Divers scoured the bottom of Lake Conroe in the hope of recovering a controversial $250,000 police drone that crashed into the water Friday.
The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office confirmed the remote-controlled helicopter drone, which was bought in 2011 with a federal grant, suffered a malfunction and went down during an exercise over the lake.
The drone is equipped with a camera and an infrared scanning device and is used by MCSO for emergency management, missing-person recovery and operation overwatch, for example filming above SWAT team activities, spokesman Brady Fitzgerald said.
"Divers did go down to look for it. They are still looking. It went down in deep water where there is a rocky bottom. Visibility is also a problem because of sediment at the bottom of the lake," Fitzgerald said Monday.
A further search Tuesday also failed to recover the drone with divers saying choppy water made things difficult.
The mini helicopter, which weighs around 49 pounds, and, in a military setting, could be fitted with a single- or multiple-shot 40mm grenade launcher, 25mm grenade launcher or 12 gauge shotgun, according to Vanguard Defense Industries.
Couple of things here, don't you just hate it when the kids break their expensive toys the day after Christmas? And second, why in God's name does a city police department need a piece of military equipment capable of carrying grenade launchers or a shotgun?
This isn't THE DRONE IN QUESTION, but it's from the same company and it's funny as hell. The dumbasses crashed their $300K taxpayer funded toy into their own damn SWAT vehicle. From March 2012.
2 comments:
It's not a drone. It's just a remote control toy. A tremendously overpriced remote control toy. Drones have AI and can do things like "fly themselves home if the control signal is lost".
Did you copy Wirecutter?
*ducks*
Terry
Fla.
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