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.
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.
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/
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.
I was talking to a customs officer in Australia who said that some drugs were just dumped overboard and collected from the shore. Even with a loss rate of ~90% from customs intervention and/or not making it to the beach, he said it was still profitable enough that they kept on doing it.
One of the common tactics for smuggling by boat is to keep it in garbage bags. You weight the drug bags, and carry ordinary garbage on board. If you get stopped, you throw all the bags. The coast guard only find you dumping garbage and the most they can do is slap you with a fine.
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.
That's old school. I remember hearing that similar was done already during prohibition where they used some sort of glue in torpedo which would release a small buoy after few days so the lost booze could be found.
Various sorts of commercial fishermen use these to keep the buoys of their traps submerged until pickup time. This prevents both accidental loss from fouling boats and poaching.
You can get them in grades from 1 to 30 days, though temperature also gets to play a role.
I think it's also worth mentioning the half-mile long drug tunnel discovered in 2010 – a full rail system was built about 70 ft under the surface that carted drugs from Tijuana to San Diego.
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'm trying to figure out the range of something like this. This is Hans Litjens' jet, he talks a bit more about it here[1], noting that it has 2L of fuel in the wings.
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.
Why do you figure it would use 2x the fuel of a 'normal' RC Jet engine? Edit - anyhow you're right on the consumption of this engine: 476 mL/minute. Still though, would be out of the feds' sight before they realize what's even going on. At night they'd never have a clue.
RC Jets are fast as hell; over 200 mph is very common for turbine powered RC planes.
> Why do you figure it would use 2x the fuel of a 'normal' RC Jet engine?
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.
I would guess that the range of such a device would be horribly short. The smaller the aircraft, the worse the range, in general, and the smaller a gas turbine, the worse its efficiency. Those should combine to give a truly awful range, but surprisingly somehow enough to be useful in this situation.
The US/Mexico border near Tijuana is pretty heavily populated on both sides, with the only real hurdle in points being the rather narrow Tijuana river. The agility of a drone would let it dart quickly enough over that you can get the goods over before someone noticed what was going on.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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]
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).
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.
Having flown many fixed wing and multi-rotors of sizes small to large fixed wing tends to require more skill to pilot and are harder to get autonomous landing right (a bad reading from the barometer on landing and you're toast) at least with the Pixhawk on a multi-rotor it'll stay hovering over the landing point until it is relatively certain that the GPS height and barometer readings match before landing. I've witnessed planes nosediving into the ground under the same conditions. Now indeed there are extra sensors that can help with this Lidar etc. but for a standard setup it's an issue.
Why land though? When you're talking this sort of money for the cargo, just drop the drugs and crash the thing, and write the airframe off as an expense.
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.
You wouldn't need much of a strip to land. A plane capable of carrying 6 pounds could land with a couple yards of short or medium length grass, and you could probably just dump it without doing damage beyond minor repairs.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
As someone who recently picked up the multi-copter hobby, I would say I want people to have to register/license these things. Previously I might have scoffed at the "flying lawnmower" meme, but it is absolutely the truth. Even the small 250mm mini sized quads are massively dangerous and the larger octocopters are downright scary. They move fast and 10" carbon fiber blades spinning at 8000rpm connected to a 5lbs drone could all but decapitate a human. One GPS glitch and the thing might go full speed toward your face, or a kid on a bike, or the neighbors dog / beamer / house. How much do you trust GPS and hobbyist open source flight control code? I trust it enough to fly around an empty park, but I'd never want it near my cat.
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.
My favorite battlebots story was from a teen who built a 'spinner' and early in their testing they lost a nut when the blade was in full spin. It left a hole in the siding of his garage as if someone had shot a bullet out of the house, 14" off the floor. Fortunately nobody was hurt. He did all future tests in a drained swimming pool.
I've been in the hobby for almost 2 years, and my impression is very nearly the opposite of yours. I think the danger of hobby-grade quads is almost universally overstated. They're dangerous, but not significantly more dangerous than kids playing baseball, and certainly nowhere near as dangerous as an automobile. I think your fears are unfounded.
