Draganfly to launch long-range drones for border patrol
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
Drones produced by Canadian UAS manufacturer Draganfly could soon be performing long-range missions to find and track the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants across the U.S./Mexico border under an agreement with the Sheriff’s Department of Cochise County Arizona.
Under a pilot program, the sheriff’s department will deploy Draganfly drones for extended border surveillance, quick-response missions and nighttime operations.
“Cochise County is a very exciting project,” Draganfly CEO Cameron Chell said in an interview with DroneLife. He called the county, “arguably the leading border county as it relates to southern border management and said both President Trump and Vice President Vance recently visited the area to inspect the border-control technology that county officials have implemented.
“They built their own off-grid network, AI (artificial intelligence) camouflage camera network that identifies everything from migration to human trafficking to fentanyl crossing the border,” Chell said.
County officials wanted to take their border security to the next level, by putting “eyes in the sky” with drones capable of traveling long distances, staying aloft for long periods of time and even delivering food, medicines and supplies t officers on the ground as well as migrants and human trafficking victims in desperate need. “They wanted a platform that could do both surveillance and interdiction.”
Chell said Draganfly plans to unveil the UAVs to be used in the county, which are variations on the company’s existing six-rotor heavy-lift drone models, at a special event on November 16.
“The version that’s being unveiled on November 16 is that same unit except it has one of two variants. It can either have a 110-cc engine on it that can burn any combustible fuel, anything from jet A to diesel, or it can also come with a variant of two 70-cc engines,” he said. “It’s a hybrid so that fuel and those combustion engines then charge the batteries and give it up to seven hours of flight time.”
The vehicles will have a nine-foot wingspan and a payload capacity of up to 100 pounds. The drones’ extended flight time and large payload capacity will make them the ideal vehicle to tackle the challenges encountered by law enforcement officers operating in the harsh, arid conditions along Arizona’s border with Mexico, he said.
Cochise County Sheriff’s Capt. Tim Williams said his department currently flies a fleet of about a dozen drones for use in border patrol operations as well as crime scene analysis, traffic accident reconstruction, and search and rescue. He added that the department wanted to expand its capabilities for using drones to patrol the vast border region.
“We have a mixture of DJI’s Mavics, and then we also have a few of the BRINC-style drones,” he said. However, he said the limited battery life of the department’s current fleet of UAVs makes them ill-suited for the kind of border operations the county would like to tackle.
“Our current drones only have about a 30-minute window that the operate in,” he said. “One of the huge roadblocks that we always run into is that our batteries are always dying.”
Williams said the new Draganfly drones will likely help bolster the sheriff’s department ability to cooperate with federal law enforcement agencies such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection, as it assists those agencies in patrolling the border area.
“We work with Border Patrol almost daily,” he said. “We support each other if we have different cases and different actionable events.”
Enhanced surveillance, interdiction capabilities offered
Chell said the new drones’ extended flight capability gives them the ability to travel to the site of a suspected breach along the border, remain aloft over the scene for an extended period of time and even assist in the apprehension of illegal migrants or drug smugglers crossing the border.
“Most drones could maybe get to the location, but if a drone takes 10 minutes or so to respond to a location, that means it takes 20 minutes to get there and back. And your battery life’s done in about 20 minutes,” he said. The new UAVs however, can fly to a suspecting border crossing site and stay on station, surveilling the area for several hours until it spots human activity.
“And because it is a nine-foot drone, this thing can get down in somebody’s face and hold them in place,” Chell said. “Now they may run for about three minutes and then they’re exhausted and tired in the heat or the cold or the altitude. And they just sit down and wait for the authorities to show up because they can’t get away with it.”
All the while that it’s in operation the drone is streaming surveillance data, giving immediate eyes on the scene to multiple federal, county and local law enforcement agencies. “So, now you’ve got not just the sheriffs, but you’ve got local police, you’ve got Border Patrol. You may even have DOD (Department of Defense) having access to the camera feeds and to the AI system.
In addition to being used in surveillance and interdiction operations, the drones also are capable of accomplishing personnel support operations as well as search and rescue missions.
“Because it’s got a 100-pound payload capacity and it’s got ample power supply, you can use it as a communications mesh-network link. So, if you’ve got officers that are in tough communication slots, you now can use this as a repeater,” Chell said.
“And if you’ve got officers that need close support or they have to end up spending time overnight you’ve got the ability to get them equipment and the ability to get them supplies,” he said.
“If you’ve got a search and rescue situation, which is quite often the case especially when there’s human trafficking, you’ve got people who are dehydrated or they are in immediate need of medical assistance, you can fly in medical supplies to them whether that’s EpiPens, AEDs, (Automated External Defibrillators), water, blankets, first aid kits or food.”
Chell said he does not know how many of the new drones the county will end up acquiring, saying that final decision likely will depend on the final testing of the vehicles. He said the sheriff’s department will get at least two drones.
“But my expectation is that somebody like Cochise County, ultimately, they’ll probably start with four,” he said.
Draganfly will debut the new UAVs to the public at the Cochise County Drone Summit to be held November 16-17 at two locations, the Cochise County border office and a remote field location, where observers will view live drone operations and tactical demonstrations.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
