To my memory; these things have been repeatedly popping up in the southern US; Arizona and Texas.

Maybe not for under $1k. But under any price? Is it physically possible? Yes.

We're not talking about a hobbyist guy in his garage here. We're talking about either US Military accidentally caught in a game of cat and mouse with local law enforcement, or more likely: drug cartels.

Both organizations operate heavily in the southwestern US, clandestinely without the need or desire to inform local law enforcement of their operations, and have practically unlimited budgets to accomplish their goals.

The real goal of a press release like this is to drum up a little FUD to take up to the governor and secure more funding, maybe even get your local precinct another helicopter, a cool drone, or a task force. And hell, maybe that's what they legitimately need here.

This was my conclusion too. This isn't a hobbyist. This isn't even a rogue professional drone pilot that flies drones for Hollywood movies or something.

This is a real UAV that is military grade.

It was either the actual military (it was first discovered just outside of an AirForce base) or a drug cartel that got their hands on a drone. Military Grade drones are pretty available at this point to any group with enough means (money). For example the Elbit Hermes 450[1] is a long-endurance tactical drone that has been sold to many countries outside of the big militaries. For example Georgia (the country), Azerbaijan, North Macedonia, The Philippines, Zambia, Botswana, Thailand, and even Mexico, Brazil, Columbia. Columbia bought a ton of drones from Elbit in the range of "tens of millions of dollars". The benefit of the Hermes 450 is the cost, it is supposed to cost only around $1M, which makes it very affordable for countries without massive military budgets like the US. I don't think it is a stretch that a drug cartel bought one ($1M is a small price to pay if it can save a single $10M drug run from being captured), or that they bought it from another country like Georgia or Columbia.

They are satellite controlled and have a 20 hours flight time, meaning it could have easily flown from a long ways away.

Oh and even the US Customs and Border Patrol own two of these same drones. Which I find also interesting.

These helicopter pilots were either chasing a drug cartel drone like this or a USAF drone. Because they first spotted it nearby the Air Force base, it seems to me that most likely it was actually an Air Force drone (most likly a MQ-1 Predator drone) that was conducting a training simulation near the base when it was discovered by the helo pilots. Then it just proceeded to play around with them. The one pilot talked about how it would fly in front of the helicopter and then maneuver to get behind it and follow it, staying in the helicopter's shadow. That sounds like a military move. I bet this whole thing started off as a training mission and then went off course and they decided to train on the helicopter pilots. They even said that the average speed of the drone was an estimated 70 knots. Well the MQ-1 UAV has a cruising speed of... surprise, surprise... 70 knots!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbit_Hermes_450

Agree with your analysis here. I don’t think this could be military otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing a press release and release of audio under freedom of information. If this was under serious investigation doubt we wouldn’t of seen the audio released as well. My bet would be the helicopter pilots got overexcited and the FAA is comfortable this is just advanced hobbyist equipment.

Unlikely, but they probably could for under $10k. The expensive part is the long-distance high-bandwidth radio system. The aircraft itself is trivially easy, assuming it's a liquid-fueled fixed-wing craft.

You'll notice I used the word "basic" above to imply a starter or hobbyist capability.

I would think that most people with $10k+ of drone up there, aren't risking it physically or legally by playing with helicopters?

Someone playing with tech that someone else is paying for though?

Don't underestimate the scale of wealth, $10k for a few moments of joy/adrenaline is far from unheard of for those with the means. If you have others, or can reproduce that piece of equipment with mere currency and you're sitting on a mountain of it.. why not?

I don't underestimate it, but if I wanted to play around with an expensive drone I could afford to lose, it would be during the day when I could see what I was doing or in a more interesting place. Dangerously flying a large/experimental drone near an air force base goes from "lose my $10k drone" to incurring the wrath of serious entities. Take down a chopper and if it's traced back to you, you're in some sort of trouble.

I just don't think private drone is the angle here. More likely to be an experimental agency thing, and someone flying a work gadget they haven't personally paid for, IMO.

> Dangerously flying a large/experimental drone near an air force base goes from "lose my $10k drone" to incurring the wrath of serious entities.

Messing with the armed forces or police seemed to be part of growing up as a teenage boy for some of my friends. (I was tempted to write rite of passage here but that would imply that it happened once for each.)

Of course they like me wasn't too well of so it was all about illegal fireworks, sneaking, swimming or canoeing into military or naval bases etc.

No doubt in my mind they could have tried something similar to this if they were young today and had the tech skills and money for it.

I know you're responding to the single point as a conversational thing, but it gives a collective theory of: teenagers mucking around, who have enough money that throwing away a $10k+ experimental drone is no issue, and they just happen to live near an air force base where there are definitely no actual experimental drones being tested. My issue then with that is that the modern teenager typically films things for credibility, and this sort of stunt isn't going to be very satisfying at night. (I fly drones. Flying at night, I try to get the footage I'm paid for and then land.)

IMO, either the story as reported has been exaggerated in many dimensions (altitude above the chopper, size of drone, time in the air, distance before landing) or it's something from the air force base that's not commercially available.

Thanks, both for your insight and the way you presented it :-)

And yes, you are right that I'm only talking about young people playing games with police/military and I don't have any idea if this is feasible or not.

But it could be a demo flight to prove to cartels this drone tech is above the law. "Look, we flew circles around a police bird and casually strolled into military airspace, imagine what we could do if we tried".

Flying a work gadget sounds way more likely a way to get yourself caught. And lose your job. No, I'd rather risk a $10k toy than risk getting fired.

All kinds of exciting things can get people into serious trouble but they still do it. For example, drifting and street racing expensive cars at night. Some even taunt the police. Here's a good series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clf-KhniImw

In my mind flying a remote controlled drone over an air base seems way less risky than hitting the streets in a car.

Yes, the cartel is very concerned about following laws and wouldn’t want to risk anything like upsetting the police to test a thing that might be specifically designed to avoid them.

Not sure the cartel would be testing in the US with a drone that has its lights on and is capable of novel flight movements, and hang around circling police helicopters, rather than just pick a place away from an airforce base and prioritise carrying a load without notice. I could see speed being an advantage, but not aerobatics.

What fixed wing craft can hover 1000' directly above the rotors of the helos? Don't fixed wing aircraft need to be constantly moving to stay in the air?

Small ones usually have sufficiently strong motors to do things that the bigger ones can't.

FPV just means that the drone has a camera with a first person view and doesn't rely on the user being able to see the drone to fly it.

Yes, it can be easily done for under $1k. This is not $1k for the drone, just for making whatever drone FPV capable, if that's what you were misunderstanding.

If you build a basic quadcopter yourself you can even include everything for $1000. This would buy you a fun hobbyist FPV rig, although it wouldn't have the range, speed, or endurance of the drone in the article. For that you'd have to pay more, but even then we're talking "serious hobbyist" money, not "nation-state" money.

Maybe some nation states are buying closeup footage of military bases and a whole market has sprung up, including local pros to service that demand.

Probably not but that's not what the post above you said. Do you think it's reasonable to say this drone was controlled by a -satellite-?