Drones are Set to Conquer Oregon’s Skies. Are You Ready?
By Jonathan Frochtzwajg Portland Monthly
In a dusty vacant lot beneath the Fremont Bridge, Scott Edwards toggles switches on a bulky controller and watches his drone rise. About two feet across and equipped with four rotors, it looks nothing like the winged combat drones that loom over various theaters of war and, thus, the darker corners of the public imagination. In fact, its sleek, white surfaces recall nothing more exotic than an iPhone.
Edwards sends his vaguely insectile device whirring over the lot, careful not to fly over the small gathering of people watching his demonstration (staged for my benefit) from the perimeter. “There’s a body language to drones,” says the 29-year-old founder of the 300-plus-member hobbyist group PDX Drones. Hovering directly over someone’s head is considered creepy, a violation of embryonic 21st-century etiquette. Steer clear of personal airspace, Edwards has found, and most humans are brightly inquisitive about the technology. Other species can be even more enthusiastic. “Dogs love ’em,” he says, as a pit bull alternately chases and flees the bobbing, weaving flying robot. “It’s like a modern-day Frisbee.”
On this summer day in 2014, Edwards’s drone is a curiosity. In 10 years, such machines will almost certainly be humdrum, each device just one of thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) buzzing about our airspace.
Best known in America as weapons in the War on Terror, drones are quickly moving from the military to the civilian sphere, where the technology offers applications, both potential and proven, in “the three F’s”—farming, film, firefighting—and beyond. (In Japan, crop-spraying by drone is already commonplace. DHL uses drones to deliver medical supplies to a small German island, and filmmakers used a drone to capture a motorcycle chase scene in the James Bond movie Skyfall.) The possibilities have attracted at least one top technophile: Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson left that magazine, one of high tech’s more excitable hype machines, in 2012 to cofound 3D Robotics, now a drone-industry leader. Major corporations are also circling, with Amazon developing a “Prime Air” service to deliver packages by UAV (in a half-hour or less!) and Google at work on its own drone-delivery program, Project Wing.
Oregon boasts a robust aviation cluster, including Boeing Portland (based in Gresham), heavy-duty-helicopter manufacturers Erickson and Columbia Helicopters, and Insitu, one of the lead players in combat drones. (Owned by Boeing, Insitu is technically in Washington, just across the Columbia from Hood River, but has many ties on the Oregon side of the border.) Meanwhile, the “Silicon Forest” seeded decades ago by the likes of Tektronix and Intel has attracted a deep pool of engineering talent. This convergence has drone boosters forecasting a “Silicon Sky” over Oregon: a vibrant new industry, pioneered by tech-scene and aviation veterans and buoyed by state R&D funding—not to mention the only federally designated test ranges on the mainland West Coast.
In this imagined future, flying robots tell farmers which crops need to be irrigated, sprayed with pesticide, or treated for disease. They reveal hot spots in building fires before firefighters charge in, or map the earth with previously unimagined detail. The infant industry’s proponents conservatively estimate that Oregon drone design, manufacturing, software, and applications could bring $486 million to the state over the next decade. “In 10 years, the aerial-robotic network will be as common to our civilization as the smartphone is today,” predicts Jonathan Evans of Portland drone start-up Skyward.
But the industry must overcome a few not-so-minor obstacles. Besides intense competition from other states and less stringently regulated countries, there’s the technology’s ominous military heritage and its attendant privacy concerns. Above all, many in the industry fear that federal bureaucratic dithering and overzealous state laws, passed in reaction to an unfamiliar and sometimes unsettling technology, will leave America flailing behind the rest of the world in this near-space race.
Before setting the sky abuzz, Oregon’s fledgling drone sector faces a fight and flight moment.
“Right now, the industry is just a handful of people who have believed in it, and pushed for it, and done a lot of work on their own with very few resources,” says Ryan Jenson, CEO of the Wilsonville-based drone company Honeycomb. “We can drop the ball, or we can be, by far, out in front.”
