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With 70+ minutes of flight time, maybe it wasn't battery powered but rather powered with liquid fuel.
by runnerup 5y ago
With 70+ minutes of flight time, maybe it wasn't battery powered but rather powered with liquid fuel.
- chucklenorris 5y agoIt would have been visible with thermal cameras
- serf 5y agowe don't know it wasn't; it's only mentioned that night vision didn't illuminate it. night vision systems are , most typically, very low-light sensitive cameras that occasionally have specific-wavelength illuminators -- they aren't generally thermal cameras. I tend to think something with a run-time like that is liquid fuel based, too.
- Jtsummers 5y agoRight. A lot of night vision goggles used by pilots like this will be more along the lines of an image intensifier [0], an NVD [1]. Not thermal imaging, though some models also let you see near-infrared they're not, strictly, infrared goggles. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_intensifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_intensifier [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-vision_device https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-vision_device
- postalrat 5y agohttps://youtu.be/YawBzT1sE6E?t=2790 https://youtu.be/YawBzT1sE6E?t=2790 It's likely they had thermal cameras available. There is a lot of video of police helicopters using thermal imaging to track people they are chasing. The audio I linked to makes me think they tried to use it but couldn't see the object.
- mgarfias 5y agoI assure You from racing r/c cars for years that an electric motor will also generate lots of heat.
- phire 5y agoEven 70+ minutes is dubious for a small liquid fuelled quad-copter. It's more likely there were multiple drones swapping in and out.
- dreamcompiler 5y agoThey specifically said it was not a quadcopter. It was probably a fixed wing craft.
- phire 5y agoThey said it was "no standard quadcopter" due to it's capabilities. In the report[1] they explicitly list it has as a rotocraft with an unknown (-1) number of rotors. They also list the UAS type as "quadcopter". At one point in the article they describe it as "hovering" [1] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/the-drive-cms-content-staging/message-editor%2F1629213934924-UAS+MOR_Redacted.pdf https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/the-drive-cms-content-sta...
- awnird 5y agoThe most likely explanation is that the chase never actually happened, and the police are making it up. We should be long past the point of uncritically believing everything police claim.
- holler 5y agoThere were two helicopters involved, border patrol and tucson police. They also phoned into the FAA as it was going down. They also made visual contact with the light on the underside of the drone: "From what I can tell just from its position light, you know, I would have to imagine it was larger than a quadcopter"
- SEJeff 5y agoConfirmed by a tower? The tower's tracked it with radar. That's how they called out the height. There would be logs.
- phire 5y agoMost radar can't tell the height of an object unless it has a transponder reporting it's altitude.
- himinlomax 5y agoIt's not necessarily that they can't, it's that the precision in altitude is very poor unless the target is close to the radar. This happened with MH370, the data released in the investigation shows altitude values varying wildly by 10000 feet in a short time. Of course conspiracy theorists picked up on that as proof of lizard people involvement.