Peoperly designed an RC plane does not need a runway at all. They can be launched with a simple catapult ramp and belly landed. Both methods are common to RC gliders and more than a few UAV’s. Those having a desire to save the plane but lacking a decent landing area also have the option of shutting down the engine and deploying a parachute, which is another well proven method used with UAV’s
Where smuggling is concerned the vehicle would likely always be on a one way mission as only a fool would hang around after delivery to re-fuel, program, and return launch. Time is not something smugglers have much of to spare.
As for automated flight, fixed wing has been doing it for much longer than multirotors, with positional accuracy equal to or less than 20 centimeters. Another benefit of fixed wing is range. It’s a very simple thing to fuel a plane to perform a flight of many miles, removing the sender and recipient a considerable distance from areas under constant surveillance. Google “aerosonde, 1998” to see where a 10’ span, glorified RC plane using an 1.2 cubic inch RC engine converted to use gas flew a pre-programmed flight across the Atlantic on less than two gallons of gas. Anyone can buy a cheap RC gas engine that’s far better than what was available for that ocean crossing. It requires very little effort to set up a modern 28cc gas RC engine to fly for 20+ hours on a couple gallons of gas. Why stand so close to the border to do that stuff? You’d have to be on Darwin’s list of the terminally stupid to do illegal stuff that close to the border.
A multirotor is much too range limited due to the fuel supply (battery) which is further reduced by adding the weight of the goods being smuggled. In my mind using a multirotor increases the risk of discovery and capture while decreasing the size of the payload, thereby reducing the “reward”.
In the long run sacrificing a model for every delivery is cheap compared to the return obtained from a successful flight. Just part of the cost of doing business. Some cartels are building extremely expensive submarines and semi submersibles to transport drugs across the ocean and all of those are one way vehicles.
All the above might well put me on some silly government watch list but anyone that has flown RC for a long time knew how to do it a long time ago. The auto pilot technology used in multirotors is not new or even recent. Most all of it originated with RC fixed and rotary wing modeling quite some time ago. It’s just gotten smaller, cheaper, and more accurate.
