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Comment by cedivad | Hacker News Reader

6-foot wide drones are very expensive and there aren't that many people that can afford risking 50-100k in one go for whatever this is, so I'm guessing it's the military, which would be long overdue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/us/drones-FAA-colorado-ne...

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I know people who build ardupilot based wing systems that have 2 meter wingspans, and flight endurance times in the 1:45 to 2:30 range, all up cost under $4000 per craft. Using fairly normal NCR18650GA batteries and pixhawk cube black flight controllers.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mfd+believer+1960&oq=mfd+bel...

You are right, I thought this was quadcopters not fixed wing. I also built ~3 meter wingspan "drones" in the past for less than $2000/100km range, fun times.

My guess is that these are hobbyists having fun. This is my guess because I've had similar ambitions and done similar research. There's a lot of software for DIYers to make a fixed wing gas/nitro powered plane autonomous. There's ethical dilemmas surrounding this (endangering existing air traffic) but inexpensive long ranged drones are quite valuable for the drug smuggling industry and could make the operators a lot of money. And these people probably don't care much about the safety hazard.

Why would such illicit operators have running lights on?

Why not? You can't shoot them out of the sky or realistically recover them in any way unless you're the one controlling them. I doubt they're drug running in the middle of Colorado. I would run lights on my theoretical illegal drone to help lower the risk of other aircraft hitting it if I was just doing it as a hobby

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