If a drone can climb to the top of Mt. Everest why can’t a drone become the ultimate assassin?

by philg

The always-interesting folks at DJI have climbed Mt. Everest with a 1 kg. drone:

(There is at least one cut so I think that there might have been a battery change at some point.)

Watching this video it seems clear that the drone was being operated from quite some distance away. If that’s the case, I don’t understand how political and military leaders can be safe going forward unless they want to live in tunnels. What stops an enemy, internal or external, from flying a lethal version of the DJI Mavic 3 a similar distance until a target is identified, e.g., while giving a speech outdoors or walking from a car into a building? If this technology had been available in 1961, for example, Cuba could have sent small drones to kill U.S. President John F. Kennedy after he sponsored the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Or maybe just the threat of Cuba’s drones, had they existed in 1961, would have caused JFK to refrain from sponsoring the Bay of Pigs Invasion. (I guess if we’re going to send DJI technology back in a time machine we’d have to consider the likelihood that the U.S. would have killed Fidel Castro with a drone before Bay of Pigs Invasion was planned.)

Will killer drones make high-profile political and military leadership jobs less desirable? If there were no fear of getting caught, for example, more than half of the Democrats I know in Massachusetts would launch one at Donald Trump. So if the technology were widely available, there is no way that Trump could be safe without living like Adolf Hitler in the spring of 1945. (I talked to some Democrats in Illinois after Oshkosh last month and they too expressed sadness that Trump hadn’t been killed by Thomas Matthew Crooks, the outsmarter of the Secret Service.) JD Vance has already been demonized by the corporate media as a “Project 2025” subversive and a threat to abortion care for baby. Mightn’t the two of them decide to retire to a golf course if Massachusetts and Illinois Democrats had a practical means of acting on their desires?

Posted in War

18 thoughts on “If a drone can climb to the top of Mt. Everest why can’t a drone become the ultimate assassin?”

  1. You also see things like drones dropping mortar rounds down on Russians in Ukraine. But, I’m assuming there are countermeasures.
    I’m pretty sure that if you try to fly a DJI drone into the most sensitive of areas or near the best-protected people, something happens. Either the wifi gets jammed or the drone stops complying. You can already read about things like built-in geofencing (I’m guessing there are backdoors into the control systems, too) At the present time, the hardware can definitely do it, but can a regular person write the software to do it?
    There are also external countermeasures you can sometimes read about. Everything from hawks to net drones. I’m guessing the secret service might be taking up trap shooting, as well. I can only imagine that pretty soon there will be autonomous drones designed to collide with and disable unauthorized drones along with portable radar sets to run them. There will probably be a lively arms race for this sort of thing.
    It would be smart if most of these countermeasures were at least somewhat secret, at least for the time being.

    • Ukrainians have adapted commercial-type drones with additional sensors and software so that they can effectively hit a target despite being jammed. No doubt they are not uniquely capable, rather the visible face of your “arms race”. Also, an assassination drone might be made very small, like a miniature pistol, or as imagined in the movie Eye in the Sky.

  3. It was a combination of many shorter flights from the different base camps. The range is pretty useless. Can’t imagine climbing all the way to within range of the summit, only to fly a quad copter over it instead of climb it in person. At least we can thank falling quad copter prices for basically all of our rising home equity.

  4. That video was a bit disappointing. Great footage until near the summit. It got to the Hillary Step, and poof! It just ended with a wide shot.

  5. Question: I’m not aviation expert as I gather many others here are. Isn’t this also a huge risk for commercial airliners, which I think(?) cruise at the same altitude this drone can reach?

  6. Military drones have been a thing for a while, 10+ years. They were a game-changer in Iraq.

    Someone in Colorado with a large screen and a joystick could fly a drone around Iraq, quietly lurking for long periods of time, following a car for miles, recording clear video the entire time, then kill them with a hellfire missile when the time was right.

    And yes, I’m sure it drove paranoia among bad guys on the ground.

    https://www.airforce.com/careers/aviation-and-flight/remotely-piloted-aircraft-pilot

    • Aerial drones came of age during Israel’s 1982 war against Syria and Yasser Arafat forces in Lebanon. According to one account, a variant of this drone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadiran_Mastiff, which first flew in 1973, shutdown Syrian MiG 21 using short range air to air missile. Other similar drones were used to break Syrian/Soviet air defenses in Bekaa Valley.
      I believe first drones were used by US during Vietnam War, but they were basically fighters without a pilot and with rudimentary remote controls and without appropriate software and were not considered useful. Similar American drones were used by Israel too, but without much success as well.
      First what was considered modern drones in US arsenal were Israeli drones. Until relatively recently, Israel was main suppliers of military drones to European NATO countries.
      US still orders modern versions of medium range drones from Israeli suppliers.

    • David and Anonymous: Military drones are powerful, of course, but they are so expensive and bulky that I don’t think they create a new and different world compared to manned fighter jets, for example.

    • Official cited price of a long range drone includes control station and several, usually 3 drones, as well as support package, and it comes to about 1/3 to 1/4 of a modern jet fighter price ticket.
      Those drones can stay in the air for about 48 hours and provide natural reduced radar signature and smaller heat and noise signature.
      Here are military drones that cost less then used minivan that US bought from Israel https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2022/10/17/xtend-signs-9m-drone-deal-with-pentagons-irregular-warfare-office/. It would be very hard to beat their military utility value per buck. There are much cheaper drones that can fly inside house.

  7. It would be impossible for a drone to get near the president because of a TFR that follows the president around. The TFR excludes both aircraft and drones.

  8. There were at least a dozen “cuts” In the form of crossfades.

    I was hoping it would reach the Hillary Step and then it would seem to struggle and huff and puff and finally surmount it, collapsing in the snow. Then it would rise again and make it to the top where it would circle around for a few laps showing a 360 and a down shot of the summit.

    I think there must have been some sort of mechanical problem, given how lame the ending was.

Comments are closed.