Less dangerous than a car? Perhaps. Although I'd point out that we require licensure and insurance for cars, and the threat of life in prison if you injure anyone through neglect while operating a vehicle
Baseball? No. These are injuries from 450mm sized quads.[1][2][3]
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
Yes, spinning rotors can cut your skin if they make contact. That has to be weighed against the likelihood of spinning rotors and skin making contact. That likelihood is generally fairly low, but is much higher when a pilot deliberately flies straight at a person's head or throttles up the aircraft while holding it.
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 have multiple(big,expensive) drones. I program them too.
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.
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.
No doubt. And if you were really trying to be stealthy you would open up an "e-waste" store and use it to collect things which you could scavenge parts out of. (would make for some good fiction as well). Thinks like GPS units are hard to get in junk bags, but easy to pick up at a recycling store out of an old phone (assuming it isn't part of the SOC). But the point remains that all of those things have 'tendrils' and the mosaic effect is very real.
Most of what you need to build an autonomous air vehicle is already in your phone: https://code.google.com/p/andro-copter
What are you going to do, restrict brushless DC motors, LiPo batteries, carbon fiber tubing / ABS plastic, and small propellers (they still use wooden ones on some planes, which would also work on quads) ?
I think the big change has been in the autonomous navigation combined with the pre-assembled stuff that is really hard to crash unless you're trying. For a few grand now, you can get a more or less plug-and-play (or charge-and-fly) system capable of transporting a few pounds of cargo a dozen miles with a minimally trained operator and minimal assembly.
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.
GL tracing a drone built from part kits bought of deal extreme or Ebay.
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 can always build a multicopter with parts that are not specifically made for drones, so they cannot enforce this. And when you deal drugs, smuggling a drone is the easy part.
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.
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).
There's no need for carbon fiber, and besides, you can buy carbon fiber beams and poles that are used for much more than just RC aircraft. Any multirotor frame you can build with carbon fiber you could build with fiberglass, aluminum, or even wood and plastic without significant performance reduction that would be relevant to hauling drugs short distances.
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.
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.
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...
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?
Flying below radar half way round the world, the fuel requirements are going to be hideous and the wingspan massive.
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.
Yes. Although I would go with a high-altitude aircraft with low radar signature. A 1 kg payload is small, and other than the engine the thing could be mostly non-metallic.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Birdshot. Range would be an issue, but the higher up the target is the more margin of error you have.
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..
I'm imagining competing gangs fueling competition in this space; why bother paying to import your own drugs from across the border, when you can snag the competition's deliveries right from the sky?
Likely counter-measure will be more drones. It's easy to knock a drone out of the sky with another drone, especially if the counter-drone is disposable. Avoidance technology becomes complicated. It's relatively easy to program an autonomous drone for clear skies. Adding threat detection and avoidance is a lot harder.
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.
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.
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.
>and you don't have any explosive and/or metal shrapnel falling back down into populated areas.
... if and only if the laser completely obliterates the target, which requires a fair bit more power and precision than a disabling shot.
I was mainly speaking to the anti-aircraft weapon's addition shrapnel, rather than the drone itself. It's pretty hard to shoot down a drone without, ah, having the drone fall down. You can try some sort of hack, or radio blackout, but those are pretty easy to defeat.
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.
I think the most effective countermeasure is just good tracking ability. Drones are pretty conspicuous -- having one land in your backyard is like a giant billboard saying "DRUG DEAL IN PROGRESS, RIGHT HERE!"
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.
Wonder how many small-time dealers are already selling smaller quantities via FPV with a drone. Take the drugs off, attach the cash, fly back to the car a mile away...anonymous, no risk of confrontation, you know where you're delivering to if they fail to pay etc.
But would that fly legally? I'm skeptical about the idea of law enforcement agents destroying someone's property without even inspecting the cargo first, even in these times.
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.
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.
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.
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...?
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.
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.
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.
I think you overestimate the difficulty of setting up dead drop locations.
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.
I think you underestimate the consequences of getting caught!
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.
> 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.
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.
The aforementioned risk factor you mentioned earlier would make deliveries below a certain size uneconomical.
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.
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.
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.
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