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Civilian Use of Drone Aircraft May Soon Fly In the US
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the Seattle Times:
"Drone aircraft, best known for their role in hunting and destroying terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, may be coming soon to the skies near you. Police agencies want drones for air support to find runaway criminals. Utility companies expect they can help monitor oil, gas and water pipelines. Farmers believe drones could aid in spraying crops with pesticides. 'It's going to happen,' said Dan Elwell, vice president of civil aviation at the Aerospace Industries Association. 'Now it's about figuring out how to safely assimilate the technology into national airspace.' That's the job of the Federal Aviation Administration, which plans to propose new rules for using small drones in January, a first step toward integrating robotic aircraft into the nation's skyways."
"Drone aircraft, best known for their role in hunting and destroying houses and children"
"Begun, the Drone Wars have."
How shall we count them?
Traffic reporting
Speeders/ Speed traps Hey someone has to pay for Maintenance, Fuel and Pilot for this thing!
Forestry service
Fire fighting
surveillance (Abuse of powers, Gonna happen)
Night vision, Infrared/Thermal imaging
Knock, Knock! Who's there!? Search Warrant!
BOOM! precision guided munition right into your toilet.
Let's not forget alien Centipedes for Senator assasinations.
Kite Fighting is a common festival in many parts of Asia. In a few years from now, imagine if a bunch of dudes do that with drones ( and the drones shooting at each other with Spud Guns in mid-air).
It will soon become and industry of its own. Microsoft and Sony will soon come out with Fighter Drones.
Microsoft's will have a "ring of death" ( It'll circle your house twice before crashing into your house and destroying the ceiling/attic.
Sony's will have the ability to fly carrying a dog as a passenger. But one day it'll disable it via software update and your mutt will no longer be able to fly.
Nintendo will come out with a cheaper, smaller drone will require you to flap your arms like a bird, which the drone will faithfully imitate.
I see a good future for the gaming industry with this.
Japan has been using UAVs for agriculture for years. Pretty cool stuff.
http://benpheneverything.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/robotic-crop-dusting-in-japan/
http://www.gizmag.com/go/2440/
This has major fourth amendment implications--When technology is in use by the civilian public, there is supreme court precedent saying the fourth amendment generally doesn't reach it. (An old thermal imaging case.)
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The small copters should be autonomous and stream media to wifi.
Get it to follow a reporter/protestor into a situation like a Occupy eviction.
My camera, its up there. The foottage of you punching me in the face, that's already on google.
If you're looking for facts and data, you're obviously not spending that time thinking of the children. Won't someone think of the children!?!
Do you also smash speed limit signs? Torch cop cars? Maybe you don't like TV, so you dig up and cut cables? To hell with all the anarchists who want society to be like the wild west. Believe it or not, we already have flying machines that can do all these things. Drones just make them cheaper and more accessible to everyone.
Go ahead. Shoot one down, if you want. If you're that violent a person, society will be better off with you in prison.
so, when it comes time to take out escalating OWS protesters -will it be done via security contractors in India or Pakistan? that would be too ironic...
only problem is -they might decide to take out the police -as the members of the Afghan military have done so often against the Alliance
In ancient Rome towards the end they would only allow foreign troops inside Rome to prevent coups and popular uprisings from having a sympathetic or communicative military...
-I'm just sayin'
Top it all off with a little Senate bill 1867 and your nightmares have become true, my friend.
Start preparing for military rule.
Civilians are already building their own drones. See DIY Drones, etc.
Personally I'd like to see a drone airship that can hold a stable position around 70,000 feet (~21km) to use as a WiFi relay, which would fix the problem of getting a clear line-of-sight for point-to-point long-range wireless but good. I doubt it can be done reliably though. But if it could, and you built a fleet of them linked with Open Mesh, you could build a global drone communications network for fairly cheap. Call it Skynet... oh.
Drones are both too small to see easily and have no pilot on board that can see any conflicting traffic.
Anyone want to open a pool to bet on how soon a drone gets sucked into a major airliner's jet intake and causes a crash? Yeah, big jets fly really high -- unless they are landing or taking off or approaching an airport. Drones fly really low -- right where the GA small-aircraft fly.
taking pot shots at them
Cops routinely round up numpties that point lasers at pilots. You go firing at a UAV that is most likely returning real-time video of your brilliant self to the operator and you can bet they'll be at your door inside an hour with a picture of you drawing a bead someone's expensive aerospace equipment.
Have you not seen the video out of Iraq or Afghanistan of individual insurgents being hunted down by UAVs? Just replace the Hellfire with a patrol car and you've got the picture.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
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I did a college project and built a simple drone with Arduino parts and some model RC stuff. We had to come up with a business plan to present commercial applications for there are many:
firefighters need a temp profile of a building before they get there, send the drone
cops need eyes in the sky to find a perp, send the drone
high volume roadway monitoring, send the drone
video taping sports events (highschool, private, college, racing, etc), send the drone
monitoring wildlife/forestry/national park outdoorsey stuff, send the drone
weather monitoring and remote sensing in harsh environments, send the drone
Anything that requires helicopter eyes in the sky but doesn't need to transport human or heavy payloads (air fuel is not cheap)
many more than not 4th amendment violations, send all the drones you got baby.
