Drone carrying drugs crashes near US-Mexico border
bbc.com
bbc.com
The show highlights, at one point, a guy who engineered an incredible drug "torpedo" that could be towed behind a fast boat, cut and dropped instantly if trouble arose, and recovered via digital homing beacons safe and sound at a later time.
I was struck by how proud he was of it, from a purely technical perspective.
And it was a damn smart solution to a problem, albeit one that was unfortunately illegal.
You can get them in grades from 1 to 30 days, though temperature also gets to play a role.
http://www.neptunemarineproducts.com/galvanic-timed-releases...
Looks like you can also use them to prevent "ghost fishing" where a lost fish trap continues to trap fish for years or for timed bait release schemes.
The probation of drugs in US is bringing much damage to neighboring supplier countries south of the border such as Mexico where the real costs of the drugs are felt in human lives. The war on drugs is exactly the same problem as we had during the alcohol probation in the 1930s, maffia like Alcapone taking over Chicago, if the state legalizes the drugs there is better opportunity to treat and help the drug users. As long as there are drug users there will be drug suppliers.
Unless the DEA intercepts practically every drug drone sent across the border, people are going to keep at it. The money's just too good.
1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/...
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-10/more-pot-les...
That is so much more money than the government has to fight it. Look into how Mexican cartels are actually kidnapping engineers to build infrastructure for their paramilitary operations: http://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/
The DEA's budget is nearly $3B, and they can't do shit against rocks in a bag. The DEA's budget could be $3 Trillion, and they still couldn't do shit against rocks in a bag.
Convictions require evidence.
I suspect that the cartels have already analyzed the cost. I'd bet that an autonomous sub is much more cost effective.
The only thing that's over is its ability to justify itself.
Multi-rotor copters are great for stability and easy to fly, but suck for, say, flying over a border.
And depending on your noise requirements, you could even use a fuel powered engine, which would give you much better height, range, speed, and payload.
I doubt anyone at the border is prepared to handle a RC plane like this:
I found one source that estimates that normal RC jet engines use 250ml/minute. If we assume that this thing uses 2x of a "normal" RC jet engine, at 350mph it could go about 23 miles in 4-minutes before running out of fuel. Or, from the border to just south of Del Mar.
With that kind of range and speed, it seems like it'd be reasonable to avoid detection.
[1] http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/rc-jets-120/9133201-fast-rc-...
RC Jets are fast as hell; over 200 mph is very common for turbine powered RC planes.
More craziness, 440 mph RC jet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa-TSNeTK-A
Because I have no idea what I'm talking about estimating fuel consumption in RC jet engines, and "2x" seemed like a reasonable guess? Looks like I wasn't too far off.
I wonder how much adding a payload would affect that, and what the max weight is including possibly larger fuel tanks and a cargo payload.
ps. WW would be proud! :-P
You'd be better off simply dropping the cargo. It's not like it would hurt drugs.
So, take off in spot 1, trace out an arc, drop the package at some point (which would be so small as to be really hard to detect), land/crash in spot 2 a long way away. If the drone is cheap enough, just throw it away.
A quick search shows people doing the same thing for fun, so this must be used or not have enough payload capacity to make it more profitable than other methods. Perhaps the risk and cost is all about the pickup and 2kg is just as much work to get as 200.
I suppose if the craft had a real detachable payload, it'd be really like a bomb. Perhaps complete with fake drops to act as countermeasures to surveillance.
High is visible and traceable. Unpowered glide is also traceable. Anything which stays in view too long is going to get filmed with by someone with a cellphone and a GPS. Low and fast wins.
You want to stay low and cover a long curved path (preferably whose radius changes) so that the release of the payload is invisible and really hard to trace (a 40 mile path over a sparsely populated forest would be really hard to track).
> so this must be used or not have enough payload capacity to make it more profitable than other methods
I suspect more profitable is the answer to why it isn't done. Why pay $10,000 for a drone when you can pay $5,000 for a human mule that you need at either end anyhow?
That said, 2.7kg of crystal meth might be worth $270,000 [1]. So the cost of the drone is insignificant to the 'value' of the meth it was carrying. Sending 1kg chunks over on $10,000 drones would still net a decent profit. And $10,000 is a pretty nice drone.
