to mind

Why would you need an experimental drone to do that when you can use satellite photos?

You want to test your ability to get physical payloads in place, e.g. in the future the drone could carry a bomb or something else clever (listening devices? Dropping gallium on aluminum airplanes? Etc)

You want low angle shots?

You're not well funded enough to get good satellite photos?

> Dropping gallium on aluminum airplanes?

Is there anything that building a delivery mechanism to carry and then drop gallium onto a plane does that an actual gun wouldn't?

Befuddle the public with scary sounding words?

Hypothetically it might act as a more subtle form of sabotage, the goal being to bring down a plane in the air. It might also be harder to cleanup/patch than a bullet hole if detected. I don't think it's a serious threat though and is really acting as a stand in for "fancy forms of sabotage".

Less visible bullet hole more structurally compromised Al.

It doesn‘t need a clear vantage point with straight-line access to the target.

It's stealthier and quieter.

All three of your points make sense, but for me the last point really resonates.

No need for a space program, or going through someone that does.

Just acquire drone > use drone.

Don't satellites only occupy a given area once or twice a day (if not geosynchronous)? If you know the pattern you can hide assets before it gets in view. A drone can do surveillance at any time.

Satellites are tracked and interesting activities are scheduled to happen when the satellite is not overhead.

Also, a drone could have radio receivers to collect short range comms.

US spy satellites have a maximum resolution of 5-10 cm. A drone close to the ground can do better.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/01/t...]

My guess is that was a VTOL with efficient aerodynamics or jet drone to loiter and power for racing-class activities. If it flies, something like https://fusionflight.com/jetquad/ could pull it off.

Possibilities:

0. Rich, drone expert prankster, or startup showing-off to their buddies/customers "getting away with something" highly-illegal.

1. State actor demonstrating strength, vulnerabilities, and/or doing low-level recon.

2. Terrorists scouting targets and/or probing vulnerabilities.

3. Military demonstrating vulnerabilities for civilian awareness and corrective purposes.*

4. Military seeking budget for anti-drone.*

5. Military-Industrial Complex drumming-up business for anti-drone.*

* Conspiracy theory-ish

I think 2. can be ruled out. It’s hard to imagine a terrorist group doing this considering the risk of getting caught. Much easier just to drive a truck into a crowd or something.

I disagree. The truck going through the crowd model requires a sacrificial group member. In our country, the lack of terrorist group members makes their individual value higher. that makes an attack that has a higher capex cost more appealing, such as sacrificial drones.

A swarm of two dozen drones costing less than $50k could foul all of a passenger airplane's engines within a few thousand feet of takeoff. The evidence would be pretty junked up and there is no easy way to trace it back to the controller while it's happening. No sacrificial terrorist cell member needed.

> they believed the drone was highly unlikely to be battery-powered based on the altitude, distance, and speed at which it flew

Does that mean it's gasoline powered?

Do we have many details on gas powered drones ? i.e. the kind of range, altitude and speed they can achieve?

You can buy jet engines for RC airplanes. A quick search shows that folks have clocked their RC jets at ~750km/h, about half the speed of sound.

Wow, now that's impressive:

https://youtu.be/DPGDAZyQ44k?t=139

Or is it nuclear powered?

Several hobbyists have built them so I’m sure that commercial versions exist. They can’t really do any better than electric in altitude and speed (electric drones can get to 14,000 feet despite the article) but their endurance is measured in hours

RC planes can hit speeds over 150mph with the fastest jet powered ones much faster. They can also have flight times of dozens of hours, a modified RC plane made a flight from Canada to Ireland [0]. Drones also don't need real-time control. They can fly a pre-programmed route or have minimal input and just be told to head to a way given waypoint (or series of them). A well positioned direction VHF or UHF can give a control channel from miles away especially if there's no need for real-time imagery.

[0] https://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amamuseum/2017/03/29/trans...

I've always been curious if you can combine small turbine engines [1] with a drone to get something with some ridiculous performance aspects.

I'm not an aerospace engineer so I don't know what something like this would look like, what the range/ceiling would be. But these are used on some crazy model aircraft.

[1] https://www.pbsaerospace.com/small-turbine-engines

I read through a lot of these UAV articles on thedrive.com and they all appear to really drum up the paranoia angle.

I do see the threat for sure but the over the top hand waving interwoven with available solutions makes me wonder if this is a anti-UAV munitions marketing campaign.

