LE BOURGET, France – Unmanned aircraft have helped rescue stranded hikers, worked to contain wildfires and gathered data at nuclear accidents. One helped a Russian tanker find its way through Arctic ice to bring oil to a stranded Alaskan community.
These remote-controlled planes have many more potential peacetime uses. But unmanned aircraft have an image problem: They’re also known as drones.
That word conjures up pilotless planes dropping bombs or spying in war zones. But industry officials and regulators say the day is coming when unmanned aircraft will be regularly used for more mundane purposes – and people will be at ease with them appearing in their skies.
For people to change their opinion, they “have to see the benefits,” said John Langford, chief executive of Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation.
“They haven’t seen any benefits on the civil side, but they’ve seen kind of the scary part.”
A report commissioned by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a U.S. industry lobby, predicts that the integration of unmanned aircraft into U.S. aviation will create 70,000 jobs for the first three years and generate $13.6 billion of business.
At the recent Paris Air Show, manufacturers were pushing the civil uses of the products. French-based Delair-Tech displayed a small drone that can survey for damage to utility lines; a small Swiss company, senseFly, showed off its Styrofoam planes that are used for mapping land and the Oklahoma-based Design Intelligence Inc. introduced solar-powered drones that could carry small cargo, such as medicine, to remote places.
So far, most civilian drones are small, with many used for data-gathering. They also have flown into forest fires in Arizona to take temperatures and help firefighters understand where the blaze might go next. They have helped patrol the U.S.-Mexican border and been used by scientists to track animal migration.
But some manufacturers already are imagining a day when pilotless cargo flights will crisscross the globe or even tiny helicopters will deliver tacos to hungry snackers.
A research team at the University of Maryland has developed a robotic bird with movements so life-like that other birds have been fooled by it, either stalking it or moving into formation behind it. S.K. Gupta, the lead researcher, said the bird was born out of a desire to create something highly maneuverable that was also very quiet.
But for the market to take off, the public has to become comfortable with the idea of these unmanned aircraft being used for peacetime purposes. And for this to happen, regulators around the world have to tell manufacturers where and when they can fly their creations.
“The regulations that exist today and airspace around the world were never designed to accommodate unmanned aircraft,” says Paul McDuffee, who is drone-builder Insitu’s liaison to the Federal Aviation Administration.
While the industry is spinning off in many different directions, the lack of regulations is holding it back.
“Right now, most of us are building things at risk,” said McDuffee, who was not at the show, since no one knows what the requirements for a drone will be.
No one knows exactly how many civilian drones fly these days – partially because of the ad-hoc regulation – but the number is likely in the thousands in the United States. Typically they do so only under severe restrictions. In the United States, each one needs to get specific permission from the Federal Aviation Administration. The regulator only grants permission to public agencies, such as police or fire departments, or to research institutions. The aircraft have to be within the sight of their user or be followed by a chase plane, so a human being has eyes on the drone at all times. They usually fly in unpopulated areas and well below the zone commercial air traffic uses.
But the FAA is working to expand their use. Congress has asked it to develop a comprehensive set of rules for unmanned aircraft by 2015. That should include everything from when and where they can fly; how their pilots are trained; what safety features drones must have; and what purposes they can be used for. Airspace over the Arctic may be opened as early as this summer to serve as a testing ground, McDuffee said. And the FAA is preparing to announce a series of test sites in the continental United States.