This can be accomplished right now, with pretty much any of the off-the-shelf, high-end consumer drones.
Setting up a fixed wing drone requires a lot more work. You would have to set up a parachute with the payload and some sort of release system, plus it would have to have enough battery to fly back. The receiving party on the other end wouldn't be able to send anything back with the drone, either, because it would never land. If you wanted it to land, then you have to deal with all sorts of other variables.
Drones that can take off and land vertically are far more flexible for point to point deliveries than fixed wing drones.
You'd probably just drop the cargo and crash the drone somewhere random nearby.
If you're smuggling 100k of drugs (or even 30k of drugs), you can just accept the 5k airframe as a transport cost and move on.
[1] http://www.fpvmodel.com/super-huge-mugin-4450mm-uav-h-t-tail...
[1] https://news.vice.com/article/drone-carrying-three-kilos-of-...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aC9Z7-Qxwk
[3] http://www.popphoto.com/gear/2014/08/new-gear-dji-spreading-...
For this to work in the longer term, the drone would need to fly high enough to be more or less undetectable from the ground, and a long enough distance so that it's impossible to monitor all available landing sites. I don't know enough about drones or the US-Mexico border to say whether that's practical.
Flying low actually helps you against ground-based watchers, because they don't see you for very long as you zoom over them. You're on the ground and you detect a drone... and bam, it's gone.
a) buying one puts you on a list
b) you are required a license to fly one, anywhere
c) you are required a license to buy, let alone fly one
Other things on the parts list are the motor controllers (motors are controlled by current, and you usually need at least 40Amps for each), battery and sensor board (GPS, compass, 3D acceleration and gyro).
That said, basic police work can still generally track the origin of a drone back to when it was built/sold. Every electronic component has a date code, and there are records of sales all along the way. That can tie it to a location/purchase, in store surviellance can often provide images of buyers, (mail/internet order is even easier) and get back to who had the drone to begin with.
At the end of the day, the higher the tech 'toys' used in a crime the easier it is for law enforcement to figure out who did it.
I have a feeling that if you buy your electronic components this way:
http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/StoreCatalog...
it's a bit harder to trace an individual component back to the purchaser. Especially something like this:
http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_1000...
Most of those drones are built from general purpose electronics which even if they were original and no knock off which is very common these days they would've been bought from some reseller in bulk and no one actually tracks individual components.
While i agree that it's easy enough for a detective to go and ask around who has a drone but once you have enough of them flying around that won't be as simple either.
You could also use a big model rocket, but you can't buy a huge one off the shelf that works so reliably with little skill. RC subs would also be possible, but again, you'd need to do a lot of your own R&D, whereas companies like DJI now do it for you. Big RC helis have been capable of the same-ish payloads for a decade or more now, but they're hard to fly, hard to build, and require quite a bit of training to fly without crashing. You'd also need to be watching it every second in flight, unlike the self-stabilizing GPS waypoint systems which have become affordable (<$10k and available to non-military) in the past few years.
With the prices for entry level models coming low enough to compete with an ipad or other consumer electronics, I can't help but think how scared I would be of teenagers flying these things around my neighborhood, let alone the hazards with wide scale deployment of automated drones for deliveries.
I'm glad I read this till the end. For a moment there I was thinking the kid had actually lost, you know, one of his nuts.
Baseball? No. These are injuries from 450mm sized quads.[1][2][3]
warning some blood / injuries
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji3Hii_LZOc#t=20
[2] http://static.rcgroups.net/forums/attachments/7/5/2/8/2/a300...
Baseball tends not to cause lacerations, so photographs won't look as gory (except perhaps for some eye injuries), but they definitely can cause serious injuries, and can very easily cause minor property damage.
I say this because the heli in the story, as most high-end consumer RC helis these days, had 2 carbon fiber blades, and on the 700 size, tip to tip on the blades is about a meter. Consider the weight and tip speed of each blade vs. A large quad or hex or octocopter. The blades will be much smaller, so much much less kinetic energy at the tips. You also don't do this with quads: http://youtu.be/EYWLqui5VsM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5eUqLopMYM&index=88&list=PL...
I am not too worried about them, they are far safer than a real helicopter.
