Civilian use of tiny drones may soon fly in U.S.
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 (FAA), which plans to propose new rules for using small drones in January, a first step toward integrating robotic aircraft into the nation’s skyways.
The FAA has issued 266 active testing permits for civilian-drone applications but hasn’t permitted drones in U.S. airspace on a wide scale out of concern they don’t have an adequate “detect, sense and avoid” technology to prevent midair collisions.
Other concerns include privacy — imagine a camera-equipped drone buzzing above your backyard pool party — and the creative ways in which criminals and terrorists might use the machines.
“By definition, small drones are easy to conceal and fly without getting a lot of attention,” said John Villasenor, a UCLA professor and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation. “Bad guys know this.”
The aerospace industry insists these concerns can be addressed. It also believes the good guys — the nation’s law-enforcement agencies — are the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.
Police departments in Texas, Florida and Minnesota have expressed interest in the technology’s potential to detect runaway criminals on rooftops or to track them at night by using the robotic aircraft’s heat-seeking cameras.
“Most Americans still see drone aircraft in the realm of science fiction,” said Peter Singer, author of “Wired for War,” a book about robotic warfare. “But the technology is here. And it isn’t going away. It will increasingly play a role in our lives. The real question is: How do we deal with it?”
California-based drone maker AeroVironment, the nation’s biggest supplier of small drones to the military, has developed its first small helicopter drone designed specifically for law enforcement. If FAA restrictions are eased, the company plans to shop it among the nation’s estimated 18,000 state and local police departments.
AeroVironment engineers have been secretly testing a miniature, remote-controlled helicopter named Qube. Buzzing like an angry hornet, the tiny drone with four whirling rotors swoops back and forth about 200 feet above the ground scouring the landscape and capturing crystal-clear video of what lies below.
The new drone weighs 5 ½ pounds, fits in a car trunk and is controlled remotely by a tablet computer. AeroVironment unveiled Qube last month at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago.