Drones, drones, drones, and more drones. It seems like they are everywhere. These days it’ s hard to go near a news medium, be it paper, TV, radio or e-anything to be bombarded with yet another article on how drones are going to take over the world, do mundane, boring, ugly and dangerous jobs and generally save us from ourselves.
At the risk of being a bit cynical I see much of this as moneyfocused raving by astonishingly ignorant and non-thinking media wonks. Drones have been around a long long long time. The first recorded system seems to be in 1849 when the Austrians attacked Italy( well, Venice) with unmanned balloons loaded with explosives. This was only partially successful as some of them got blown back into Austrian territory!
Then over the period 1910-1912, a Major Raymond Phillips made many demo flights in the London Hippodrome with wireless controlled balloons and airships( and model trains and boats) He also did quite a few trials with light-guided airships using a small searchlight and selenium cells. Then during WW1 and a little later, there were many drone developments, with“ Automatic airplanes”“ Aerial torpedoes” and Automatic aerial targets” being developed and built.
In keeping with a lot of other areas, WW2 spawned a whole raft of these. Reginald Denny’ s company produced around 15,000 DennyPlane drones for training AA gunners. The RAF developed the“ Queen Bee” a RC Tiger Moth, again for gunnery practice, and the USAF used old converted B-17 and B-24s as large remote unmanned“ one-way” bombers. Both US and German forces had TV-guided flying bombs from around 1941 onwards, some were spectacularly successful, others less so.
If the birthplace of“ modern” UASs in decent quantities was WW2, they really came of age during the Vietnam era. There were many thousands of very successful designs fielded. The most produced was the AQM-34 and variants with about 9,000 made, the production ended in 2002 and some are still operational.
Probably one of the most successful modern UASs and one that gets a lot of media coverage is the Predator. This was developed in the early 90’ s and was initially built quite economically from pretty much off the shelf engines, components, consumer video equipment and light aircraft avionics.
What is quite amusing is that in 1996, the US DoD and General Atomics( the manufacturer) gave a brief in Wellington on Predator to every man and his dog, including Defence, CAA, Airways, Customs, Immigration, Police, etc, etc. A Press release on this was circulated afterwards, and got ignored by the media fools. Now of course, try to find something without UAS ravings!
Amongst all the dross and trivia, there is the odd good article, |
and one that was balanced and sensible was the“ Rise of the |
Drones” in the Feb 11, 2013 |
issue of Time magazine. |
I |
commend it as good reading. |
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They make a number of important observations. One is that consumer grade“ drones” are a little like PCs in the 1980-ish period, almost a toy for enthusiasts and geeks. But that is very rapidly changing and they soon become as ubiquitous as cellphones.( or two as most teenage girls seem to require!)
If used sensibly, they have a considerable number of useful applications, that we are only starting to scratch the surface of, and in fact, new uses are starting to dawn on us every week, it seems. However as Carl Sagan dryly noted:- almost every advance we have ever made, can be used for good or bad.
They correctly point out that societal changes will be as important to us as the regulatory and technological ones. Imagine walking down a mall, with about 200“ drones” flitting about. The reaction of many will be“ get that thing outa my face!” especially if they are suspected of carrying a camera, and they virtually all will. They are essentially“ flying smartphones” now. And that will force a national debate and discussion on several issues.
They mention the well-known 2012 case in South Carolina, where an animal-rights group used a drone to watch hunters during a pigeon shoot on private property. The hunters promptly shot it down, and Time observes that it might be America’ s first case of human-on-drone violence, but it certainly won’ t be the last.
As I write this an NZ Navy rating has been court-martialed for taking pictures in women’ s toilets. So imagine a mall with all these tiny drones flitting about, in and out of toilets, changing cubicles, etc. A real pervert’ s delight! Of course finding the offender will be impossible, as they could be anywhere in the mall, or even kilometers away. It seems to me that the antidrone weapon of choice will be something like a squash racquet with a 2-3 metre handle extension, to do a little“ aerial sweeping”
The legal system has yet to catch up with all this, but it will. Right now the main airspace regulators’( NZ CAA) rules are fuzzy but under development. However, I think it’ s fair to say they will never cover this sort of micro-drone. So I’ d expect to see council by-laws trying to, i. e. just like the rather common“ no skateboards on the footpath” by-law. That might work, but will only ever stop the law-abiding section of our society. See the point is this; it’ s illegal to speed on the roads, but in NZ during 2010, 919,639 speeding tickets were handed out thus raising about $ 86M in fines! Bit of a compliance and / or comprehension problem there, you might agree?
Just to set the scene, there are a few States in the USA that are in the process of passing bills that will make illegal, or very severely restrict drones, and that generally includes model