"One GPS glitch" ?? When something fails on a drone you could detect it very easily. If GPS fails you have barometric sensors, you have accelerometers, you have compass, you have gyroscopes, you have infrared sensors for horizon.
When something fails you actually reverse and disconnect the motors automatically. Now it is just 1 or 2 kilos falling down. Mine have small parachutes.
Like humans you could add redundancy to those machines, and the probability of all of them failing at the same time is almost zero.
Normal toy quadcopters weight 100 grams and you can stop the blades with your hands (or you neck) without harm.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/near-c...
Remote control is a bit different (than drones) in that the drones can operate with electronics that allow them to fly without a remote operator (in some situations and with the right model). You needed obviously an operator for a RC Helicopter. Always needed to be flown and I do mean always if you took your hands off the sticks it would crash.
The drone era is well and truly upon us. I can't wait until it scales up enough to be able to really have an impact on the transportation industry...
For non metric people, your proposition is calling for something to be able to transport a package around 2lbs approximately 9,000 miles.
Flying below radar has its own challenges, as described here: http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2952/can-you-act...
Your real issue would be finding an efficient enough engine to fly that far with a few refueling points along the way, thus making the trip longer than what you're probably envisioning. This is why I'm assuming jeffasinger has proposed a blimp or some form of a blimp to get this accomplished.
Yes, it can be done, but with several caveats.
However if you allow for most of the journey to be done by sea and assuming your destination is relatively close to the coast and you do not care if it takes ages, then you could transport a small aircraft in one of those passive sea drones that navigate using variable buoyancy by gliding underwater to a set depth, before going back to the surface again for a recharge and gps check.
A couple of things:
- is it a mission that requires 1 continuous flight? That would be very difficult to accomplish. You need a lot of fuel to go that far, which in turn increases your mass, which increases your fuel requirements, etc. - speed requirements? How long do you want it to take? It may be possible to use a balloon and take advantage of wind + solar power. - size? route? service ceiling? None of these are defined very well so it's hard to say.
My guess would be it'll probably be very difficult to accomplish without being detected by someone.
Flying over terrain is hard. Wind shear is a huge issue (I've seen situations where there was a 20 knot wind at ground level and still air at 100 m) as is turbulence and stuff in the way (trees, rocks, mountains...)
I've often wondered if a combination of storage batteries and solar panels could give you unlimited range (for some part of the Earth, at least, during some times of the year: high latitudes in the summer, say.) A high altitude design would also facilitate that, as power consumption could be minimized during the dark hours at the cost of losing some altitude (simply gliding through the night is not possible with any reasonable design parameters.)
The total cost of such a project would be low enough that I'm a bit surprised no one has done it yet.
See http://www.solarimpulse.com/en/our-adventure/solar-impulse-2
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/robot...
But most modern AA weapons have tremendous velocities and are often explosive. Even after losses due to air resistance, AA shrapnel can come with with lethal velocities. I was told by somebody I trust that the Baghdad suffered more damage in financial terms from AA fallout than the actual US air strikes in the first US/Iraq war.
For that reason, I think the ideal solution would involve capturing the drone somehow, maybe with a net of some kind. Innocent drones could be marked with contact information, allowing them to be returned to their owner in the event that they are mistakenly captured.
As an added benefit, harmlessly capturing the drone would provide more useful evidence for the police investigating drug crimes.
That or maybe falcons. Train birds of prey to knock drones out of the sky. Might not be safe for the bird, depending on the type of drone. I wonder if falcons are smart enough to make that sort of judgement call themselves..
Edit: though I guess there might be some simple countermeasures
Or the US could just go with something that actually works, like the Portugal system of scrapping all drug laws. After fifteen years none of the imagined horrors have come true, addiction has dropped to half the previous value, law enforcement costs have gone down, and things are generally better.
People look at Portugal, see that the facts contradict their imaginary scenarios, and deny the facts, but that doesn't change them.
The counter-countermeasure, of course, is to start making "deliveries" to random people, and tie up law enforcement by compelling them to arrest innocent parties.
Anyway, it makes me think of the "move fast and break stuff" philosophy we see in software. Someone willing to throw stuff together and give it a shot will be flying while a careful planner is still planning. Flying, and quite possibly crashing, of course.