With all the good that could come of this technology, I guarantee the loss of civil liberties and privacy will be ten-fold larger. First to market will make lots of money once they pay off the FAA and get through the red tape. Lockheed/Northrop/Boeing/large DoD contractors have the lock on the drone market for the gov't now, once a large demand is created in the non-government sector, we'll see more of these stateside once the red-tape and matters are worked out. Where drones are better at some things overseas, they will be utilized that way here as well (hopefully, but not guaranteed, to be ordinance free). Naturally drones are nothing new, the barriers to entry are cost, FAA regs, demand. But once contractors get the lock and private firms/governments see/feel/create the need, drones will become another fact of life here in Panopticonland.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
What's the big deal? The pilots on a commercial flight are just there to make the passengers feel better.
No, they are not. I wish people would stop repeating this stupid myth. Airline pilots do an enormous amount of work during a flight, particularly takeoff and landing. It may well be that their jobs could be automated away, or that this will be possible in the near future, but it's nowhere near happening yet.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
No they don't. If it's not a puddle jumper, the damn thing lands itself.
How about we listen to an actual commercial pilot? http://www.salon.com/2011/08/04/can_jetliners_fly_themselves/
"The US military, best known for their role in hunting and destroying houses and children"
Seeing that here in the US we live in the safest time in human history your apparent need to up the ante of the surveillance state seems to indicate you should move to a nice fascist regime. As a person who realizes that, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants" I also realize that the "blood of patriots" did not refer to young men shipped to foreign countries but possibly referred to liberty minded citizens right here at home who are willing to take the amazingly slight risk of allowing liberty to remain paramount. I also realize that "tyrants" could even refer to our own government and that the government should be trusted as far as I can spit up wind in a hurricane.
Government by popularity with a decision making process funded by corporations is an insanely dangerous thing.
No. I will not willingly give a blind government hierarchy a cost effective way to micromanage our lives and to automate the fleecing of the people. WE ARE NOT THEIR SOURCE OF INCOME. They are supposed to be our servants.
Think about this: It is impossible for a government, a corporation, or a committee to be moral. Morality requires a conscience and only an individual can have a conscience.
That's not just a troll. The drones get much bigger headlines (just outside the USA?) for blowing up wedding parties and other civilians, than for killing enemies, even though they hopefully do the latter more often.
I was going to comment about blowing up allied border posts, but that particular massacre was done by piloted planes. So are drones really the problem?
Are drone pilots any more detached from the carnage than the WWII high-altitude incendiary bomber crews?
As for civilian use, we could use a couple of these for aerial shark patrols. Not too dangerous flying over the ocean. They could even be armed with a .50 cal gun.
...people from taking pot shots at them, be it with firearms, slingshots, toy rockets, what have you. I suppose that the best way to prevent this from happening is to make them so hideously expensive to insure or operate that no one bothers.
Discharge of firearm in a populated area: bad, jail bad.
Slingshots: good luck hitting a small, erratically moving target 20 stories up.
Toy rockets: you got a gyro guidance system with optical tracking on that thing?
What have you: apparently you have nothing that can take out a drone, even the guns aren't going to be easy, trying to hit a 2' target at 100+ yards with a major elevation change.
Insurance: is based on risk, it's a business. The only way risk will be increased by lawmakers is if the chance for lawsuit is increased. Since most applications are downright illegal right now, drones are un-insurable. As for liability after they are legal, how much damage can 2 lbs of plastic do falling on whatever? O.K., now, how much damage does a Cessna do when it crashes while flying low for pipeline monitoring, crop dusting, etc.?
People hate change, drones are change. Don't hate the drones, they really are better than what we had before.
Go ahead and hate the people who will misuse them, but remember that you don't need to fly to install cameras on every intersection, automatic license plate readers in every squad car, or facial recognition cameras at the entry to every store.
Well, unless you count 737s, 757s, 767s, 777s, and a few dozen other 100+ seat commercial aircraft as 'puddle jumpers', you are wrong. These airplanes have the capability to autoland, under a highly restricted set of conditions, involving maximum wind speeds (on the 737, max headwind 25 kts, xwind 15 and tailwind 10), clearing a large ILS safe zone on the surface of the airport to assure no interference with the localizer & glide slope antennas, minimum visibilites (because many autopilot systems work only the ailerons & elevator, not the rudder, and once you are on the deck you need the rudder to track the centerline, which the autopilot can no longer do, and neither can you if you can't see), etc., etc., etc.
I flew 600 hours for a major airline on the 737 last year. I did exactly one autoland in the entire year, and it was because the Captain & I wanted the procedural practice, the airport had a CAT III ILS, and it was a quiet day & ATC was accommodating.
