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November 29, 2011 in Nation/World
FAA looks at drones for cops and farmers
The Qube is flown in a demonstration in Simi Valley, Calif., in October. The tiny drone can capture crystal-clear video of what lies below.
(Full-size photo)
LOS ANGELES – Drone aircraft, best known for their role in hunting and destroying terrorist hideouts in Afghanistan, may soon be coming to the skies near you.
Police agencies want drones for air support to spot runaway criminals. Utility companies believe they can help monitor oil, gas and water pipelines. Farmers think drones could aid in spraying their 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 the use of small drones in January, a first step toward integrating robotic aircraft into the nation’s skyways.
The agency has issued 266 active testing permits for civilian drone applications but hasn’t permitted drones in national airspace on a wide scale out of concern that the pilotless craft 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 professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, 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 that the good guys – the nation’s law enforcement agencies – are probably 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 spot 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 W. 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?”
Drone maker AeroVironment Inc. of Monrovia, Calif., the nation’s biggest supplier of small drones to the military, has developed its first small helicopter drone that’s designed specifically for law enforcement. If FAA restrictions are eased, the company plans to shop it among the estimated 18,000 state and local police departments across the United States.
In the foothills north of Simi Valley, amid acres of scrubland, 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 1/2 pounds, fits in the trunk of a car and is controlled remotely by a tablet computer. AeroVironment unveiled Qube last month at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Chicago.
Plenty of police departments fly expensive helicopters for high-speed chases, spotting suspects and finding missing people. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said it recently bought 12 new helicopters at a cost of $1.7 million each.
Gitlin said a small Qube, by comparison, would cost “slightly more than the price of a police cruiser,” or about $40,000.
Drones’ low-cost appeal has other industries interested as well.
Farmers in Japan already use small drones to automatically spray their crops with pesticides, and more recently safety inspectors used them at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Archaeologists in Russia are using small drones and their infrared cameras to construct a 3-D model of ancient burial mounds. Officials in Tampa Bay, Fla., want to use them for security surveillance at next year’s Republican National Convention.
But the FAA says there are technical issues to be addressed before they’re introduced in civil airspace. Among them is how to respond if a communication link is lost with a drone – such as when it falls out of the sky, takes a nose dive into a backyard pool or crashes through someone’s roof.
Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx Corp., the largest owner of commercial cargo jets, suggested using a fleet of package-laden drones led by a traditionally piloted plane that could keep an eye on the robotic aircraft.
“Think of it like a train where you have a locomotive and you put two or three or four or 10 cars – depending on what demand is – and the drones basically fly the exact same flight profile in formation,” Smith said at a Wired magazine conference last year. “It’s very efficient.”
Drones could also be useful to real estate agents to showcase sprawling properties. Oil and gas companies want to utilize them to keep an eye on their pipelines. Even organizations delivering humanitarian assistance want to use drones.
Matternet, a Silicon Valley startup, has proposed a network of drones to deliver food and medicine in isolated regions around the world that are now inaccessible because they have no roads.
But if the use of drones is so widespread in the future, it raises concern that they could fall into the wrong hands and be weaponized.
Small drones are not designed to carry weapons or explosive materials, and the extra weight makes the drones difficult to control, said Gretchen West, executive vice president of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a robotic technology trade group.
“Also, because the technology on these systems are state of the art,” West said, they are controlled by “rules that govern the larger systems, which prohibit the systems and technology from falling into the wrong hands.”
Stocks plummet as outlook in Europe dims 
Hank Greer on November 29 at 5:09 a.m.
Thanks to Homeland Security grants the militarized drones are also available to law enforcement.
http://www.click2houston.com/news/New-Police-Drone-Near-Houston-Could-Carry-Weapons/-/1735978/4717922/-/59xnnez/-/index.html
Plus, aside from the FAA figuring out how to integrate robotic aircraft, our legislatures and judges will need to figure out the civil liberties and constitutional rights issues posed by drones looking in windows, etc.
JBlim on November 29 at 5:55 a.m.
Countdown to Skynet … .
dataxman on November 29 at 6:36 a.m.
Hank
If you are doing something illegal in your house - close your blinds and you won’t have a problem
misjustice on November 29 at 6:46 a.m.
I posted my opinion when the drone story ran on the National Pages…reposting here because I still think it’s a bad idea to further militarize the coppers.
“…the good guys — the nation’s law enforcement agencies — are probably the biggest commercial market for domestic drones, at least initially.”
Oh, goody! I can imagine the havoc that could be wrought by the SPD with several of these things…good grief!
We don’t need the further militarization of “law enforcement”. Their little Tank-like vehicle, Tasers, militarized pepper spray, and robocop garb is bad enough; now they are going to want drones, paid for by tax payers of course.
What’s next for the coppers arsenal? Land mines, missiles, and nukes? Where will it freakin’ end??????
libmark on November 29 at 7:24 a.m.
Dataxman —
You have a valid argument… up to a certain point. I think there is plenty of room for law-abiding citizens to be concerned about the thought of granting government yet another method for conducting warrantless searches.
DickAdams on November 29 at 7:27 a.m.
I`d like to “ditto” the comment by my good friend, MisJ. What a great lady she is!! Very bright too. Luv her.
The_Seer on November 29 at 7:51 a.m.
The U.S. won’t be the only nation to deploy these weapons platforms and the next generation of drones being produced will have defensive capabilities. Not only do they not belong in the hands of law enforcement, they shouldn’t be used for military means as well. Drones completely sanitize the killing of others. War needs to be messy and filled with the gore those who cause the gore can see. There are no better deterrents to war than war itself and moving the action to a trailer in the Nevada desert where “soldiers” “pilot” drones with a joystick like they are playing the latest version of Grand Theft Auto is a haunting enough prospect.