[1] http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/may/19/flying-marijuana-over-b...
[2] http://kpbs.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/photos/2011/0...
Were I in a law-scoffing mood, I would first set up hidden cameras in several prepared locations and let them record for a while. After reviewing the footage for unusual traffic, I would place the UAV at one such site by hand. After I left, it would fly to a second site, drop payload, and proceed to a third for later recovery.
If I really took it seriously, I would have several pre-programmed abort procedures, and a sachet of thermite powder with an electrically-triggered magnesium igniter affixed to the control electronics.
You don't actually need to recover the drone if your margins are high enough, but you do absolutely need to ensure that it doesn't end up intact in the wrong hands. I might try to design a UAV with a largely disposable, mostly-printable airframe and an ejectable/destructable control module.
Your plans are reasonably valid at first - you still need to deliver the drugs to the launch location, but that's a current problem with deliveries anyway. However, that third location is going to be the problem - if your authorities were really in a mood to capture you, they could track the drone back to your recovery site, and either wait for you to show up, or set up a camera to get you collecting the drone on tape. Note that they could use a drone of their own for this, too, and theirs can fly higher and probably have a better camera, so you'd have to be pretty diligent to make sure you aren't 'followed'.
And if you're attaching remotely-controlled explosive/incendiary devices onto your drone, then your risk factors have just gone up by a degree I can't even begin to estimate. I think a capacitor that would short out the electronics and memory would be enough, as long as you're careful about not getting any fingerprints or DNA samples on there.
This is fun to think about, though!
I suppose that if I were to do this, I'd have my drone go somewhere with only one aerial entrance that I'm surveilling, to make sure no other drone/person follows it in (e.g., train/subway tunnel, storm drain, etc) that has many different entrances/exits that I could use to recover the drone - if there are enough of these, I could go in and recover my drone before the police could reasonably place each one under surveillance/show up in person. But there's surely not an infinite supply of these even in a big city.
In reality, you wouldn't recover the drone. Just drop the payload somewhere over the flight path and crash the drone.
A camouflaged package would be almost impossible to find in a forest or the desert. Add in a spread spectrum beacon and your mule can come pick up the package day/weeks/months later.
They had entire meth labs in the state forest and they couldn't be found because there were only two contact times: when they set it up and when they collected the product.
This sort of thing would be most useful between producer and distributor, or between distributor and dealer. The last mile to the consumer would require a lower risk profile than currently exists, including the risk that the customer or someone near the customer knocks down your drone during delivery and prevents you from re-using it. I don't think drones are sufficiently disposable for consumer deliveries yet, even for completely legal goods.
I recall seeing a video of model aircraft enthusiasts doing remote-operation races through a forested area. If you could get your UAV through a wooded area under the canopy at decent speed without crashing it, it is very unlikely that anyone would be able to follow it through unless they already knew where it was going. If you were able to program a predetermined evasion route through a volume with a lot of navigation hazards and concealment, it would be very difficult to maintain tracking.
The problem for the defender is at least one order of magnitude higher than for the attacker. The defense must be equally strong everywhere. The attacker need only exploit the weakest points in the defense. UAVs make drug interdiction harder. And I'm not certain I want the DEA to wield the sort of power required to counter all possible UAV-based drug muling.
(Plus the April 2014 US case mentioned in the parent article)
FAA got pushed around pretty good in the Congress hearing yesterday
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4524659/colin-guinn-testifies-...
http://www.designfax.net/cms/dfx/opens/article-view-dfx.php?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvGiJIz3K4Y
- What is the range between the remote control and the receiver on the drone?
- How does the person piloting the drone know where it is going? Do they track its GPS signal?
- How does the person piloting the drone know what it is landing on (ground, rooftop, trashcan)?
- How likely is it that when a drone is found, its pilot can be identified? What methods of investigation, if any?
https://store.3drobotics.com/t/parts/autopilots http://ardupilot.com/
If found by the feds, identifying could be tricky; you'd have to do the old fashioned footwork of knocking on doors, asking if they saw any suspicious people. Given that a good amount of Mexico, including Tijuana, is in the midst of a hardcore drug war, finding witnesses could be more than a bit tough.