I did not originate the following quote, but I have used it with some frequency over the years in various forms. My current favorite version of it is:
The internet spreads stupidity at (roughly) the speed of electricity.

I ought to buy whomever coined this a beer some day.

Don‘t want to be standing down range after all this shooting into the sky:ouch:

Perhaps we should start a Poll.....listing the many options of what the truth re the source and real explanation of all of this and see who comes closet to being right.

You do not have to corroborate your entry and mere uninformed opinion is allowable.....which judging by the existing posts shall be nothing new.



My offering is John Kirby is a two faced lying weasel and the government is the Operator. What they are up to is a test of some kind as part of developing detection and defensive measures.

I know I am on very solid ground re Kirby's credibility and devotion to the truth.

A few years back a mate built one of these, put lights on it and flew it around the local village after dark..
It's still talked about now... :E

Things that make you go hmmm...
Those drones mysteriously flying across I-70 around Colorado were believed by some to be looking for radioactive material that came up missing in the US.
Perhaps the NJ drones are nuclear sniffers.
Then again, note that the mass hysteria surrounding the drone sightings appears to have been exaggerated by the MSM (Covid-style) to astronomical levels and it could just be a deliberate attempt at creating a drone scare in order to push through H.R.8610, the Counter-UAS Authority Security, Safety, and Reauthorization Act of 2024.

They wouldn't send up drones sniffing in the world's busiest airspace without any NOTAMs or TFRs. The risk of a mid air between a drone and a helicopter would be way too high. Also, that's what NEST is for. They operate AW139s with all that sort of equipment. HeliOps has a story about them in their latest issue.
I fly in NY/NJ at night with passengers multiple times a week and have seen zero drones. Same goes for my colleagues. It's all MSM hype and the push for a Counter UAS act sounds very credible.

Schumer is pushing to get a specific manufacturer product as well as his own anti-drone legislation. Robin Radar is held by Parcom, a private equity firm. Follow the money.

I am sure that Schumer is not alone in this. There must be others interested in turning what appears to be a combination of a hoax and gullible fools into a payday.

Meanwhile, not one tiny mention of Remote ID or hobby drone registration that was forced down the throats of the hobbyists. Why is that not working? Wasn't it explicitly for just such an purpose - to let people know who was operating drones? The FAA, at the behest of Congress, has gone after hobbyists for posting their drone-based videos of vacation spots because they didn't have a commercial license, on the grounds the YouTube sells advertising; even though the hobbyist gets zip from that sale.

Now off to the time when the anti-BLOS (beyond line of sight) rules that are applied to individuals are excepted to allow Amazon, et al, to fly their delivery drones, buzzing low over neighborhoods by the thousands. How much easier it will be if all hobby drones are made illegal to own or sell.

From the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyvnnj8g34o

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....314e04ae5.jpeg

YouTube has a live NJ beach camera with ATC feeds. Nice ocean view

If one has a camera with a decent clear aperture, like f2.8 and a good size, then try cutting out a UFO shape from an opaque material and putting that over the lens. Any point lights that are out of focus will take on that shape. Note that many of the videos include glowing spheres - because the opening of the cell phone camera lens is a circle and the point source is out of focus. For example:

Maybe they’re government drones, spreading Chemtrails……… :E​​​​​​​

“There’s no question that people are seeing drones,” Mayorkas told ABC News’ “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos on Sunday morning. “I want to assure the American public that we in the federal government have deployed additional resources, personnel, technology to assist the New Jersey State Police in addressing the drone sightings.”

Got any potassium iodide pills? ;-)

The 2 NEST helicopters are primarily used for target monitoring/protection for large-scale NSSEs like the Super Bowl, etc. When an area search is needed, protracted monitoring, or for high exposure/risk (God forbid), drones cover greater area far more efficiently than a helicopter. It is also hard to hide helicopter/KA350ER aircraft from the public for sensitive and covert operations-imagine the panic if the public learned of a large-scale nuclear radiation detection operation. NOTAMs? Seriously.

Drone Detection System Deployed in New York
 

US officials are sending a drone detection system to New York, Governor Kathy Hochul says, after questions over mysterious objects in the skies over the east coast and beyond grew in recent days.

Hochul requested the federal assistance after drone sightings forced runways at Stewart International Airport in the state to shut for an hour last week.

"In response to my calls for additional resources, our federal partners are sending a drone detection system to New York," Hochul wrote on X on Sunday.

I believe Abraham Lincoln was the first to say this.

Now Wright-Patterson for four hours. Millions of people and no one following the drones to their landing locations nor reporting the drones evaded them.

Of course the legislators want to add more laws regulating the drones they cannot find to stop them from doing what is already illegal.

How about let the military and the police work on solving the drone problem and the legislators can work on solving price gouging and healthcare issues?

