Larry -- instead of arguing vague costs and such, can you put numbers on any of this?

You claim that a fleet of Cessnas is cheaper than the UAVs, by an
order of magnitude. What are you basing this on? I am curious how
you arrived at your conclusion. (I am acutally interested in how much
these UAVs really cost -- your "several million dollars" figure sounds
quite high to me. Is that just the cost of manufacturing for the
UAVs, or does it include millions of dollars in research amortized
over a small number of planes?)


Larry Dighera writes:
Regardless, the expensive high-tech equipment installed on the UAV is
not necessary to locate people illegally entering the US as is born
out by the current successful use of video camera equipped model
aircraft.

Why use model aircraft, when we have seen the successful use of
cowboys on horses? This argument holds no weight unless you can state:

a) what is the goal of the border patrol? How many people do they
wish to catch crossing to achieve this goal? (Note: if the answer is
100%, then they should build a wall.)

b) how effective are the model airplanes at achieving this goal?
Compared to the UAVs? Compared to border agents driving pickup
trucks?

According to ABP Director Glenn Spencer, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
has a top speed of 40 mph and is usually flown at an altitude of
200-400 feet agl. External fuel tanks mounted on the three-foot-long
fuselage give it a 90 minute endurance.

Okay. So if these model planes were autonomous, they could fly up to
30 miles from the launch point, and then fly straight back. Along
that path they could view, twice (on the trip out and back), a swath
of land roughly 400-800 feet wide.

To cover the entire border, you would have to station a launch point
every 60 miles along the border. Presumably these planes are not
autonomous, and so you need an R/C pilot every 60 miles. (Does there
exist a radio technology that can reliably transmit control signals to
an R/C plane over 30 miles in the presence of terrain? How is the
pilot going to control the plane when it is over the horizon? Is it
possible to get a good enough and fast enough video signal back to the
pilot for them to do that reliably from 30 miles away? Three foot
long planes are pretty twitchy, especially if you have any wind at
all.)

They are probably pretty light, so you can only fly them on not very
windy days. They are probably pretty noisy (based on my R/C
experience), so you will only catch the folks who don't hear them
coming and hide. Once they find someone, they can't follow them or
track their position for more then a few minutes before running out of
fuel and having to go home.

To be that small and still be able to carry a payload, they are
probably constructed using model airplane techniques: out of wood,
fiberglass, and monokote. How many cycles of use can they go through
before they have to be reconditioned or replaced? I suspect that the
answer is significantly less than 500 cycles.

Now, let's say you want 24x7 coverage on the border. Every 60 miles
you need to set up an R/C landing strip. You need 9 R/C pilots every
60 miles. Assuming the border is 889 miles long (a google search told
me this), that means you need 133 pilots, operating at least 15
planes. (2 pilots for each 8 hour shift -- one flying, the other
watching the camera. Assume they work a 5 day 40 hour work week.)
How much does that cost?

My math:
133 pilots, at $60k/year: $7,980,000/year
Planes -- assume 12 flights/day, 500 flight plane lifetime, $21,000/plane:
(8.75 new planes/year) * (15 aiports along border) * $21k = $2,756,250

So this program costs you just over $10million/year, ignoring the cost
of setting it up, buying land and housing for the airports and pilots,
administrative costs, or fuel costs.

How much did those UAVs cost? How much more (or less) capable are
they than the ten-million-dollar per year fleet of R/C planes?

(Or, do you think my math or the assumptions behind it are wrong? In
what way?)

And what do you get in the end? Every portion of the border has a
video camera passing over it 24 times a day, at known intervals, with
a lot of noise preceeding the camera's arrival, on clear and calm
days. Do you think this would be money well spent?

Chris
--
Chris Colohan Email: PGP: finger
Web: www.colohan.com Phone: (412)268-4751