<story><title>Drone carrying drugs crashes near US-Mexico border</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-30931367</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>aresant</author><text>This reminds me of a VICE program around Columbian Narco Submarines (1)&lt;p&gt;The show highlights, at one point, a guy who engineered an incredible drug &amp;quot;torpedo&amp;quot; that could be towed behind a fast boat, cut and dropped instantly if trouble arose, and recovered via digital homing beacons safe and sound at a later time.&lt;p&gt;I was struck by how proud he was of it, from a purely technical perspective.&lt;p&gt;And it was a damn smart solution to a problem, albeit one that was unfortunately illegal.&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vice.com/video/colombian-narcosubs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.vice.com&amp;#x2F;video&amp;#x2F;colombian-narcosubs&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Drone carrying drugs crashes near US-Mexico border</title><url>http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-30931367</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This has been discussed before and is a favorite of some of the robotics communities. This particular drone seemed to be a bit overloaded (2.7kg?) and I&amp;#x27;m guessing the person who launched it hadn&amp;#x27;t made the connection between flight time and weight. But still it seems a pretty straight forward way to get drugs from point A to point B.&lt;p&gt;That said, 2.7kg of crystal meth might be worth $270,000 [1]. So the cost of the drone is insignificant to the &amp;#x27;value&amp;#x27; of the meth it was carrying. Sending 1kg chunks over on $10,000 drones would still net a decent profit. And $10,000 is a pretty nice drone.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/faqs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pbs.org&amp;#x2F;wgbh&amp;#x2F;pages&amp;#x2F;frontline&amp;#x2F;meth&amp;#x2F;faqs&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>