JOKE
The situation is getting worse.
I am seeing car sized objects on the street passing within 150 feet of my house at night! They move at various speeds and directions, sometimes in groups.
They have lights on them. Bright white ones on the front and ominous red ones at rear, sometimes some of these lights flash when these objects go around corners! What can this mean?
I have no idea who is in control of them.
What are their intentions, where are they coming from? Are they gathering intelligence and if so for who?
I feel I have the right to know everything about any object approaching my domicile!
I am running out of the vital tinfoil needed to make hats.
I demand an investigation and explanation!
JOKE OVER.

A helicopter flying in the daytime would be a lot less suspicious than the mysteriously blinking drones flying at night, don't you think?! 99% of the sightings people have been reporting are either commercial airliners, helicopters or Venus/Jupiter. There has not been a single confirmed drone sighting by any aviation professional. Highly unlikely in an airspace as busy as NY.

We have multiple UAS NOTAMs here in NY/NJ since they do a lot of survey in the daytime for various things. Just pull up NOTAMs for either EWR or TEB and you'll see plenty FAA NOTAM search. They've been around for the last few years and move occasionally. Funny enough those areas where they actually do operate drones people don't seem to notice because no sightings have been in those areas.

Well....this incident adds some interesting news re these drone sightings over the Army Arsenal.

Make of the content of the article as you wish....and add it to the list of reported sightings but this time with some useful information if true and accurate.

A host of explanations can be offered for the one drone losing power but which one is accurate?

https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-jerse...d-drone-report

Fox news, seriously? The headline alone is pure trash and then having a picture of a Guimbal Cabri G2 posted... come on! This is journalism at its finest.
The drone signal jamming is something that was installed at LGA a few months ago as well. For a brief time they had issues with the signal interfering with one of their tower frequencies.

ROFLMAO…
That mysterious drone in the Fox shot sure resembles an Airbus/Eurocopter HS 130 or another of the company’s product does it not? Right down to the skid gear and the fenestron tail rotor.
Photos credits Fox and Utube.
I am very surprised that with all the police and news gathering helicopters swooping around in the US no reporter immediately identified it.
But they have to keep the story going…ratings you understand. Cue anchor with a concerned expression, brain dead talking head reporter, outraged politician and confused citizens with lasers to hand ready to defend the country from the drone hoards.
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....789a3ae67.jpeg
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....2f7a1e943.jpeg

It's a Guimbal Cabri G2. There is a flight school down in Medford, NJ that operates them. They operate out of a small airport just a few miles southwest of where this picture of a night flight was taken.

Could well be a Cabri but the skid gear sure makes it look like an HS 130 to me.
However I think we can all agree it is not a drone.

100% a Cabri. I’ve instructed in it for close to 1000 hours. Easy giveaway is the position light. Airbus puts theirs on the horizontal stab vs Guimbal puts it up front on the fuselage.

And our great news correspondents/journalists are now lapping it up, a quote in the latest BBC update is just classic. A New Jersey police officer has been quoted as saying: She saw 50 drones “the size of cars” flying in abnormal patterns towards the coast.

Do they have random drug testing for New Jersey’s finest?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz0r9v3xekno

I'm voting for HS120 (below) due to the width of the rear LG support and the black line on it is from the step. It could be the HS130 but that has a more prominent exhaust.
https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....0a2d1adbdb.jpg

I don't see lights on the stab. Am I missing them?

100% not a Cabri but I have only been looking at the picture for 1/1000 of an hour

Are HS120 and HS130 new designations for EC120 and EC130 that I am unaware of?

I vote for Cabri G2 for that blurry night time image. The skid cross tubes look like they have a long fairing on them like the rear cross tube of the EC120, but that is probably due to blur from the long image exposure at night. The lighting looks consistent with G2 as others have already noted, see for example:

https://www.airplane-pictures.net/photo/874418/g-dgre-helicentre-aviation-guimbal-hlicoptres-cabri-g2/

MechEngr: Are you saying you don't see nav lights on horizontal stabiliser in the night photo? Wouldn't that simply mean it isn't an EC120?

I think it might be one of these....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heli-Sport_CH-7


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....e324b8c94a.jpg

We don’t have any h120/130s based anywhere near this area. But I’ve only flown around these areas for the last few years so what would I know.
The position light on the forward fuselage is a Guimbal thing. Airbus puts the position on the horizontal stabilizer. Google some images of either type flying at night and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

No - it’s H120 and H130 now. H for (Airbus) Helicopter.

How damaging and embarrassing would searching for an Iranian dirty-bomb (on US soil) be for the Obama-Biden administration(s)? Just asking the hypothetical.

The US DOD has a new classified strategy for countering Drones and the unclassified Press Release can be found here.....

https://www.defense.gov/News/Release...anned-systems/So....was the assets being deployed by the Federal Government part of that new strategy and new assets and capabilities?

Is the government on the horns of a dilemma where if they present their evidence they give away methods and capabilities of the new classified strategy?

What methods are available for use in sorting out the truth of the 5,000 or so reports of Drone activity?

Analysis of photo imagery seems more an art than a science if we consider the argument extant right here in this thread.

