Cochise County Sheriff Eyes Hybrid Drone with Claims of 7-Hour Flights for Border Surveillance

The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona is working with Canadian manufacturer Draganfly on a custom hybrid drone that supposedly boasts a seven-hour flight time. The aircraft uses gasoline engines to drive onboard generators, which in turn keep its batteries charged while it flies.

On paper, it is a huge leap from the 20 to 30-minute flights most public safety or even consumer drones manage today. In practice, there is still very little hard data in public that proves these numbers are achievable in real missions.

Let’s unpack what we know so far.

From 30-minute Flights to Long-Endurance Border Patrols

Cochise County sits on roughly 84 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, and deputies say they still routinely encounter groups of up to 300 people per month crossing through some of the harshest parts of the local desert.

Many sheriff’s offices across the U.S. already fly a mix of DJI Mavic series and BRINC drones for crime scene documentation and photogrammetry, traffic crash reconstruction, and search and rescue, but their battery life is a constant limitation.

Capt. Tim Williams has said many missions end not because the job is done, but because batteries are dying and the drone has to land after about 30 minutes in the air.

That gap between what deputies can see on a map and where their existing drones can physically reach, is what pushed the agency to look for something different. Draganfly’s answer is a large, hybrid-powered multirotor designed specifically around Cochise County’s border mission.

What is the Draganfly Outrider?

The platform Cochise County is evaluating is the Draganfly Outrider. It’s a long-endurance platform that can supposedly fly for up to seven hours straight, and lift over 100 pounds. Essentially, the Outrider platform carries two large lithium batteries onboard, as well as one or two gasoline engines. There are also generators onboard, but the specifics of the hardware and whether an all-in-one system is used are still unknown.

During a mission, the engines run at a steady RPM, and the generators continually top up the batteries while the electric motors do the actual flying. The batteries act as a buffer, allowing the drone to still handle sudden power spikes during climbs, tight maneuvers, or gusty winds.

Hybrid power like this is already used in a handful of industrial drones, but the Outrider pushes that idea to an extreme endurance and payload combination that Draganfly says has not been available in a multirotor before.

What has actually been demonstrated so far?

From November 16th-17th, Draganfly and Cochise County Sheriff’s office hosted a border security summit south of Sierra Vista. Multiple agencies came out to watch live demos that included the Outrider flying in border terrain.

Axios Phoenix reported that Cochise County will receive two Outrider aircraft under a pilot program. At first, those aircraft will be flown just to validate flight times, and the sheriff’s office will only bolt on sensors and start “real world applications” later in the program.

However, there are a few details buried in the coverage:

• The aircraft are still in testing, and are technically prototypes.
• Each aircraft currently costs ~$150,000

What has yet to be seen is any independent telemetry data or third-party report that confirm:

• A continuous seven-hour flight time.
• A verified 100-plus-mile communication link used in an operational setting, not just in theory or a controlled environment.

Every instance of the specs we’ve seen so far have been directly from Draganfly’s releases, but they have yet to be confirmed by a third-party.

Privacy Implications

One thing that has been mentioned time and time again across many drone-related stories is privacy. Drones are inherently able to see areas better than a person on the ground, so what would it look like if five drones were hovering outside of your house for seven hours a day? If you stop for a moment and consider the possibility;

• Would you get annoyed?
• How loud do you imagine a drone over five feet in length would sound?
• Would you feel safe and protected, or like you’re being watched 24/7?

Recent coverage of Cochise County’s drone testing has already flagged privacy concerns. One Arizona outlet noted that civil liberties advocates worry about what constant overhead monitoring will mean for people who live and work in nearby towns, even when they are not involved in any border crossing at all

DroneXL’s Take

Hybrid drones like the Outrider are one of the more exciting directions I’ve seen the drone industry trend toward. Using generators to keep the batteries topped up seems like a great idea in theory, but I’m eager to see this drone in action for myself before I get too excited.

Draganfly has made a name for itself, too. They’re not new to the unmanned aviation world. The company has been building specialized unmanned aircraft for decades and has already fielded heavy-lift platforms with some impressive capabilities. Given that background, it wouldn’t surprise me that they could pull off a hybrid drone of this kind.

Let me know what you think below – would these drones make you feel more or less safe overall, as opposed to AI-enabled cameras?