12 ms·

Drone carrying drugs crashes near US-Mexico border

• cooperpellaton 12y ago
  This looks absolutely insane. It seems as though someone just taped a pile of these crystal bricks to the top of the drone and let it fly. Astonishing.
  • mikeash 12y ago
    I believe it's the bottom, not the top. The drone is upside down in that picture. 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.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• arjn 12y ago
  Inevitable I think.
• ChuckMcM 12y ago
  This has been discussed before and is a favorite of some of the robotics communities. This particular drone seemed to be a bit overloaded (2.7kg?) and I'm guessing the person who launched it hadn't made the connection between flight time and weight. But still it seems a pretty straight forward way to get drugs from point A to point B. 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. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/faqs/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/faqs/
  • dublinben 12y ago
    What benefit would these hexcopter drones offer over a similarly sized fixed wing drone? Isn't the safest smuggling flight for this a straight shot?
    • t0mbstone 12y ago
      With a lot of the higher end drones, you can do autonomous flying via GPS. Just tell the drone a point on the map to go to and off it goes. You could easily have a partner in crime just waiting at the pre-determined GPS coordinates to pick up the drone and the cargo. The partner could then swap the battery pack and send the drone right back to you. 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.
      • ObviousScience 12y ago
        Fly back? 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.
      • mbrameld 12y ago
        I'm pretty sure both the Pixhawk and Ardu Pilot Mega are capable of auto-landing a fixed-wing aircraft. Here's a demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CF_vDq2Wq4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CF_vDq2Wq4
    • tantalor 12y ago
      Copter might be easier to land in a discreet location. Does a fixed-wing require strip to land? You could always just crash it and eat the cost of the drone.
  • kenrikm 12y ago
    You can quite easily build a drone capable of flying for many miles with a 2.7kg Payload for 2-3K. Indeed $10,000 would buy you a very, very nice setup. If they wanted to go the plane route a Mugin will do 15kg and still be under 10k [1] [1] http://www.fpvmodel.com/super-huge-mugin-4450mm-uav-h-t-tail-plane-platform_g628.html http://www.fpvmodel.com/super-huge-mugin-4450mm-uav-h-t-tail...
    • scoot 12y ago
      Anyone know what that's based off? A "full sized" drone of maybe 3-4X this size, but with exactly this profile flew directly overhead at low altitude about 18 months back.
      • darkmighty 12y ago
        This perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Heron-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Heron-1
    • ChuckMcM 12y ago
      Yup, that would do it. 600km range for 15kg of 'cargo'. Assuming a full write-off of the air frame in the flight, possible recovery of the auto-pilot/electronics. It's right on the edge of what its radar profile is going to look like. (model/bird vs small aircraft).
  • WestCoastJustin 12y ago
    VICE claims this was a "DJI Spreading Wings s900" drone [1]. There is a nice little demo video on youtube [2], but it is hard not to mentally replace "camera gear" with "6.5 pounds of meth", when watching it after reading the news story. Looks like it is about $3,800 USD rigged up [3]. The specs say it can only fly for 18 minutes [4], so they had to have been pretty close by! As battery tech, software auto pilots, and availability improves, this is likely going to become a much larger issue. [1] https://news.vice.com/article/drone-carrying-three-kilos-of-meth-crashes-in-tijuana https://news.vice.com/article/drone-carrying-three-kilos-of-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aC9Z7-Qxwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aC9Z7-Qxwk [3] http://www.popphoto.com/gear/2014/08/new-gear-dji-spreading-wings-s900-drone http://www.popphoto.com/gear/2014/08/new-gear-dji-spreading-... [4] http://www.dji.com/product/spreading-wings-s900/spec http://www.dji.com/product/spreading-wings-s900/spec
    • kenrikm 12y ago
      You can fly a pretty good distance in 18min @30-40mph (Napkin Math - somewhere in the 10mile one way range) it would be reasonable to speculate they were within 10km as they still had a way to go to get across the border but that's still a pretty large area.
  • TillE 12y ago
    Even a kilogram of marijuana would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000. Something like pure cocaine is worth vastly more. 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.
    • fit2rule 12y ago
      You mean low enough to the ground to be undetectable - and there is already hobby-level advanced technology to do this out on the intrawebs. I myself am building drones (planes, mostly) to do things like auto-navigate the neighborhood and so on, and am actively seeking ways I can get involved in a startup to use this technology for positive effects. I'm not at all surprised to see the drug cartels already making headway on carrying loads - there are a near infinite number of other good applications of this technology, which I sincerely hope governments allow to prosper, anyway, in spite of this ...
    • kxo 12y ago
      Your first price is about two times what top shelf, domestic black market prices are presently at.
    • vacri 12y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nap-of-the-earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nap-of-the-earth 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.