However, we do indeed have a problem. I can see a single drone hovering around a nuclear facility or military base as harmless bit of curiosity. But multiple UAVs hovering for an hour are certainly suspicious.

The wonders of technology.

We have reached the tech level where individuals or a small group of enthusiasts can compete in the nation state arena. This is within that realm.

We always were in that realm. “Nation states” are not some god-like, invincible entity. They’re groups of people with a budget.

Seeking friends with a budget for nuclear submarines, and hypersonic missiles.

I personally got $5 on it.

You joke, but for a high enough price, I’m sure you can find someone willing to sell. ISIS didn’t manufacture their own missiles or guns.

They also didn't have nuclear submarines with hypersonic missiles.

I'll throw in $20 if I can be the periscope man

I'll need a good periscope man, deal.

Do you think they'll finance the sub with $25 down and two co-signers?

Um, is anyone else thinking how impossible this would be with current tech?

50 miles during one stretch. And on the helicopter that followed it, it logged 1.5 hours of flight time! The radio control tech must have been extremely tuned for that range. Maybe a vehicle was driving below it.

I am picturing at least 5KWh battery that should weigh at least 75 pounds (total guestimation)

In the article:

Thank you, missed that.

I am quite surprised we have not seen drones as instruments of terror yet.

It’s already common for nations to do so. For individuals missiles, bullets, or bombs etc are generally more efficient as very long range drones are still expensive and cheaper options exist at short ranges.

Not in the US, but it‘s happened. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37398/deadly-taliban-a...

Um... do you know how the US military uses drones?

Israelis have used them against protesting Palestinians with unidentified toxic gases.

Plus the US has illegally killed US citizens, like Anwar al-Awlaki, with drone strikes. Then a few years later they killed his 16 year old son with a drone and his 8 year old daughter in a commando raid. All Americans. [1]

Or when the US has drone striked a wedding. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack/at-lea...

Yeah, they're supposed to shoot and bomb other people only.

This is a handy reference to the impacts of drones being used as instruments of terror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...

How would you characterize the US use of drones? (The USAF vet asks...)

How is a “rich idiot” smart enough to build a cutting edge drone but dumb enough to accidentally fly it over an Air Force base? It doesn’t make any sense.

If it’s a foreign entity, how do they get it to Arizona in the first place? Why risk starting a war to test out your drone? If China or Russia has this capability, you know damn well the US does too so showing off seems unlikely.

And neither of these theories can identify a motive. Why would a rich idiot be flying near pipelines and air force bases to begin with. Why would a foreign country be doing a dry run so far from home at so much risk?

The only possibilities that I find compelling are domestic terrorist, the US government itself, or something spooky.

> How is a “rich idiot” smart enough to build a cutting edge drone but dumb enough to accidentally fly it over an Air Force base?

I think a lot of people here are vastly overestimating what is required to build an RC plane that would outrun a typical helicopter. Most ARF (almost-ready-to-fly - just add your radio and a batter pack) electric-ducted-fan model planes in the $400-$600 range would be able to hit 150-200km/h (see https://www.motionrc.com/collections/rc-jets/products/freewi...). When you jump up to turbine power, it’s a little more expensive, but you should be able to get quite a bit faster. Head over to YouTube and you’ll see plenty of RC planes breaking the sound barrier.

Add a FPV system with a low lux camera (see https://oscarliang.com/flying-fpv-at-night/) and you could fly this around at 10:30 at night (although there are not too many sane RC pilots who would wish to do such a thing.)

This “advanced drone” could be built with entirely off the shelf components for a few grand.

The flight track seems to show the police helicopter chasing it northwest at 60 knots for 20 minutes or so and not catching up. That's pretty impressive.

Good thing the drone was fitted with the FAA-required GPS reporting and registration ID transponders.

Realistically, those are probably still useful in situations like this, because the authorities can more easily filter out compliant air traffic when they're trying to monitor/investigate something like this. Without it, they'd need to find the needle in a much bigger haystack.

I know you're being snarky, but those things are not required. Remote ID is still months/years away from being required - there isn't even a published specification yet, much less anything on the market that conforms to it.

Whomever this was presumably broke many laws, but the things you mentioned aren't among them.

Well this is kind of terrifying. It was only a matter of time, I guess.

Sunset in Tucson at Feb 9 was at 18:04 [0]. The incident occurred at 22:30, so it was pretty dark. I could not find any weather reports for that day, but since it disappeared in the undercast it must have been cloudy. Because it had been dark for some time for some time, the air must have cooled of, and it is not unreasonable to assume that there were also some smaller clouds below 14,000 feet.

