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Consumer drones with the best range and battery life ($1000) get you about 15-30mins flight time and 1 mile of distance, commercial drones ($20,000+) driven by cellular LTE modem can fly for an hour on battery and for indefinite ranges if they have wings or are internal-combustion powered. Would be very hard to catch one class of drone with the other.
Another reason they aren't doing that is that flying a drone within city limits in a blue state is almost always illegal and if somebody did do that, they wouldn't want to admit to it. Pretty much the only way people get in trouble with drones is to break the law and post video footage online.
People have been shining lasers at commercial aircraft though, which is super-duper illegal, and while the sorts of weird libertarians(seriously, what is it with libertarians being such normal boring business savvy centrists recently? Bring back the schizoposting bigamist with YouTube videos on how to drill 1/8” holes with equipment convertible to a grow lab) who just blatantly violate regs like that are rare in urban blue states, there should be at least some in the largest metro area in the country.
Liking smaller government and being concerned about massive domestic surveillance operations should be considered normie Republican positions. Yet somehow that's not how the DC Republican establishment view them.
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I'm pretty sure airplanes at EWR (Newark) get lasered on a regular basis; occasionally they bust someone for doing it, but I think they usually prefer to keep it quiet to avoid copycats. It's much more a problem at takeoff and landing, when the plane is close and you can hit the windshield. There probably are people pointing handheld lasers at the "drones", but pointing a laser essentially at the bottom of an airliner 10,000+ feet up doesn't do a thing even if you aim perfectly. Wouldn't be surprised if they are hitting the occasional private pilot.
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My sub $1000 drone (DJI Mini 4 Pro) can fly for over half an hour with the default battery (keeping it under the 250g weight limit where other rules kick in) and around 45 minutes with the slightly heavier battery. It has a range of around 20-30 miles if you maintain line-of-sight.
It's actually rather remarkable how cheap some of this stuff has become.
I know the marketing material says 20-30 miles for the radio control link, but if you follow the FAA rules regarding altitude, your video connection will get you between 1-2 miles (with the Mavic 3). The furthest I've ever been with it is 2 miles away while at 400' altitude while standing on my roof, then when I turned it around to fly back, I lost signal and the drone had to use GPS-return-to home until it got back into range. Obviously you could have infinite range if you're flying at 2000' while standing on a mountaintop but I don't think that's very informative to people when they ask what kind of range your drone gets.
How far away have you actually seen the Mini 4 fly? If it's much more than 2 miles I'll go upgrade immediately. I only have a Mavic 3 and DJI-FPV (O3 video transmission protocol) and not a Mavic/Mini 4 (O4), but it seems unlikely that the new revision would be that much better.
The mini doesn't fly as far as the air or pro. My own tests in perfect environments get it about 2 miles easily, but RF interference degrades it significantly. Normally at around 0.5m
2.4ghz for the Mavic 3 gets you about 2 miles, 5.8ghz mode in a low-RF saturation environment can push up to 5, 10 with a patch antenna.
All of this ignores 4G/5G teleoperation kits that can be mounted onto even Mavic Pros now, which do exist and can be controlled via a sim card, or full autonomous drones. Range is definitely not the limiting factor for these drone sightings.
The boring answer for the drone sightings is likely mass hysteria and false attribution, since small aircraft are not noticed by people most of the time and when they are now being paid attention to they seem so different from the big liners that they cause confusion. Drone shutting down airports like what happened at Gatwick a few years ago started with dickheads flying a drone for that sweet shot, then general incompetence during the monitoring phase. A common problem is observation drones used by one agency without notifying other agencies, causing other agencies to scramble their own observation drones etc etc etc.
Most LEO have DJI aeroscopes in their inventories, which can track all DJI models up to 2022 that were in the air, and a fair few newer models using legacy firmware. By now someone would have figured if it was a rogue DJI drone in the air. If the flight lights can be seen its a low altitude drone. Its most likely some trolls fucking about and piling on for shits and giggles.
But its much better if its ayys looking for their dropped nuclear fuel. Lets hope the greys land and demand to see the manager here.
There is to this day no evidence there was any drone at Gatwick that did not belong to law enforcement.
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I'm told the DJIs are quite hackable; if you're flying out of visual range you're already breaking the regs, what's a few more? But I don't think altitude should be a big issue; even if you're at half the legal altitude, distance to horizon is 17 miles.
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I have the mini 2! Love it, best camera I own. But I can't fly it very high where I live due to FAA regulations. I've taken it to other places, like a beach in Florida--or even England-- and it soars. The "military" drones I saw in MD were easily 4-6X in size, painted drab colors and flying formation. They were also only about 3-4 stories up so very easy to see. Not sure this is what people are seeing in NJ though. As I said in a different comment, I live around all kinds of National military crap, so you just sort of get used to seeing weird stuff. (This is also where Mothman, Snallygaster, Jersey Devil and the Blair Witch originate, so maybe just a crazy place).
The Blair Witch Project was set in Western Maryland and filmed in Montgomery County, Maryland. New Jersey had nothing to do with it.
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