  • Shivetya 12y ago
    so how long before 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
    • splatsearch 12y ago
      you need a licence and permission to fly one in Spain already
      • seanp2k2 12y ago
        How would they enforce this without tracking everything larger than a small bird via radar or satellite?
        • splatsearch 12y ago
          i dont know how they enforce it but its a law. Spanish law works different from most countrys. They have laws to say what you can do rather than what you cant. The law is you need a licence.
    • pavel_lishin 12y ago
      I'd imagine that 3D printing is already good enough to print most of a drone; the only things you'd need to order would be wires, a control board (arduino?) and motors.
      • miahi 12y ago
        You usually need something strong for the frame; big drones are carbon fiber - and I don't think you can print anything like it right now. 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).
        • baddox 12y ago
  • ojbyrne 12y ago
    That's the street price. I'd ballpark guess that the wholesale price within drone-flying distance of the border is a tenth of that. Still profitable though.
    • girvo 12y ago
      In Australia it'd be about a fifth of the original figure, but our economics for the drug trade are very different I suppose.
      • ojbyrne 12y ago
        I believe the closer to the border, the lower wholesale prices are.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• programminggeek 12y ago
  Wow, they got there before Amazon.
  • jamessb 12y ago
    This is not the first instance of drones being used for smuggling - previously, a fixed-wing drone carrying cigarettes across the Russia-Lithuania border was intercepted in May 2014: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/russians-capture-cigarette-smuggling-drone/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/russians-capture-... (Plus the April 2014 US case mentioned in the parent article)
  • jonathantm 12y ago
    Not quite the same thing. But that does give me an idea. Order drugs locally via website, have them delivered via drone... like an express and localized Silk Road...?
    • Sanddancer 12y ago
      Drones are too expensive for local deliveries. The current method of dropping it in a street corner mailbox works rather well for packages up to 8 ounces, which covers pretty much anything you'd be selling over a website.
    • deeviant 12y ago
      Yep, that sounds about right. Between bitcoin, an anonymous brokerage such as silk road, and drone delivery, the dealers would be pretty hard to track down.
      • pavel_lishin 12y ago
        I think it would be easier to track them than current Silk Road/whatever dealers. You don't need a physical address to ship drugs out, but you definitely need a physical location from which you're launching drones - and unless you're throwing in a free drone with every delivery, you need to recover them after the delivery is completed.
• slayed0 12y ago
  Although this was clearly a failure, I imagine there are a lot of these that are successfully getting across. It's not hard to see where obvious mistakes were made.
• Varcht 12y ago
  Fast and Furious = Drone Edition? FAA got pushed around pretty good in the Congress hearing yesterday http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4524659/colin-guinn-testifies-congress http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4524659/colin-guinn-testifies-...
• theorique 12y ago
  Bruce Sterling talked about delivery drones in his book Heavy Weather (1995), and implied that they were being used for drugs. However, the one he described was ground based - I think it bounced like a kangaroo or pogo stick.
  • lotsofmangos 12y ago
    I like the craft in that book that has loads of independent pogosticks attached to a central pod, with the ride just getting bumpier if any of them fail.
• jasonkester 12y ago
  Remember when these were called Remote Control Helicopters?
  • baddox 12y ago
    Multirotor aircraft were never to my knowledge widely referred to as "remote control helicopters."
  • larrys 12y ago
    I flew gas powered in the 80's. At that time I remember seeing an electric being demoed or more or less used as a trainer to learn to hover (the first step back in the day). It had a power cord attached to it and could only go within range of the cord. 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.
• venaoy 12y ago
  It's fascinating to think about potential counter-defenses... I can imagine this will spur development of new technologies to intercept small personal drones like these. Regular air defense artillery is too dangerous to use in a busy airspace like the San Diego/Tijuana border where this drone was found, and it is designed to work against military drones which are much bigger. New and different technology is needed to intercept and destroy small personal drug-smuggling drones.
  • kristofferR 12y ago
    Israel is deploying Iron Beam this year, a laser system, to shoot down (among other things) drones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam
    • jqm 12y ago
      hmmm... and Hawks?
    • seanp2k2 12y ago
      Good luck detecting RCs that look like birds: http://youtu.be/sczE8nNkrY4 http://youtu.be/sczE8nNkrY4
  • deeviant 12y ago
    Seems like a pretty good use case for lasers as you can generally hit only what your aiming out, and you don't have any explosive and/or metal shrapnel falling back down into populated areas.
    • aaron987 12y ago
      Blasting the drone out of the sky is probably not the best option. Drones are becoming more popular for legitimate uses like photography, farming, and maybe deliveries in the future. Without knowing what the drone is carrying, it would be hard to determine which ones should be shot down and which are serving some legitimate purpose. 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.
• Mikeb85 12y ago
  Why not just use a fixed-wing RC aircraft? 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.