It reportedly had a green flashing light, and because of the darkness it seems unlikely that they could could really see other details. The object could not be observed with night vision goggles which seems surprising since they are supposed to be more sensitive than the human eye.

When you look at a bright colored light source you will experience afterimages [1]. When you are looking at a point source you will see these as tracks (with a complementary color) around the source. These tracks are caused by your eye movements. Under low-light circumstances your vision mainly depends on rods[2]. A green light with a wave length of 523 nm is pretty close to the optimal rod sensitivity that lies at 498 nm so your rods are pretty sensitive for this wavelength. Because the outputs of rods are interpreted as light vs dark, the afterimages of the rods will be interpreted as dark.

> While this makes rods more sensitive to smaller amounts of light,

> it also means that their ability to sense temporal changes, such as quickly changing images, is less accurate than that of cones.[2]

This also implies that afterimages from rods last longer than those of cones. Afterimages follow the movement of your eyes. So if you focus on a new point, the afterimage will follow to the new point, so it can appear to move at a tremendous speed.

In principle rods can detect a single photon[2]. Night vision goggles generally have optimal sensitivity in the near infra-red spectrum [3] so it is not very surprising that they failed to detect green light.

The central part of our eyes contains few rods [2]. The effect of this is that when you try to focus on a faint light source it will seem to disappear. This is why you should always try to focus on a point close to a star but not on the star itself. If you forget to do this, you will observe that the light seems to flicker even when it is not.

Humans are not very good at estimating the size of objects in the sky. The reason is pretty simple, if you do not know the distance between you and the object you cannot say anything about its size. In the air it is difficult to estimate the distances because there are no real points of reference. Also remember that it was dark.

It's pretty simple to buy a green laser pointer [4]. If you point it at some cloud it will appear as a green object on that cloud. Due to afterimages, it will appear to be a dark object with a green light on it. When you point at a different cloud, it will look like the object moved from its first position to its second position. If you believe that both positions are far apart then you will also believe that the object moved at a very high speed. It is also very simple to make the object disappear by turning of your pointer.

This seems to be a much simpler explanation than speculating about extremely powerful drones (or aliens).

[0] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/tucson?month=2

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_cell

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared#Night_vision

[4] please use your favorite search engine or supplier

P.S. I am a bit disappointed in most of the HN responses that assumed it was some kind of physical object without considering other possible causes.

Any chance it was bat related?

According to the description “The quad copter was described as approximately 5 feet long by about 3 feet wide, with a single green flashing LED light.”

Odd that the creators of the drone bothered with a flashing light.

That's the one detail of the story that leads me to believe it may have been some rich idiot that didn't know the legality of what they were doing.

Also entirely possible they used some stock parts and just didn't realize the LED was there.

> Also entirely possible they used some stock parts and just didn't realize the LED was there.

I only think an amateur would make that kind of mistake. If it was from a hostile power with any kind of competence, I think they would have extensively tested it in simulated operational conditions. If they didn't notice the light when they initially built it, they would have probably noticed it during testing.

You overestimate the human ability to account for all conditions. For example, perhaps they did all of their testing in the middle of bright sunlight and simply did not see it?

I think that's the clue.

This could simply be mischief with an off-the shelf, gasoline, quad copter with upgraded long range radios. Flashing green strobe would be an FAA navigation light -- if viewed from the other side you would see a flashing red.

All of the natsec and domestic spying theories would be nullified by the thing having nav lights.

https://droneswatch.org/gas-powered-drone/

I can imagine the conversation in an evil war room: "We are doing illegal stuff, but still, let's not go as low as to remove the flashing light. We have morals!" :))

Green is close to the center of the visible light spectrum. If somebody wanted to track it visually from a great distance, (perhaps from a nearby mountain?) this would make it easier to spot.

This would be beneficial for a two person team. The drone operator watching the video feed and a spotter providing positions of pursuit aircraft.

Closer to Batman dimensions (Michael Keaton)

If it was Batman, it would have a black LED.

Bat mobile?

Oh geez, it took me almost 24 hours to get the joke.

It was night, it seems pretty unlikely that anyone could make any good observations of the size or shape. When someone points a green laser at some clouds you will observe an object with a green light.

I didn’t understand the comment I replied to and was trying to say “that’s a big bat.” Pop culture references go over my head more than they likely should.

Highly modified weather balloon, obviously.

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