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Tucson copter cop says mysterious, ‘sophisticated’ super-drone ‘like no other’
- elijahparker 5y agoAre there any consumer drones with a flight time of over an hour? (An hour+ of high-performance flight at that).
- grp000 5y agoBlog comments are mentioning the fact that one of the choppers had to refuel, maybe a testament to how energetic the chase was, but maybe it was already low at that point. That, and the fact that there is an AFB there points to a military drone.
- gpm 5y agoNot exactly consumer, but Anduril sells a drone that claims to be capable of that (100 minutes +) https://www.anduril.com/ghost https://www.anduril.com/ghost
- anon946 5y agoDepends on how you define "consumer", but hybrid drones can fly a long time: https://www.quaternium.com/ https://www.quaternium.com/ .
- rtkwe 5y agoThere are prosumer gas powered ones coming out. My guess is it could be a version of this NASA project that can hover and then transition to winged flight. It's unclear how good of a look they got at it. https://www.nasa.gov/langley/ten-engine-electric-plane-completes-successful-flight-test https://www.nasa.gov/langley/ten-engine-electric-plane-compl...
- neom 5y agoIf it's performing maneuvers as complex as described, it must be heavily computer assisted or computer controlled, so you'd presumably need sensors, computer, etc, that adds a lot of weight. On top of that, the speeds they describe coupled with the wind they said it was fighting, it would need to be very well built. Given all the factors, I think it would probably have to be extremly extremly advance.
- DuskStar 5y agoSensors and computers aren't meaningfully different for a 5' quadrotor vs a 5" micro. Same physics, same control loop.
- greesil 5y agoYeah but you can put a radar and nice camera on the 5' one.
- pillefitz 5y agoSensors and computers weigh next to nothing. Every piece of cheap plastic commonly used for building quadcopters fulfills your criterion of being 'very well built'. Nothing about your description makes a drone 'extremely advanced'. Just a hobby project of some random guy/gal.
- jcims 5y agoComputers are 100% required for motor coordination and other low level flight details with a multirotor uav, but in terms of piloting the aircraft a typical human brain is quite capable with practice. https://youtu.be/SldJIisWFmE https://youtu.be/SldJIisWFmE
- himinlomax 5y agoIt's nearly trivially easy to build one, though not necessarily cheap. Just replace the battery pack with an engine, generator and fuel. It may be necessary to use a turbine engine to meet requirements, hence not cheap, but for flight control you just need to use free open source software firmware (Ardupilot?) that has long been freely available and tweak it.
- jfrunyon 5y agoI think it's highly unlikely that this was a "consumer" drone. (But there are definitely "professional" drones that have longer flight times)
- Erik816 5y agoI'm not clear why it is assumed this is a "drone." From the article, it sounds like all that could be identified was a single green light. This seems like a classic UFO/UAP. Maybe it was a drone, but I don't see the evidence to make that conclusion based on this article.
- defaultname 5y agoThe article links a number of other sources. The device was described as a 5 ft x 3 ft quad copter -- standard drone arrangement, but larger. But too small to be manned. By the contemporary, common use of the word, drone fits. Someone made a large scale version if the story is accurate.
- exporectomy 5y agoWhere did you get 5x3 ft quadcopter? I only found an FBI interviewee saying it was 4-6 feet diameter and unknown if it was quad or hex configuration. If they couldn't count the propellers, I wouldn't be confident they saw any propellers at all. Maybe it was fixed wing, for instance.
- defaultname 5y agohttps://jetcareers.com/forums/threads/quadcopter.307891/#post-3043924 https://jetcareers.com/forums/threads/quadcopter.307891/#pos... I have no idea where that guy got the info but he's presumably in the area/industry there.
- D13Fd 5y agoI mean, it's an unmanned aircraft of some sort, and unmanned aircraft are typically called drones. What difference are you suggesting between "drone" and "UFO/UAP" in this context?
- Erik816 5y agoDrone pretty clearly implies to me "a craft piloted remotely by a human." A UFO/UAP is an aerial phenomenon we can't currently identify. It could be a human piloted craft, it could be something else yet to be determined.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago99% chance it's an air force UAV. Look at the nearby Davis-Monthan Air Force base: https://www.google.com/maps/search/Davis-Monthan+Air+Force+Base/@32.1671006,-110.8603368,2593m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/search/Davis-Monthan+Air+Force+B... A plethora of planes, helicopters, and 3 big doppler radar domes. I guarantee the air force were tracking it, probably because it's their baby. The only reason we even heard about it is the police reports, and they weren't in the loop. The Air Force is not guaranteed to disclose what they do to the local cops, and might use them as a training exercise in fact.