We all did agree that it isn't a drone shown in the picture just not on the particular type of helicopter so I don't think imagine analysis is an art if you have basic knowledge of the looks and lightings on an aircraft.

Those 5,000 reports are all unconfirmed and made by the general public. No NJ based helicopter pilot that I know of has seen a drone either from the ground or in the air.
The fact that we had a drastic increase in laser strikes - multiple the other night, my coworkers being one of them - is a pretty good sign that what people are seeing are actual manned aircraft.

Notice the change in narrative over the last few days from the White House, DOD and other federal agencies related to the drone sightings.

Last Thursday, DOD spokesman John Kirby said, "And importantly, there are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace.”

In the same press briefing, Kirby said, “I want to go back to something I said at the top. There has been no evidence of any of this activity in or near restricted spaces.”

On Sunday morning, the DHS Secretary on an ABC News program stated, “There’s no question that people are seeing drones,” and, “I want to assure the American public that we in the federal government have deployed additional resources, personnel, technology to assist the New Jersey State Police in addressing the drone sightings.”

Yesterday, Monday, December 16, Kirby said, “Now there have been some drone sightings, I think, as you know, over some military bases. We're obviously looking at that.”

Kirby claimed yesterday, "We’ve done the detection and analysis. We’ve corroborated the sightings…. We've now examined some 5,000 different sightings.”

Brent Cotton, Director of the Counter-UAS at DHS, claimed that they used "geospatial modeling to overlay reported drone sightings and manned aircraft tracks as well as associated image analysis."

On Friday, Kirby said “We're taking that imagery seriously and we're doing the best we can to analyze it…  We want to do the best we can to triangulate it… We're going to do everything we can to find out.”

DOD and the other agencies claimed in a statement released last night that they "have not identified anything anomalous."

You are right - the difficulty in interpretation is that the lighting on the aircraft is not uniform. In the night photo I see the streak of the forward lamp and the over-exposed starboard marker also has the streak. That marker is responsible for lighting the skid, which has a similar "width" to the length of the streak. The fenestron should have a streak, but it is illuminated by the strobe lamp on the top of the fenstron, a very short pulse of light, so it is frozen at the instant of the flash.

I am amazed at the one video that is claimed to be of a delta wing drone when, as it turns, one can clearly see the engine nacelles of the commercial airliner illuminated by the landing lights. I don't know how many observers are just so amped up to imagine anything is a drone and how many are clearly pranking the news services by omitting the sound that goes with the videos.

A good part of this is the repetition of the claim that they are seeing drones rather than seeing something that they aren't sure what it is. I think that Gatwick was eventually traced back to someone looking up and seeing the marker lamps on a tower crane, kicking off the whole cascade of stupidity where pretty soon people were reporting the actual police drones that were used to find the not-a-drone.

Vertical,

Don't get ahead of your Resume on this.

Helicopter UAV's have been around probably well before you got your driver's license.

What has been "agreed" upon is the video/photo image "appears" to be a helicopter.

What has not been agreed upon or any mention made is whether there is a Pilot aboard flying the machine.

That is why so far such recognition efforts are merely within the area of "art" rather than "science".

For craps sake....you all cannot even agree which airframe it is much less how it is being operated.

You might consider this old UAV program....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northr...Q-8_Fire_Scout

The USMC is renewing the Kaman contract for two UAV aircraft that were used so successfully in Afghanistan moving cargo.

The use of helicopter airframes for use as UAV's is proven technology that is constantly being improved.

Sikorsky, Air Bus, Schweitzer, Bell and Kaman have experience with it.

So...just because the aircraft/drone looks like a helicopter one must be very careful in proclaiming it to be just that...and not a helicopter based UAV

SASless,

no one is getting ahead of themselves here. You could’ve at least sent me this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airb...copters_VSR700
Which is the Cabri G2 in unmanned form. I’m very well aware of plenty of helicopter based UAV platforms. But like I said before, there is a flight school down the road (Ascent Aeronautical) from where that picture was taken that flys the G2s. So I’d say chances are very, very high that it was them and not a UAV.

Vertical - rotary wing drones go back a long way. The USN's DASH (Drone Anti Submarine Helicopter) was an early effort at harnessing such tech. IOC in about 1963. As newer classes of ships were built (Knox, Spruance, Brooke classes) an organic manned helicopter was chosen as the better idea. (LAMPS = Light Airborne Multi Purpose System). The SH-2D and SH-2F did well in that role, but were replace by the more capable SH-60B (and now MH-60R) manned systems. (I flew both Sea Sprites and Seahawks).
The Firefox that SASless mentioned is a case of things coming full circle, about 50 years later. It is a lot more capable than the "DASH" and was successful in the early part of this century. Not sure if the Navy will try to get something more 'current' for future unmanned systems, but I suspect that they will.

The KMax logistics system was a land-based variant that I expect to see grow again...but who knows what budget battles it may fall afoul of, or what form it will take. If it takes a new form, where does the testing take place?

For What It's Worth.