eWave: Future of drone use appears to be wide-open
BY PAUL EDWARD PARKER
Journal Staff Writer
Imagine a Sunday afternoon some fall in the not-too-distant future:
The New England Patriots score a touchdown and kick an extra point before the TV fades to a commercial. A fresh, hot pizza fills the screen. Your stomach rumbles. You’ve just got to have a slice.
Without moving from the couch, you grab your smartphone, tap the icon for the pizza delivery company’s app and place your order: large pepperoni with extra cheese.
Less than 30 minutes later, you get a text and pry yourself away from the TV to open the front door.
As soon as you open the door, a pizza delivery drone alights on your front steps, a familiar cardboard pizza box strapped to the top.
Is that scenario too far-fetched?
“I don’t think anyone has an answer,” said Ben Gielow, a spokesman for a drone trade association. “That’s how wide open this industry is.”
Gielow, general counsel for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, said the commercial drone business is open to “anyone with a good idea.”
Much of the buzz about drones lately has focused on military aircraft shooting missiles at suspected terrorists and police aircraft snooping in our backyards. But representatives of the unmanned aerial systems industry — which eschews the term “drone” — imagine a future where the robotic aircraft perform a variety of tasks faster, safer and cheaper — no mileage reimbursement and tips for pizza drivers, as an example.
“A lot of it is just kind of boring uses,” said Gielow.
Among examples he cited:
Farmers can monitor their fields and target watering, fertilizer and pesticide only to those parts that need it, increasing crop yields while cutting environmental impacts.
Utility companies can inspect miles of pipelines and electrical transmission lines.
Energy companies can examine the undersides of deep-sea oil rigs, which now requires lowering a person from the platform, which is both dangerous and offers only limited views of systems that need to be checked.
Businesses can check buildings to see whether maintenance is needed, from towering factory smokestacks to the rain gutters at your home.
But, before any of this can happen, a major hurdle must be cleared: the Federal Aviation Administration has banned the commercial use of drones while it develops regulations for the industry.
“You can’t use an unmanned aircraft for commercial operations,” said Les Dorr, a spokesman for the FAA. “It’s probably not going to be until early next year.”
Congress has directed the agency to come up with rules for commercial drone flights.
“It probably won’t mean you can fly what you want, where you want, whenever you want,” Dorr said. “Our prime directive is to make sure any unmanned aircraft systems operation does not pose a safety hazard.”
Although drone technology is new, the agency’s mission of adopting new technology isn’t.
“The FAA has a history going back 50 years of integrating technology into the nation’s airspace,” Dorr said. That includes the introduction of jet aircraft, and then jumbo jets, as well as global positioning system navigation, as a few notable examples. “We have a record of success of integrating new technology into the nation’s airspace, and we expect to do the same with unmanned aircraft systems.”
Although the FAA has authorized certain drone flights since 1990, Dorr said interest started picking up in the middle of the last decade.
“Ten years ago, the market was not what it is now,” he said. “In our latest forecast, we said there could be as many as 7,500 small unmanned aircraft systems in operation over the next five years.”
With that kind of demand, a full system of regulation is needed to maintain safety, Dorr said.
As soon as the FAA promulgates regulations, Gielow expects the future to arrive at once. “That’s when the commercial industry will open up and really take off,” he said.
His association forecasts that about 80 percent of the industry will be focused on agricultural applications, with another 10 percent on public safety. All other applications will make up the remaining 10 percent of the market.
Some of that other 10 percent includes:
Environmental monitoring
“Aerial mapping will be a big one, as will wildlife mapping,” said Gielow.
Already, NASA is flying drones to monitor hurricanes. While commercial entities are grounded, government agencies can receive permission to fly drones. The space agency has two Global Hawk drones monitoring hurricanes. The drones are recycled military hardware.
And military drones have been pressed into service to help firefighters battle forest fires in the American West. One day, commercial drones could be used for such flights.
Filmmaking
Gielow predicts that drones will replace most uses of helicopters in moviemaking.
“It’s cheaper, it’s safer, and you can get shots now that you couldn’t get before,” he said. “They can fly in between buildings. They can fly around power lines. They can even fly into buildings — areas where you would never put a human for their own safety.”
Drones have already been used to film sequences in some major motion pictures, including the James Bond thriller “Skyfall,” science-fiction drama “Star Trek: Into Darkness” and a slew of superhero movies, from “Man of Steel” to “Iron Man 3,” among others.
Newsgathering
Especially during natural disasters, news organizations may find drones indispensable, Gielow said.
“Maybe you can’t access the roads or there’s downed power lines,” he said. “It will help you get out better information to the public more quickly and more cheaply.”
They also have been used in investigative journalism, to get to places not easily reached by foot.
One of the best-known cases, according to researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington in a report this spring about drone journalism, was of a drone that captured images of a red stream flowing into a Dallas river. The footage led to indictments of owners of a meat-packing plant for dumping pig blood into a creek.
Communications
Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico company, has developed a drone model it calls Solara that can act as a communications satellite.
“You could do away with having to build cellphone towers,” said Gielow.
According to the company, the solar-powered Solara can fly as high as 65,000 feet and remain aloft over its target area for up to five years. By being so high, it has no problems with barriers to conventional cell towers, such as mountains.
And all of that can be done more cheaply than launching satellites.
Air transport
One day, cargo planes and even passenger planes could crisscross the skies with no pilot on board.
“You could fly a 20-hour flight, and you wouldn’t need multiple crews there,” Gielow said.
Instead, pilots could report to a central location to fly an eight-hour shift before being replaced by another pilot who flies the plane from the same ground-based flight center. This is much the way the U.S. military flies drones on combat missions around the world, from a base in the American desert.
While a pilot is not on board, each plane is flown by one on the ground. “There’s always still a pilot in command of these flights.”
No way anybody will set foot on a plane without a pilot onboard, right?
Gielow said that we already have ceded control to computers on conveyances such as airport trams and elevators, which used to be operated by people.
“The public does, over time, become more comfortable with unmanned transportation,” he said. “The computer can do it better and more safely.”
So when will airlines begin flying planes without pilots onboard?
“I think everybody agrees it will be decades,” said Gielow.
But air cargo, such as UPS and FedEx, might have freighters flying around before then.
“That will be sooner, but it probably won’t be in the next five or 10 years,” he said.
One obstacle remains federal regulators.
“We’re having a hard time getting the FAA to allow stuff that’s four pounds.”
