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Unmanned Aerial Drones Coming Soon Above U.S.
cnet-declan writes "Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been flying over Iraq and Afghanistan, but now the Bush administration wants to use them for domestic surveillance. A top Homeland Security official told Congress today, according to this CNET News.com article, that: "We need additional technology to supplement manned aircraft surveillance and current ground assets to ensure more effective monitoring of United States territory." One county in North Carolina is already using UAVs to monitor public gatherings. But what happens when lots of relatively dumb drones have to share airspace with aircraft carrying passengers? A pilot's association is worried."
...and NASA plans to do it too for terrain mapping purposes (presumably within US borders):
http://esto.nasa.gov/obs_technologies_uavsar.html
UAVs are something we're going to have to get used to. Up next: pilotless passenger planes. Most modern aircraft are already equipped with auto-takeoff, auto-pilot (cruise), and auto-land. What more do you need? The ability to control them from the ground? That's being worked on for security reasons.
-Oliver / TreasureTunes.com
Personally I am mixed on this program, I believe that border security needs to be strengthened but at a pilot I am kind of scared of being forced to share airspace with UAVs, and the pop-up TFRs that go with them.
TFRs are the bane of private pilots because they are often short notice, large enough to be an inconvenience, but small enough that you can transit most of the center of what they are trying to protect in under a minute, and Part 121 and often part 135 traffic is most often exempted (the aircraft that can do the most damage). Here in Florida for the shuttle launches we have 24 hour TFRs (the TFR is post 9/11 NASA had used a set of restricted airspace that was much smaller or oriented downrange), that are so large that it cuts off East coast VFR corridor between Orlando's Class B airspace and the ADIZ. Forcing pilots to fly an obstacle course of TFR, restricted, and controlled airspace to get to their destination.
Why not remote control cars, too? We could change traffic rules to give priority to robot police cars, which could observe us, too.
It's a clear violation of airspace safety in which the pilot is ALWAYS reponsible for avoiding other aircraft. It's the most basic rule you learn when you become a pilot, and it's what every examiner checks for before each maneuver during the practical exam. Unfortunately, the engineers designing these things aren't pilots or air traffic controllers and have no idea how our airspace works. (They work fine in Iraq, but that's a war zone with no civilian aviation.) Apparently engineers do know how to weasel our tax dollars to fund their overpriced remote control toys.
If AI was smart enough to fly an airplane, why aren't they flying airliners? They'd be way cheaper than pilots. If there's no pilot, there's no see-and-avoid. When a camera can see and process as quickly as a human, then it might work, but before then, the only way to do this is to not allow them to fly anywhere near humans fly.
There's currently no FAA-approved technology to relieve a pilot of her duty to see and avoid other aircraft whether or not the AC is on an IFR flight plan. Next time you're on an airliner, listen to the channel with the pilots talking to TRACON or CENTER. There's a lot of human interaction.
In the late seventies, CIA funding changed from human intelligence gathering to satellite intelligence gathering. We can see every place in the world and pick up all their signals, but we still couldn't tell India was testing an Atomic bomb. With all the billions of dollars spent on overhead technology, we still haven't found Osama. Now the people selling the things tell us how similar technology will solve our crime problem...
It's a multifaceted problem, and no solution is readily available.
The way I see it, the problem is by design. It's well known that there's been a lot of "media consolidation" over the past few decades, so that the major outlets are controlled in the hands of a few corporations (e.g. Clearchannel).
John Taylor Gatto tells us in his books & presentations that the government's schools were set up to provide workers for industry. Before government schools, the American dream was an independant livelihood. After government schools, the expectation shifted to finding employment with a good company with good benefits.
The problem is that the same group of people are behind both efforts. Is it really so odd to propose that a small, dedicated group of families has been steadily concentrating wealth in their own pockets for centuries?
Furthermore, why is it that the same group of rotten scoundrels install themselves in government? George H. W. Bush was in the CIA at least as far back as the 60's. Head of the CIA, Vice President for 8 years, president for another 4.
Donald Rumsfeld was in the Nixon, Ford & Reagan administrations, according to Wikipedia. He even got his picture taken with Saddam Hussein back in 1983. Now he's secretary of defense. Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense under Papa Bush, and before that he got himself elected as representative from Wyoming.
I'm sure there are more examples. The problem, as I see it, is that the same rotten bastards keep getting recycled through the political system. Watch for the keywords: Project for the New American Century, Bilderburg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, etc... And that's not even mentioning the more secretive enclaves. See The Controllers: Secret Rulers of the World for a timeline of the consolidation of power over the last 100+ years.
What's more, anytime this sort of observation comes up, the masses have been conditioned to just snicker and dismiss the messenger as a "conspiracy theorist". But how do said masses know that there is no conspiracy? They don't "know", but social conditioning has implanted a nearly impervious belief.
Expose the so-called "illuminati" and their plots, and the problem will begin to go away.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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