Look! Up in the sky!
It’s not a bird, but it might be getting ready to lay an egg. It’s not really a plane, although it’s sure got the Federal Aviation Administration’s attention. It’s an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), if you like, or an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) if you like that better. You probably know it as a drone, and it’s taking Metropolises everywhere by swarm.
The first consumer drone, the semi-venerable Parrot AR quadcopter, was launched at a Las Vegas tech show back in 2010. By 2014, industry watchers estimated some 350,000 consumer drones hangared in American garages. Christmas 2015 saw about a million more sold between LGA and LAX, and by New Year’s Day, 2017, experts expect the country’s remote-control civil fleet will soar to at least 2.5 million.
That’s a lot of unregulated aviation, which is why in 2014 the FAA began requiring drone owners to register as such. To date, about 325,000 actually have, which still leaves a lot of unregulated aviation.
Granted, most consumer drones aren’t big enough to do any serious damage. Models ranging from $99 starters to $6,500 professional-grade units can tip the scales anywhere between MOTA’s half-ounce JETJAT Nano and DJI’s burly 22-pound Spreading Wings S1000 Octocopter. Consumer drones don’t have to be big because their primary function is photographic, and cameras – even high-speed, hi-res video platforms on stabilizing gimbals – are getting smaller all the time. Still, there have been, er, incidents.
Two years ago a Dutch tourist crashed his eye-in-the-sky into Yellowstone’s fragile Grand Prismatic Spring. That same year an Australian triathlete ended up with stitches in her scalp and a disappointing time after a drone following the race fell to Earth directly on top off her noggin. Intending to catch lovers in mid-lip-lock, a TGI Friday’s holiday promotion called “Mobile Mistletoe” left a bad taste in participants’ mouths when an extra-extreme closeup cost a woman named Georgine Benvenuto the tip of her nose. And several people attending an event at Virginia Motorsports Park in Richmond were injured when a hobbyist’s UAV made an unscheduled landing in the stands.
While undoubtedly sympathetic toward terrestrial victims, the FAA is mostly uptight about UAVs in the airways. Sucked into a jet engine, that half-pound My-First-Drone under the Christmas tree could present a not-very-jolly holiday surprise for a plane-load of folks on their way back from grandmother’s house. In 2015, commercial pilots reported well over a thousand too-close encounters with recreational flying objects, a rate of more than three per day.
Just 26 states have acted to put the airbrakes on drone traffic, and then with almost monkish self-restraint. In Colorado, several attempts to legislatively sanitize sensitive airspace have all gone down in flames, burned to a crisp by concentrated heat from what this year became a $5.5 billion industry dominated by the Great Big Chinese manufacturer DJI.
Police departments and customs officials love drones. Farmers and ranchers love drones. Geologists, ecologists and archaeologists love drones. Drones are great for search and rescue, public and private security, mapping and surveying, and for the general monitoring of just about anything under the clear blue sky. Hollywood has gone positively drone-crazy. Collectively, however, that’s all small potatoes compared to the real prize – drone delivery.
For most of its short life, the backyard buzz-bot has been severely limited by range, tethered to its operator by a short radio leash. With the decreasing price and increasing reliability of GPS guidance systems, “autonomous” commercial units are expanding the boundaries of self-guided freight-hauling into profitable territory.
America’s first-ever drone delivery was made in March of 2015 when an Australian outfit called Flirtey teamed up with Virginia Tech and NASA to deliver 10 pounds of medical supplies from a rural Virginia airfield to a clinic about three miles away.
Eighteen months later, autonomous UAVs are poised to haul 50-pound payloads up to 15 miles, and some very heavy retail hitters are racing to be the first to get their goods in the air. Amazon, Google X and Walmart are all testing drone delivery systems, and since the FAA finally overcame its UAV anxiety long enough to formalize UAS operational rules a few weeks ago, Millennials should at last realize their fondest dream of using their smartphones to obtain everything from groceries to garments, electronics to auto parts and medicines to Montrachet without ever once having to interface directly with a tiresome human being.
Not surprisingly, first into the breach have been food and beverage entrepreneurs. In San Francisco, the “Tacocopter” is good for a crunchy lunch anywhere in the city. In Minnesota, ice fishermen have been known to get a 12-pack of Lakemaid Beer air-dropped hole-side. Guest to the Casa Madrona Hotel in Sausalito can get champagne droned to their rooms, and the Marquee Dayclub in Las Vegas vends over-priced bottles of stronger stuff the same way. London-based YO! Sushi has been sending “sushi burgers” on the wing, and Coca Cola has been air-lifting ice-cold comfort and notes from home to migrant construction workers stuck for weeks at a time atop rising Singapore skyscrapers.
A couple of California dreamers have completed beta testing the “Burrito Bomber.” Customers place their order via a special smartphone app. A custom-made refried wrap is loaded into a high-tech “Burrito Delivery Tube” affixed to the bottom of a Skywalker X8 Flying Wing. Upon reaching the specified coordinates, the Burrito Bomber engages a Quantum RTR Bomb System which releases the payload in mid-air, automatically deploying a parachute that allows the high-flying feast to descend gently into the hands of the hungry.
“We’ll be able to take to the skies to bring you your burrito faster than you can say ‘Salsa roja, por favor!’” declare a source close to the project.
It’s hard to see how that kind of Yankee Doodle ingenuity can miss. FAA analysts predict that innovation, imagination and rapidly advancing technologies will make drones a $90 billion business within the next 10 years.
Truth and justice aside, that’s definitely the American Way.
