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.
Because then you can’t probe unannounced/classified defensive abilities, strategies, and tactics.
* 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.
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.
I'd like to hear why you think some branch of the US government would be behind this. To what end?
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.
>>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.
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.
See also: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/drones-swarmed-u-s-wars...
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
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.
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?
[0] https://amablog.modelaircraft.org/amamuseum/2017/03/29/trans...
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.
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.
I personally got $5 on it.
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)
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...
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.
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.
Whomever this was presumably broke many laws, but the things you mentioned aren't among them.
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.
> 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.
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.
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's more likely that the night vision device was either malfunctioning or pilot error made its use ineffective.
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...
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).
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…
EDIT: nope I'm stupid
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.
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?
Dropping disguised sensors for espionage comes immediately to mind
You want low angle shots?
You're not well funded enough to get good satellite photos?
Also, a drone could have radio receivers to collect short range comms.
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanocallaghan/2019/09/01/t...]
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.
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.
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.
Is there anything that building a delivery mechanism to carry and then drop gallium onto a plane does that an actual gun wouldn't?
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".
No need for a space program, or going through someone that does.
Just acquire drone > use drone.
Do you think they'll finance the sub with $25 down and two co-signers?
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.
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.
This would be beneficial for a two person team. The drone operator watching the video feed and a spotter providing positions of pursuit aircraft.
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.
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.
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").
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...
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).
> 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.
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.
My money would be on terrorists as well, but that's why we have investigations. Let's see where the satellite photos take us.
Why would anyone ever rob a bank when you can earn money legally?
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.