- nimbius 5y agothis kind of wishful cheerleading feels more appropriate during an avengers movie. its equally plausible two local cops are just making up tall tales to justify getting a little wild during a certification flight in the event the locals lodge a complaint about the noise.
- bostonsre 5y agoThere were two helicopters from separate organizations that were both chasing it.
- ojbyrne 5y agoIt doesn’t completely disprove your theory, but that base is a well-known boneyard: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_boneyard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_boneyard
- elihu 5y agoYep, there's a museum there that'll take you on a bus tour of the boneyard (or at least, it did like 15 years ago or so when I was there). You can see a bunch of (I think) B-52's with their tails chopped off. Iirc, they did that to comply with arms reduction treaties with what was the Soviet Union. They left them out in the desert like that so that spy satellites (and now Google maps) can spot them and verify that, yes, those planes were really destroyed.
- aaron695 5y agoGeneration Kill, Evan Wright "As for the lights that the Marines saw six kilometers away, Shoup believes they were actually seeing lights from a town seventeen kilometers distant. They had misread the lights of a distant city as headlamps from a much closer convoy. Shoup attributes the perception that these headlamps appeared to be moving to a phenomenon called “autokinesis.” He explains, “When you stare at lights long enough in the dark, it looks like they are moving. That’s autokinesis.” What it boils down to is that under clear skies, in open terrain with almost no vegetation, the Marines don’t have a clue what’s out there beyond the perimeter. Even with the best optics and surveillance assets in the world, no one knows what happened to nearly 10,000 pounds of bombs and missiles dropped a few kilometers outside the encampment."
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 5y agoOff topic, but I was very surprised to learn how faithful the HBO series was to Wright’s book that I went one level deeper and read Nathaniel Fick’s book, “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer”. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Fick’s description of events fit pretty well with Generation Kill. You don’t see that very often.
- nwienert 5y agoI moved to Tucson temporarily during the pandemic. One night walking to get groceries my girlfriend and I saw a very low flying drone with a single green light underneath. It was moving far faster than I’d ever seen a drone, very low over our head and went far into the distance. Couldn’t hear it at all. The speed must have been at or above 100mph, it was almost unbelievable how quick it went.
- mistrial9 5y agoNASCAR warmups trials, except for drones.. humans are dangerous, and proud of it
- seaorg 5y agoYou didn’t hear it at all? Why do you call it a drone, because it had the typical four struts of a commercial drone? What color was it? How many feet above the ground would you say it was? Did it maneuver at all to avoid buildings as it flew?
- nwienert 5y agoIt was high enough, maybe 60-100ft that it could have been quiet and we just didn’t hear. It was off to the left a little as well. I say drone only because it seemed about that size, didn’t see it beyond the general shape and darker color unfortunately.
- joshmlewis 5y agoYou would definitely hear it at 100ft and 100mph. I race drones and they are LOUD. If it's some DoD tech then maybe they figured out how to make it near silent but it'd have to be some real state of the art prop design.
- pillefitz 5y agoNot every drone is a quadcopter, could have had wings of some kind (?)
- lend000 5y agoRemarkably similar to a 1975 case [0], which was regarded as one of the most credibly unexplainable UFO cases prior to information coming out about the Nimitz incident in 2017. [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ufo-nearcollision-with-army-helicopter-40-years-ago_n_4119987 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ufo-nearcollision-with-army-h...
- seaorg 5y agoIt’s literally not similar in any way besides taking place in the air. I mean what are you thinking? This drone is described as traveling at a speed of 100 mph and the ufo in your link is described as accelerating faster than the laws of physics might allow.
- lend000 5y agoPerhaps you didn't read either link? Both involve an unidentified object closing in on a helicopter at some point, stopping and hovering, a green light being the primary visual, and then the object leaving the helicopter and eventually disappearing.
- exporectomy 5y agoThe Nimitz "Gimbal" UFO has been explained. I don't think you can count it as unexplainable.
- solarengineer 5y agoCould you point to this explanation? The various explanations that I have encountered use a combination of ridicule and a disregarding of multiple-sensors multiple-observers and instead only talk about camera failures, sensor failures, human eye-sight failures and vision phenomenon.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoIIRC reflection in the optics. Two of the three videos can be explained away just by reading the data overlaid on the video and applying some middle school-level geometry to it.