RedCedar on November 29 at 8:10 a.m.
1111, if the FAA regulates drones the same as conventional aircraft, they will have to fly at least 500’ above the terrain. Hitting a small moving target at 160 yards requires not so much a high-powered rifle, but some spectacular marksmanship. There’s a reason duck hunters use shotguns even at much closer ranges. Of course it’s possible the FAA will let police drones fly lower, but I bet even without regulation, they’ll “voluntarily” stay out of shotgun range.
On the other hand, some will get shot down, probably the low, slow, and cheap ones. Then we’ll get into the countermeasures cat-and-mouse game, with the cops spending more and more money to mitigate against various threats, and the government imposing more rules to keep drones out of civilian hands, or require complicated licensing and regulation for anyone who wants to fly one. It’s just one more step towards the “us vs. them” relationship between the government and the people, and back at the root of it all is drug prohibition, because only the war on drugs provides a sufficient excuse for militarizing the police and providing them will all this expensive equipment.
Note that even today any of us can buy a fairly cheap turnkey remote-controlled model airplane with a camera in it, and if we’re ambitious there are few legal limits to how big a model airplane we can build. It might be illegal to build one that navigates itself via GPS, or that might be a gray area that the regulators haven’t dealt with yet. In any case, converting a radio-controlled model airplane to a GPS-guided one would not be that hard. Something like that would be a smuggler’s dream. Most things that are smuggled these days have a very high ratio of value to weight. It’s impossible to defend our borders against tiny aircraft that can be launched anywhere and can crash-land in an infinite number of remote pick-up spots. If a few get captured, so what? If drug smugglers are building large human-operated submarines to help satisfy our country’s demand for reality-numbing drugs, swarms of drone drug-smuggling aircraft would be easy for them. Again, the war on drugs will drive the criminal end of the drone market as well as the police end.
In fact, without the drug-driven side of crime, I think they’d be hard-pressed to come up with any non-absurd reason to justify purchasing and maintaining a fleet of police drones. Keeping tabs on demonstrators, perhaps? Chasing the hypothetical fleeing bank-robber who leaps from rooftop to rooftop like Spiderman? Monitoring long-term standoffs with lunatics “holed up” somewhere? There are a pretty thin set of circumstances when they’re really all that tactically useful. On the other hand, boy would they sure be neat to have! So in that sense, they’re in the same category as armored personnel carriers, automatic rifles, and all those fun special-purpose shotgun rounds.
DickAdams on November 29 at 8:31 a.m.
“Drones completely sanitize the killing others”, re the posted comment above. Completely? I suppose the trouble our country is in the past several days because of our Drone killing 25 innocent people was completely sanitized?
jddavis on November 29 at 9:24 a.m.
@Seer
“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.
He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
—General George S. Patton
ManleyPointer on November 29 at 9:33 a.m.
Over the weekend, my inoffensive, 22-year-old car was brutally vandalized as it sat at the curb outside my house. I didn’t bother calling the police, since this is obviously a minor property crime that doesn’t concern them. Well, this kind of “minor crime” IS the sort of thing that concerns me and, I suspect, concerns many of you, way more than bigger, more glamorous crimes that would give law enforcement a chance to fly their high-tech drones. Law enforcement is becoming increasingly dehumanized, detached from the people it is supposed to serve. This drone nonsense is just one step further down that path.
Scoutster on November 29 at 9:35 a.m.
Please…
As a recent trial just demonstrated, our police aren’t equipped to handle the training and proficiency requirements for a simple stick with no moving parts except the hand of the operator.
How can they be entrusted with something so complicated and potentially lethal?
liveinfearoftheSPD on November 29 at 11:03 a.m.
If they want to see what is in my yard they only need to load Google Earth.
RedCedar on November 29 at 11:13 a.m.
Exactly, Manley. But the feds will give them grants to buy them, because the makers of them have friend$ in congre$$. And they sure would be fun. How long do you suppose it will be until they weaponize them?
jddavis, Patton also said that the M1 rifle was “the greatest implement of battle ever devised.” This was presumably before the drone or the atomic bomb. He also fought in a quaint time when equally-matched nations declared war against each other and their soldiers wore uniforms and obeyed the Geneva conventions. Nowadays, we have lots of tactical ways to make poor dumb bastards die. Strategically, however, killing poor dumb bastards who don’t belong to any country, who don’t wear uniforms, in wars that are never declared, accomplishes nothing.
jddavis on November 29 at 11:58 a.m.
Red—the point is that our warriors are kept in a “safer” position in battle. Having superior technology and weapons goes along way to that end.
No matter your position on any specific war, it is our military carrying out the orders of the President. Whatever it takes to mitigate the danger to them is fine with me.
RedCedar on November 29 at 2:02 p.m.
Okay, as far as war goes, though I think we should still declare it like the Constitution requires. This article, however, is about “civilian” uses of drones, and a big part of that involves the militarization of policing.
jddavis on November 29 at 2:32 p.m.
Agreed Red—I was referring to Seer’s comment at 0751.
DickAdams on November 29 at 4:57 p.m.
jddavis: Read your comment posted this morning to yesterdays thread regarding what I undoubtedly misinterpreted. Thanks for straightening me out. As an old guy I sometimes get rusty and forget to scrap the rust off and take a little more time to digest what I`m reading. In my previous life, I lucked out and was promoted to a executive level at the corporation where I worked. Having said that, I welcomed suggestions that were opposite of mine from employees. I learned a lot listening to other views. A few employees always agreed with what ever I had to say, and it didn`t take very long to recognize the always “yes” employees no matter what I`d say..