I'm quite interested how the ground control station for that is set up, or if it's flying autonomously and in radio silence. If you're illicitly controlling a drone, presumably you don't want to be standing around holding a great big radio transmitter like a Vegas searchlight pinpointing your location. And you also don't want the drone to be broadcasting either since modern planes are bristling with electronic warfare sensors.
There's nothing said about what they found on the impact site. The drone leftovers could be telling, at least to find where it came from and who it could belong to?
I remember an old illustration in a French newspaper, to explain how a military B747 mounted missile interception system would work. For the B747 they reused the last clipart they had around which if you looked closely was a TWA B747. An unfortunate choice as that was shortly after the TWA Flight 800 crash, which was long rumoured to have been shot down by a rogue missile.
News reporters are known for their extreme accuracy and precision, and their in-depth knowledge of subject matter. Maybe the MIC is still trying to convince US taxpayers to throw more countless trillions at nonfunctional pork projects for the benefit of Lockheed-Martin and uncountable layers of subcontractors? You know the A-10 just isn't whiz-bang enough for CAS roles because it can't run 13 nested levels of hypervisors and K8s.
Nation states, human/narco traffickers, or criminal-acting crazy people. 0.001% it was a stupid amateur. Either way, the source wasn't good. The prescription isn't more regulation but better defenses and integration of on-the-ground civ&mil police work.
The article is misleading or misinformed. There are numerous cheap consumer drones that can go miles high. The hardware is more than capable of it - it's just the firmware that's crippled, but it can be modded. You can also just make them quite easily. Here's [1] a video of a guy with a homemade drone that hit a height > 40k feet, along with links to buy the exact parts. It's almost certainly just people trolling, because it's somewhat predictably turning into the Great Balloon War of 2023, part 2.
Would a nation state be brazen enough to risk a state of war with the US over this?
But on the other hand, if an adversary was brazen enough to try that, would the US admit it and therefore effectively admit it has something close to zero control over its own airspace when it comes to drones? Maybe that's what this theoretical adversary is banking on.
It’s trivial to build your own with some basic soldering skills. I’m curious to see how this shakes down over the coming decades.
I built some non-compliant (also non-autonomous) 450g drones before the 250g weight limit. They’re only for acrobatics at treetop level or below. It’s kind of silly IMO that this style is required to have a transponder now. This is speaking as someone who flies planes.
For the store bought ones that require no forethought - I am glad those are regulated.
