Drones: When the Future Sneaks Up on You

Last month, at a Congressional hearing, Sentator Patrick Leahy quoted an FAA prediction that there would be “as many as 30,000 small, lightweight unmanned vehicles [drones] operating in the national airspace by the end of this decade”. That was considered a lot. And he was talking about seven years from now.

Guess what. There are more than 30,000 such small, lightweight drones in Americaalready. My own company sells more than 10,000 a year, and we’re just one of many. We’ve been at it for nearly four years.

Drones are not just remote-controlled aircraft (there are hundreds of thousands of those, which have been flown by hobbyists for decades); instead, they’re computer-controlled unmanned aircraft capable of autonomous flight, following GPS waypoints and otherwise executing pre-programmed missions and controlling on-board cameras. A decade ago, this was the sole domain of the military. Today, you can buy one for less than $550.

How is it possible that Senator Leahy and the Federal Aviation Administration don’t have any idea how many such drones there are in America?

The simple answer is that they’re stuck in the past. The FAA typically tracks aircraft from aerospace companies that go through a certification process. They’ve assumed that the only people who can make drones, which are after all highly complex flying robots, are such firms.

And until about five years ago, that was true. But now, thanks to consumer smartphones and the economies of scale of Apple and Samsung, the tiny sensors and powerful processors needed for drone autopilots are available to anyone. Indeed, they can be bought at Radio Shack. Anybody can make or buy a drone today, and we’ve even created a website called DIY Drones to show you how. It currently has more than 38,000 members flying drones today. So much for the government prediction that “up to 30,000” drones might be here by 2020.

Before you despair for the FAA and Senator Leahy’s ability to track technology’s progress, remember that this sort of disconnect is always what happens with disruptive change. When technologies come from big, regulated companies like the aerospace industry and defense contractors, the government can count them. But when they come from the grass roots, like our own DIY Drones community of amateurs and hobbyists, they’re off the radar (so to speak).

We’ve seen this time and time again. In 1993, when I was at the Economist magazine, I wrote the publication’s first report on the Internet. In it, I described a scene at the FCC, the agency that regulates telecommunications networks.

[A researcher] recalls visiting America’s Federal Communications Commission in 1990 and seeing an official excitedly waving two charts. One, from the FCC, showed the traditional telecoms investment, worth several billion dollars and growing at the same rate as for the past few decades. The other, from the Commerce Department, showed all network infrastructure investment–including office PC networks and private long-distance data networks.

It had started at about the same level as the few years earlier, but had grown exponentially to double that figure by the late 1980s. The gap was widening rapidly, representing something altogether new; something, the FCC official admitted, “we know nothing about.”

It was the foundation for the Internet, even though the true importance of that development did not become clear for another decade.

Now, twenty years later, the FAA is about to realize that it’s making the same mistake with drones. This technology is no longer something that goes through a regulatory approval process and comes from companies that file paperwork in Washington DC. You can buy drones in the shopping mall. Children fly them on weekends in the park. The Chinese make them in toy factories and sell them by the tens of thousands. The technology has democratized and it’s now fast, cheap and out of control.

It’s like the Internet all over again.