alt Hacker NewsThat's such am inefficient, hands-on, loud and dumb way to smuggle drugs across a border this large, this cannot be true. Unless you they are talking about submarines and land RCs, in that case sure, probably.
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Why do you say that? Fixed wing RCs can fly fast and have long range. Anyone can buy radios for them that transmit for many kilometers. There are open source autopilot projects. Drugs like Fentanyl are so potent that each dose is less than a milligram.
It’s not far fetched at all.
> loud and dumb way
Sounds like the perfect distraction!
Quadrotors are loud, but fixed-wing drones are quieter, more efficient, and have much longer range.
Check what is happening in Ukraine. The war moved a field of moderately cheap and moderately powerful drones forward.
We don't understand the consequences yet... Ukraine is actively working on hunter drones that could operate on 10 km altitude to shot down enemy targets. Now, imagine that cartel, terrorists put their hands on such technology, endangering whole civilian air transport.
The statements can also be parsed as "we have thousands of detections of an unknown number of drones that are being used by cartels to surveil the border in order to smuggle".
The number of drones vs. the number of detections is ambiguous. How detections are counted is ambiguous. Whether drones are physically moving drugs or part of an intelligence network is ambiguous.
It would seem entirely unsurprising that cartels are monitoring border enforcement by drone. That's not great, obviously. But different from "thousands of drones are carrying contraband into the US".