The Little-Known Feud That’s Shaping the Future of Delivery Drones
What happens when you take your drone to public land in Pleasanton, California and start flying it around in first-person view, using the drone’s onboard camera to see where you’re going? If you’re Sean Wendland, you get a stern talking to from an old man who says you can’t use your newfangled technology here.
The old guard vs. the new. Welcome to the nerdiest beef in the drone world.
For decades, the model aircraft hobby has been dominated by former soldiers, pilots, and other airplane enthusiasts. They’ve been flying gas-powered model aircraft and balsa-wood clunkers at flying clubs around the country for decades with very little interruption from the government or anyone else, for that matter.
But when you pop a camera on a hexacopter and stream that camera’s video back to your iPad to fly it like you’re playing StarFox, things change. All of a sudden, instead of a model airplane you can fly in circles for a half-hour, you’ve got a drone that can be used for deliveries, to do land surveys, to perform search-and-rescue missions, and take aerial photography. And you’ve got a huge influx of Silicon Valley-types who care very little about flying around a little airplane and care very much about getting a slice of the estimated $13.6 billion the drone industry is expected to be worth once the FAA finally sets commercial regulations.
“They are tech guys, that’s one thing I’ve noticed,” Dave Mathewson, executive director of the Academy of Model Aeronautics, said about first-person view droners. “I don’t think they’re as interested in the flying aspect, they’re interested in the platform and the ability to do something with it like starting a company.”
First-person view (FPV) is how Predator drones are usually operated overseas and it’s how commercial drones will have to be operated if they’re going to do anything out of line-of-sight from its pilot—unless we’re going to let them fly completely autonomously. It’s also a technology that is hated by most of the old guard.
Wendland is not a member of the AMA, as that old man at Lassen was, but it’s not for lack of trying. He said he was turned away by three flying clubs who said his kind, and his technology, wasn’t welcome there.
“It’s a cultural and a generational issue,” Wendland said. “I’ve been turned away from three clubs and now I have a bad taste in my mouth. I won’t go near anything associated with the AMA, and a lot of people in the FPV community feel the same way.”
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-little-known-fued-thats-shaping-the-future-of-delivery-drones
