So what I'm getting from the responses in this thread is that no one knows who this is. Okay, checkmark number one.
What frustrates me about what this person is doing is that it seems to display a lack of requisite knowledge for doing this. I doubt he is doing this for any kind of scientific purpose, but rather he has money he wants to spend on getting attention by doing something extreme that most others aren't doing.
Sounds about right for storm chasing.
I hope he understands that unless he uses some kind of large, bulky, high-powered, professional drone unit, he is unlikely to ever get a drone directly into a tornado. Those things are just not strong enough to punch through the wind field. His only hope would be to place the drone in in an inflow surge, but those are not easy to find. And he will likely lose the drone doing so.
You're not going to be able to get a modern-day consumer-brand drone into a tornado by going through the RFD...like...ever. The reason is...it's a downdraft, and when downdrafts hit the ground they spread out...ya know...diverge...i.e., the winds push out and away from the RFD core. That means away from the tornado except for in the small sector where the RFD hasn't completely wrapped around it (better get there early in the tornado's life cycle, because once it becomes occluded it's game over for your chances). You'd have to get your drone into the near-surface part of the inflow ahead of the apex of the RFD gust front to get a drone into a tornado. You would then have to hope that debris centrifuging doesn't keep the drone from being able to get in closer to the tornado's center. Not impossible, but you're probably gonna go through a lot of money crashing drones that get close but don't make it.
ADD: My final point in this matter comes in the form of a question: why do people want to get drone footage from a tornado in the first place? Instrumentation is fine, but I'm only seeing reports from people using only cameras. What do you think you're going to see? It's not going to look like the inside of the EF5/"finger of god" tornado from Twister. I strongly suspect the video would be difficult to make sense of for a few reasons: 1) The camera would likely begin tumbling due to turbulence on its way in or due to extreme spatial velocity gradients in the funnel; 2) even if the camera doesn't tumble, it will still be rotating rapidly within the funnel, and may also experience strong vertical motions, so vision of any one fixed point in space will be very short; 3) even if a camera punctures a visible condensation funnel, the inside is likely to look nothing but gray - there will likely not be any fixed points of reference within the funnel on which the camera can focus. More likely the video would look like swirls of black and gray with much of it out of focus and either covered in mud or water.
