Will Bureaucracy Keep The U.S. Drone Industry Grounded?
Martin Kaste
Americans are suspicious of drones. Reports of the unmanned aerial vehicles’ use in war zones have raised concerns about what they might do here at home. For instance, in Seattle earlier this year, a public outcry forced the police department to abandon plans for eye-in-the-sky UAV helicopters.
The backlash worries Paul Applewhite, an aerospace engineer with 10 years of experience at companies like McDonnell Douglas and Sikorsky. He now runs his own startup company, Applewhite Aero, in an industrial park on the south side of Seattle. Applewhite is developing drones — or UAVs, as the industry calls them. He shows off a 3-pound Styrofoam plane he has dubbed the Invenio.
“We bought the airframe and the motor off of an online hobby shop,” he says. To make it a UAV, he added a GPS antenna and a circuit board that allows it to fly autonomously. He hopes to sell it to aid agencies; medical teams could use it to fly tissue samples back to a lab, for instance. They’d enter the coordinates, and the Invenio would find its way back.