- sjg007 5y agoMaybe a Ham radio drone built by some enterprising UofA students?
- seventytwo 5y agoCartel drone, maybe?
- baggy_trough 5y agoI like that idea, but why the green light then?
- Wistar 5y agoIt was transporting marijuana?
- yarcob 5y agoSo the operator can see it in the sky?
- jfrunyon 5y agoBeacon for the operator? Light for the camera (particularly if the operator was like "crap, is that a helicopter right in front of it")? Reflection of the helicopter's starboard (green) position light? Reflection of a white light (searchlight?) off something on the drone (marijuana, green structural elements)?
- mvanaltvorst 5y agoThat was my idea, turbine powered FPV drone to fly over the Mexican border (only ~150km).
- jcims 5y agoHere’s a turbine fpv setup hitting 500kmh https://youtu.be/TFYXiJ1NJTw https://youtu.be/TFYXiJ1NJTw
- Robotbeat 5y agoIf it was fixed wing, it could be pure electric. Zipline’s drones have similar capability. If it’s a quad copter (or similar), batteries wouldn’t last long enough and so it’s burning a fuel of some sort.
- trashcan_ 5y agoSeems unlikely to be a quadcopter given the 100mph airspeed it was capable of
- kolinko 5y agoMavic FPV goes to 100mph in Manual mode.
- Ancapistani 5y agoNonsense - you can build a quad capable of that speed for ~$500. It won’t have a flight time of more than a few minutes, though. For that, you’d need a fixed wing, or a non-lipo power source (like, say, hydrogen)
- asperous 5y agoIt sounds to me like the city of Tucson and CBP didn't know how to deal with this. I mean chasing a light unmanned drone in a fully manned helicopter is of course going to end up with the kind of silly antics they talk about (the drone flying circles around it). I wonder how effective an rf jammer would have been.
- layoutIfNeeded 5y agoProbably ayylmaos.
- sloshnmosh 5y agoI live near that area and had heard and seen a drone above my house in the very early morning before dawn a month ago. I first heard a sound like a swarm of bees overhead but looked up to see the drone. It took off southbound at a high rate of speed in the same flight path that the police helicopters use. I have no idea if this is related but I thought it was very odd for a drone to be flying at that time over a heavily populated area near the University of Arizona.
- heavyset_go 5y agoCops fly drones at night because they're hard to see, but the drones can see in the dark.
- Ancapistani 5y agoSo do private drone pilots. I often fly my quadcopter at night.
- anotheryou 5y agowas it a quad copter or winged?
- jcims 5y agoThe only thing interesting about this is the flight time. Everything else is trivially achievable with a custom build from parts one can order over the Internet. 150mph multirotor, 300mph fixed wing, control and video link range of 100km. Not particularly relevant but fun to watch: a purpose built, turbine-powered rc aircraft flying at 450mph and executing turns that would probably kill a human pilot. https://youtu.be/DPGDAZyQ44k?t=150 https://youtu.be/DPGDAZyQ44k?t=150 Onboard: https://youtu.be/H74rXkQBeR4 https://youtu.be/H74rXkQBeR4
- Animats 5y agoThe reported behavior suggests a fixed-wing drone, not a quadcopter. Especially the circling.
- bserge 5y agoWhy not retractable wings quad/multirotor? Would have long flight time (especially with a gas engine) and be able to "disappear" by retracting the wings and speeding straight up or down.
- 9dev 5y agoAs one of the blog comments suggests, and seems likely from what I've read about it, a lot of the description fits the Northrop-Grumman Bat[0]. One has to wonder why a drone purportedly available exclusively to the military flies such a risky mission... [0] https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/BAT_Datasheet.pdf https://www.northropgrumman.com/wp-content/uploads/BAT_Datas...
- helloworld11 5y agoIt's worth noting that in the last years of the 19th century, when airship and zeppelin technology was just starting its first steps of development, many people throughout the United States reported numerous cases of phantom airship sightings. Much later, at the dawn of development or at least interest in rocketry and space travel technology in the late 1940's and then 50's, some of the first modern UFO sighting waves really captured public attention. Now, we have cases like this, but in the context of drone technologies, with the mysterious objects being seen having capabilities that appear to be a certain margin beyond what's known to be currently available. All three periods share some odd similarities.