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by oxymoran
1848 days ago
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How is a “rich idiot” smart enough to build a cutting edge drone but dumb enough to accidentally fly it over an Air Force base? It doesn’t make any sense. 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. |
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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.