  • dghughes 12y ago
    I think the advantage is it can hover and perform a pinpoint landing.
    • bsder 12y ago
      Why land? 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.
      • MichaelGG 12y ago
        Use a weather balloon or rocket or something and go high on the Mexican side. Then head over and essentially become a guided bomb. Even with a 1:5 glide you could get many (50km?) km over and fall directly to the pickup site. A toy version of an ICBM. 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.
        • bsder 12y ago
          > Use a weather balloon or rocket or something and go high on the Mexican side. 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?
• petercooper 12y ago
  Physics / engineering people: Ignoring cost, is it physically possible to create a drone of not too significant size that could, unaided, take a 1kg payload from almost any useful point on the planet to another point (so a maximum range of, say, 10-15,000km) at below typical radar range?
  • PMan74 12y ago
    Physics / engineering people: while we're on the subject, could a five ounce bird could carry a one pound coconut from the tropics to Europe?
  • jeffasinger 12y ago
    I bet the answer is yes, if Lighter than air (blimp) designs are allowed.
    • at-fates-hands 12y ago
      Agreed. 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-actually-fly-under-the-radar 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.
      • toomuchtodo 12y ago
        If you don't care about your cross section, solar would fit the bill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Pathfinder http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Pathfinder
        • FeeTinesAMady 12y ago
• aresant 12y ago
  This reminds me of a VICE program around Columbian Narco Submarines (1) 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. (1) https://www.vice.com/video/colombian-narcosubs https://www.vice.com/video/colombian-narcosubs
  • acd 12y ago
    The war on drugs is over. I realized it was over when I also read about the narco subs, now there are narco drones. Drones delivering drugs over the border. Narco subs delivering drugs. Horizontal directional drilling like the ones used in shale gas exploration are also used to deliver drugs. It has turned into a technology war. 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.
    • DrFunke 12y ago
      The DEA's budget is nearly $3B. I'd doubt RC technology can compete against that.
      • chroma 12y ago
        For manufacturers, the profit margins on illegal drugs are absurd. A lab in Mexico can make meth for $500/kg. Once that meth is in the US, it can sell for $60,000/kg.[1] In other words, manufacturers can lose 90% of their product and still make tons of money. 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/math.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/special/...
• coldcode 12y ago
  The article mention catapults. I wonder how far you could toss a bad of meth?
  • miahi 12y ago
    Chucky 3 can throw a 4kg pumpkin at 1.1km. But the thing is huge. http://www.designfax.net/cms/dfx/opens/article-view-dfx.php?nid=4&bid=299&et=news&pn=01 http://www.designfax.net/cms/dfx/opens/article-view-dfx.php?... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvGiJIz3K4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvGiJIz3K4Y
    • apendleton 12y ago
      If we're looking to pumpkin chucking as inspiration, the pneumatic cannons are a better bet, as they generally perform better than the catapults/trebuchets. The record for those is 1.6km.
• leeoniya 12y ago
  it's crazier that they fly in powered hang-gliders for drug drops over the border [1] crash [2] [1] http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/may/19/flying-marijuana-over-border-low-slow/ http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/may/19/flying-marijuana-over-b... [2] http://kpbs.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/photos/2011/05/18/Ultra-Light_Crash_tx700.jpg?8e0a8887e886a6ff6e13ee030987b3616fc57cd3 http://kpbs.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/photos/2011/0...
  • themodelplumber 12y ago
    Warning: The second link above appears to show a dead body in a gruesome position
• fit2rule 12y ago
  Here in Austria, the Austrian border patrol are actively recruiting RC-rotor pilots (helicopters) to patrol the terrain around the borders with the eastern European countries.. I know of 2 guys who started the RC helicopter hobby and are now doing regular patrol duty with government-sanctioned rotorwings. 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...
• innguest 12y ago
  I'm confused for being ignorant about some key aspects of this. Any help would be appreciated: - 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?
  • Sanddancer 12y ago
    Elsewhere in thread, they say they used a DJI Spreading Wings S900, which has a flight time of 18 minutes. Using the fully automated remotes, there's a claimed range of 11-32 km depending on antennae, etc. Navigation, etc, could either be done with binoculars, or using the avionics package you can get for the drone, with gps, radio beacons, etc. 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.
  • base698 12y ago
    You don't really need to control it. There are open source and off the shelf autopilots everywhere at this point. https://store.3drobotics.com/t/parts/autopilots https://store.3drobotics.com/t/parts/autopilots http://ardupilot.com/ http://ardupilot.com/
• briantakita 12y ago
  Perfect excuse to dump more money into the "War on Drugs" and to increase our domestic robot military force.
• dogma1138 12y ago
  2.7 KG? doesn't seem like a cartel operation to me. I think it's more likely that some Texan decided to cross the border and buy some in bulk.