Drug Courier Drones
 

Long before Amazon perfects their courier drones, the drug cartels will be sending stuff over borders and onto shores from boats .

Because the way they are doing it now is so inefficient?

Well as far as human mules , yea.
they cant really be tracked to where they came from, very easy to get over the south border to a few-5 miles right now, range will probably be increased very rapidly.
Just recharge and send back-or it would be just like old WWII c47's in the 70's - left abandoned in texas fields.

Gas powered R.C. planes have existed for years -- I'm surprised this didn't happen 20-25 years ago.

It's all about payload capacity.

I'd imagine that capacity per unit cost would be more critical.

people are much cheaper than drones

They have already been using ultralight aircraft

The drone idea is pretty clever. If the police somehow seize the drone, the drug dealers are behind the fence in Mexico and probably face little chance of being nabbed. People tend to snitch if there's enough heat.

I wonder how much a drone could carry and how far and how accurately? I'm talking about the ones which are supposed to be delivering books and other merchandise. If they could whiz around with 10 pounds and make a 5 mile or 10 mile round trip, that seems fool proof to some degree.

If police were smart, they'd track the drone (perhaps with another smaller drone :) ) and pick up the people on the receiving end as well as impounding the cargo.

We ought to look at this from a military point of view....Mr. President, we must not allow a Drone Gap. !!!:D

Mineshaft gap - Dr. Strangelove - YouTube

LOL! One of my favorite flicks, still hilarious 49 years later!

We already have an intellectual gap in our govt, what's another gap?

I wonder what the FAA will have to say about these gizmo's? Saturday morning I had to dodge two Cessna's and a buzzard. I hate to think about sharing the sky with all these little buzzard size robots with pilots safely on the ground with no worry about hitting manned aircraft.

Indeed. And predator drones to send a missile back where it originated.

- Peter.