Police helicopter's 100mph chase with 'super sophisticated' drone near Tucson

Hmm. That’s good reasoning, thank you.

The SBX is perhaps the most sophisticated long-range radar the United States possesses, and testing has cast doubt on whether it can even reliably detect missiles, the application it was built for. It's pretty much still considered in testing and not an operational piece of equipment despite being 15 years old.

Long-range radar is a really hard problem, the working models are so expensive than the USAF and FAA struggle to afford to install them, and the military has a long history of being, uh, optimistic about the capabilities of their radar equipment when talking to the public. Saying they can detect a softball over the horizon and then failing to detect a widebody jet at seven yards is pretty much the history of the Missile Defense Agency in a nutshell.

For air space surveillance purposes, the FAA and USAF share their radar network, because neither can really afford to have their own. The radars are bespoke, mostly built by Raytheon, and replaced very infrequently (many are hitting 30 years old) due to the high cost. They struggle with detecting light aircraft and anything below 15k feet or so, which is why we need to use secondary radar for ATC purposes. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it), this is basically the only general airspace surveillance measure in the US short of getting a fighter in the air to use its targeting radar.

Yeah if it had like a turbine engine it should have been pretty obvious on the thermal camera unless it had some kind of countermeasure. The pilots seemed to think it had very low thermal emissions, but I do wonder if they were also just having a really hard time getting it within the sight of their thermal camera. I would personally tend to guess operator error (unable to keep the camera pointed at it due to its fast motion) over it having very low thermal emissions, because hiding the exhaust from something like a small jet engine is not at all easy.

Well raytheon isn't the only provider of psr systems, just in the US.

The economics of primary surveillance radars is strange. Reliable service (the war on nines), robust filtering of false alarm (even tough multi-sensor ATC trackers have made huge strides...) more and more requirements on the 'high speed + maneuvering' kinematics (replace mil psr radars in some missions) and in the 'slow or static small rcs' (drones mostly but also helps). Processing latency is getting squeezed to 'almost impossible with COTS HW' levels and regulatory requirements only increase like mad. But you're only selling & installing what, at most 100 a year? Good luck recouping any R&D.

The entry in such a market is hard too, as ATC operators are conservative as hell, and Chesterton's fence tends to be respected a bit religiously by customers.

> FPV systems don't require satellites, and you can put a basic one together for less than $1000

This is a strawman argument. While technically yes it is true that an FPV drone can be put together for $1,000. But such a drone would not have the characteristics described in the observations.

A drone with capabilities matching the observations could certainly NOT be put together for $1,000. In fact, it would rival the capabilities of American military drones like the MQ-1 and MQ-9 which cost $10M and $28M respectively. These collective observations are why the two trained and experience pilots, who understand flight mechanics and capabilities, are so dumbfounded by what they saw.

The assumption made by the pilot suggesting that it must be satellite controlled is actually a valid conclusion. The pilots followed this drone from TUS area all the way to 50 miles outside of town, up to an elevation of 14,000 ft. Not only did they cover that distance, but they crossed over a mountain range. They were outside of the airport's radio range which is only transmitting low fidelity audio from one of the tallest towers in the area at presumably a ton of power (electricity...wattage) behind the transmission.

So for a line of sight transmitter we would need a low latency, high fidelity transmission capable of those distances. This MIGHT be possible physically, but not practically. The pilot of the drone would certaintly require a massive tower with a ton of power more powerful than the airport has. They would need to be doing it at a higher frequency (which degrades even faster over distance). This type of transmission would HAVE to come from a tower and it would require FCC licensing to transmit on the power and/or frequency required to make this happen (if its even possible to begin with, which I doubt). I am not even addressing the absurd claim that this could be built for $1,000. It simply can't. Full stop. I am addressing the actual capabilities, even if money were no object. This type of thing (if it were possible, which I don't think it is), would require significant infrastructure. This isn't somebody with a FPV they built off a video they watched on YouTube.

So then we get to the conclusion... how do you communicate with something at these distances and elevations? Satellite. This isn't possible for line of sight. At the $1,000 pricepoint or any other pricepoint.

There are a lot of other claims, such as the fact that it was outmaneuvering the helicopters. It had no thermal profile. But it had the ability to outlast the helicopters in flight time. It also was able to fly up to 14,000 feet which is actually another impressive feat for a smaller aircraft. I suspect it was fixed wing in order to accomplish these elevations and endurance.

Really this type of drone doesn't sound like something a civilian would be capable of building, it sounds like it matches the capabilities of a military grade UAV. Since it was first discovered near the AirForce base, I wouldn't discount the fact that it was a military UAV on a training exercise that just decided to harmlessly fool around with the helicopters after it was discovered.

I think what they were chasing was an MQ-1 UAV (popularly known as "The Predator"). The military is mostly replacing these now with the newer MQ-9 (Reaper), so it is common for the military to send all the shiny new equipment overseas to fight in wars and the older ones come back to the states to be used as training equipment. The helicopter pilots estimated that the drone they followed was averaging 75-80 mph. This is actually a peculiar speed because it is faster than a quadcopter is capable of, but even an old high-wing Cessna would fly closer to 100mph. But surprise surprise the MQ-1 has a cruise speed of 80 mph. The MQ-1 can also climb to 25,000 ft. It is operated by aviation fuel (so it can fly for hours), but has a low thermal profile (to avoid Surface to Air missiles). It also switches between satellite transmission for general flight and line-of-sight transmission for take-off and landings.

That's just my theory, but I think they were chasing a $10M MQ-1 military UAV. Not a $1,000 FPV someone built off a Youtube video. Everything just seems to point to that. It matches the capabilities perfectly. I can't think of anything cheaper that could do what the helicopter pilots observed. The drone should have been flying with full aviation lighting since they were flying in American airspace, but maybe they had turned off those because they were simulating a night strike training mission.