Civil UAVs Still A Distant Prospect 109
holy_calamity writes "The aerospace industry has failed to obtain the radio frequencies that would allow the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civil airspace, New Scientist reports. It will be 2011 before it can even begin to lobby for space on the radio spectrum. What's more, no national aviation authority in the world will allow civil UAVs without a system for avoiding other aircraft. And no firm has even started development of one. Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?" From the article: "On the brighter side, last week the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization, based in Montreal, Canada, said its navigation experts would meet in early 2007 to consider regulations for UAVs in civil airspace. That could be a step towards internationally agreed rules for how UAVs should operate. Even if the UN body makes rapid progress, however, it will be meaningless unless the industry can obtain the necessary frequencies to control the planes and feed images and other sensor data back to base."
Star One (Score:4, Insightful)
Thank God. (Score:3, Insightful)
No stupid questions, but some are silly. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, the industry was created pretty much ex niholo by its customers. Said customers were the military. Nobody else was thinking ahead far enough to anticipate this at this time. So blame whomever you like, but include yourself in there for not being any smarter than everyone else in the governments who didn't forsee it and start planning for it before we knew when it would be viable.
Nothing that pilots cant do. (Score:1, Insightful)
(1) Wilderness firefighting and monitoring.
It doesnt take a big plane to carry one pilot around looking for smoke.
(2) Search and rescue.
A good pilot can fly in any kind of weather too, and has a MUCH better chance of successfully picking people off a bobbing raft than any program you could possibly come up with... Cameras & code can only do so much... besides once you had the survivors aboard youd be breaking the law by carrying paying passengers without a properly certified pilot.
(3) Wildlife and domestic herd management.
Pilots do this every day.
(4) Distributed resource management.
Pilots also do this every day.
The most important asset a pilot has is his judgement. He has to be able to make a decision about whatever the situation is in an instant & has to make the right choice every time. Why are we trying to make computers do this? Because its cheaper? I doubt it, by the time you build the UAV and all the computer hardware necessary, trained the users, setup all the necessary infrastructure around it, you may as well have gotten an old cessna & stuck a pilot in it. You can get the plane for $20,000 or so & its not hard to find fresh pilots who will work for close to nothing just to build hours.
Would you trust your PC to drive your car? Would you trust it to drive your kids to school?
UAVs are neat in a sort of technological "look what we can do" kind of way, but they have no practical use that couldnt be better served by having a living breathing thinking pilot aboard.