It could have been a kid playing with a toy, or it could have been a realtor taking photos, but I also know it could have been a lot of other, far more nefarious things.
What I do know is that it was flying over private property, and I was standing on private property, and I confirmed that it wasn't being flown by the owner of the property. I also know that it made us all feel unsafe, and if it continued to watch us we'd begin to fear for our lives.
The only idea I could come up with to get rid of it was to unzip my jacket, reach inside and pretend like I was drawing a pistol. I was wearing black leather gloves and at that range I figured I could make a convincing pistol silhouette with my fingers.
I drew my hands out slowly and aimed them at the drone using proper technique. I held a bead on it for about 15 seconds and it sped-off into the distance.
This experience got me thinking about how I can be ready for the next time this happens. I'm going to read-up on how the law applies (do things like Castle doctrine and Stand Your Ground apply to airspace?), but I'm also thinking about practical countermeasures.
Of course a firearm will bring any quadcopter down, but there's lots of reasons that's not my first choice, especially outside of your own property.
These machines are very easy to bring down if you can interfere with their rotors, so things entanglement hazards like string or monofilament come to mind, Other ideas are liquids or foams that can gunk up the works (imagine hitting one with a stream of Great Stuff), but you'd have to get close enough or somehow propel these things to reach the drone.
This got me thinking about a discussion I recently had about home-made guided missiles. I was doing some reading on homing missiles (specifically early heat-seeking anti-aicraft missiles) and the mechanisms were fairly simple. A lock is achieved by essentially aiming a detector at the heat source and when the sensor can confirm the signature the missile is launched. As it flies, it measures changes in the signature and interprets these as the missile going off-course and it uses it's control surfaces to adjust course in the opposite direction.
Quadcopter drones don't produce a strong heat signature, but they do produce distinctive radiation in the form of sound. Maybe you could make a seeking mechanism that homes-in on that distinctive whine?
If so, you could create a "warhead" containing one of the mostly-harmless entanglement agents we discussed earlier, and combine it with the sonic homing mechanism and a simple rocket. If you could keep the weight of all this low enough a basic off-the-shelf solid rocket motor should be sufficient to reach a target within visual range.
Such a guided missile would easily outpace even the fastest quadcopter and bring it down with no explosion or other danger beyond the kinetic energy the drone already has. You could increase safety more by disarming the warhead of the lock is lost, and even use the control surfaces to bleed-off energy before landing in the event of a target miss.
I would have to do some more design and research to confirm it, but I imagine something like this could easily be contained in a small-ish portable package, maximally something the size of a shotgun or telescope (forms that would aid in initial target sighting and lock). It might be possible to go even smaller depending on how heavy the warhead needs to be to be effective (I'm not concerned about the weight of the homing device, it could be tiny).
Now that I think about it, it might even be possible to propel such a missile using a bow instead of a rocket motor. This has several advantages and is safer as well. Has anyone made a guided arrow before?
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026