I really wish I knew what urges people to forcefully declare they know about something when they plainly don't. It only subtracts from the discussion and your credibility.
Depending on the size and complexity of the drone, I would wire up an appropriately-sized radio control airplane(or copter) with a camera and a light payload of explosive, probably using a servo instead of electronic signal as the detonator for safety reasons. It would be more expensive than firing off a few rounds, but the fact that the oppressors paid a hundred or even a thousand times more for their drone than I did would be worth it.
Drones (and drone operators) are extremely ill-suited to dealing with level playing fields. But you're right about everything else, though. Guess its time to move to a rural area, growing and hunting all of my food and saving up enough money to flee the country before its military is turned loose against the general population.
Are you suggesting that civilian UAVs should be outfitted to fire rocket-propelled patrol cars at ground targets? Because that sounds simultaneously awesome and impractical.
Depending on the size and complexity of the drone, I would wire up an appropriately-sized radio control airplane(or copter) with a camera and a light payload of explosive, probably using a servo instead of electronic signal as the detonator for safety reasons. It would be more expensive than firing off a few rounds, but the fact that the oppressors paid a hundred or even a thousand times more for their drone than I did would be worth it.
Stick with rifles, you'll have a hell of a time hitting it with an RC aircraft and they're more likely to know you did it - with the rifle you can shoot from a concealed location and disappear before they can find you. Either way, gunshots or flying explosive charges around, your're in jail when caught.
Drones (and drone operators) are extremely ill-suited to dealing with level playing fields. But you're right about everything else, though. Guess its time to move to a rural area, growing and hunting all of my food and saving up enough money to flee the country before its military is turned loose against the general population.
Point of the article is that drones are shrinking. Sure, the Predator is the size of a 707, but take a look at Switchblade, smaller than the RC plane you can get at your hobby shop, faster too, not cheaper, but it costs less than your legal fees will trying to deal with the legal charges you'll face for putting RC explosives into the air.
The rural area plan sounds good, but unless you can afford hundreds of acres, it's not much more secure than living in a normal city. And, as for fleeing, to where? Try to take comfort in the fact that we've got less than 1% of our population in the military, half of them as reservists, even if the military does consume nearly 5% of our GDP, those numbers have been generally falling from 10% of GDP and more soldiers (in absolute numbers) in 1960.
I'll take my plate of crow now. FTR, what compels us is years of reading articles in credible computing circles that have said exactly what I said. Yes, upon further reflection, it does strike me that's industry bullshit from the folks who think automation works for everything. That said, I have not seen the claim credibly challenged before today. Clearly there is a lot of money out there selling the automated aircraft. I have known a lot of credible people in the computing, programming and robotics fields who have repeated this claim. My best response is that it is apparent pilots don't have the same sort of lobby out there explaining their side of the problem. Because frankly it looks like pilots have been decidedly left out of the discussion. Bear in mind, around these parts we're awfully prone to liking a good story about autonomous vehicles. Very simply put, good PR has sold me a lie that sits very easily with my mind.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Drone attacks during Reagan Administration: 0. Your point?
It's a relatively new technology: it makes sense that it's being used more and more as time goes by.
That said, it's a f**king killing machine, and using it amounts to murder. But's that your today's Amerika.
I don't have a sig.
Hate to break it to you, but Hobbyist FPV (First Person View) RC pilots have been building and flying planes that are smaller AND faster than that, with greater range.
From the spec sheet:
Size: Unlisted. but from the picture it appears to be roughly 2 feet long, with a 1.5 foot wing span.
Weight: 5kg!! This is VERY heavy for a UAS of this size. Most short range FPV birds clock in less than 4kg, preferably closer to 2 or 3. Long range birds weight more, mostly due to larger batteries.
Speed: 55knots (a bit over 63mph) about average for a UAS of this size, there are MANY very cheap foamy planes in use right now as FPV platforms that will easily crest 100mph. (Stryker, Funjet)
Range: 5KM Again, fairly average for a plane this size. For FPV round trips, that's 2.5km out and back. Many FPV planes can go 5 out and back, 10 out and back and more. So 5km one way isn't impressive.
So it's not faster, not smaller, and yes, not cheaper. Mostly because it's a flying bomb, NOT the type of plane we are likely to see used for reconnaissance. Don't get me wrong, it's a great tool. Just not what you thought it was for.
In truth, the private sector is very far ahead of the military in regards to small UAS craft. Mostly due to hobbyists pursuing it on their own. If you see a drone up in the sky, you can bet it isn't big brother, it's probably your neighbor from down the street.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
It is, sort of, single point of failure.
1) intimidating crowds of protesters
2) mass delivery of casual pepper spray
3) spying on any person/house/field
4) following vehicles remotely
5) issue speeding tickets remotely
6) back-up air support for raids (Branch Davidian debacle)
Until I see law enforcement acting responsibly with the power they already have I am not a fan of giving them more.
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