> in what the officials said was the first attempt in the state to smuggle material into a prison with an unmanned aerial vehicle

Eh.. surely it's the first detected attempt?!

To be fair that's the article quoting "officials" and the article directly mentions other attempts a paragraph later.

There have been others, at least one last year. I don't know why they say this is the first.

In Oklahoma? They clearly say it is the first in the state.

i rarely watch sports but this strikes me as one of the obscure facts that cross the screen:

Oklahoma prison officials 1-0 against known smuggling attempts when they are playing at home versus incompetent criminal pilots.

Perhaps someone should fork this behavior and start dropping care packages for prisoners. Good chocolate. Textbooks, self help books, poetry and literature. Letters from family members. Comfortable underwear. Assistance for those soon to be released. A kind rebellion against the unblinking barbed wire.

I think there are legal ways of getting all of these inside the walls of a prison.

Which is prob just as fun and pleasant of an experience as delivery by drone.

If you do this, please pilot better than the crashes reported in the article.

Or you know... don't smuggle stuff into a prison...

Or don't lock people up away from their community for non violent crimes. So many options!

Unless I'm missing something important, it takes some special level of incompetence to fail like that. I have 1 hour and 10 minutes of total flight time of a quadcopter under my belt and could probably navigate better than that.

Which makes me wonder, given the other apparently trivial failures mentioned in the article, how many more drone drops are successful and go unnoticed?

It says the stuff was attached by fishing line. I imagine the pilot was trying to keep the drone as low as possible and misjudged the clearance of the fishing line from the top of the fence. Once it was caught, there's nothing you can really do.

The line it clipped could have been invisible on camera

Maybe that was on purpose. You know, someone pissed off someone, so no deliveries for ya...

It's only a matter of time before someone uses a bigger drone to get out.

I put my money on this guy: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/hoverboard-duru-1.3270569

Have you seen any of the drones able to lift a human? Absolutely no way that's sneaking around undetected unless the prison is uber incompetent.

Doesn't need to be undetected, just fast enough that the escapee doesn't get shot and slow enough that the escapee doesn't die from the G-forces. There's a lot of room between those two extremes. You'd have to install drone guns to protect against the escape drones, but are invulnerable to attacking drone guns. This could get ugly.

Shouldn't this be easy to defeat during the daytime by a guard who has experience shooting clay or ducks?

I know what all the other stuff would be useful for, but does anyone know why it was carrying super-glue? I find it hard to believe an inmate would huff that if they had access to anything else in that package.

This is just speculation on my part, but a glue such as cyanoacrylate would be extremely useful for attaching a handle to an improvised tool or weapon.

I guess it's lighter than duct-tape and concealable too. I know the hacksaw blades would be useless as anything but weapons, so it's probable that there's an inmate who's now stuck with a surplus of handles and no blades. Worse yet, he could also have a bunch of late drug orders.

In addition to the variety of suggestions so far:

You can mend things with it.

I dunno, but recently when buying some at the local Walmart, an alert went off and they carded me to see if I was over 18. The guy at the checkout didn't know why but he speculated sniffing of some kind.

In a pinch, you can use it as an alternative to stitches.

You can also sniff glue to get high, cheap drugs. Although it wouldn't have to be "super"-glue.

Sounds like trade goods. If you're escaping (hacksaw blades) why do you need drugs now (leaving soon)?

I assumed the hacksaw blades were also trade goods to be used for making weapons. I imagine if you were really determined to escape you may need more materials than that.