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" The drones they are a coming, and you should be cool with that fact. Why? Because there are several implications to the pending decision by the Federal Aviation Administration about the  use of drones on movie sets that will apply to and benefit a whole lot of people. You included. Call them what you will. They are &amp;quot;drones&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Unmanned Aerial Vehicles&amp;quot; or, as the U.S. Air Force absolutely insists, &amp;quot;Remotely Piloted Vehicles.&amp;quot; But their ability to precisely and cheaply see things from the air has a multitude of utilities for us civilians. All of which, though you may not know it, had been barred in any way, shape or form from commercial usage, until recently. Even local government usage had to be individually approved by the FAA ahead of time. Now the rules are about to change to allow for the commercial use of drones by movie companies, on movie sets. (Well, if the decision is &amp;quot;yes,&amp;quot; as is expected.) Most of those aircraft are now quadracopters or even octocopters. If it happens, movie studios will be able to use them as long as they weigh less than 55 pounds, can fly no faster than 57 miles per hour (knots)*, stay below 400 feet, and are at least five miles from an airport. Those last two are already rules for the flying of drones by hobbyists. But besides the obvious advantage this gives the movie moguls, it also means that the technology will spread. Market pressures almost assure that as a foregone conclusion. Before long, drone technology will almost certainly be approved for use by news-gathering organizations, farmers, Search-and-Rescue operations, medical evacuations**, along with the obvious applications. You may soon see security patrols around nuclear (and all other) power stations, for example, as well as surveying for real estate, mapping for the same pipeline checks to identify spills and contain them (Alaska anyone?) - the list goes on and on. The possibilities, once you think about it, are nearly endless, and that is just for the drones which are human operated. What matters more is when the FAA sees reality and allows for the flight of robotic aircraft in American airspace. Did I just say that? Did I just advocate robots? That is to say, truly autonomous machines which can accomplish a task without a human, in real-time, 3D space. Like in the Terminator movies? Yes, yes I did. Why? Because when you start to think about it you realize that they are being hyper-bureaucratic in the FAA. The software that can fly a jetliner is the intellectual equivalent of a Rhesus monkey compared to that which flies a drone chopper, which you could compare to a human (if only for relative comparison purposes). The FAA has been, for nearly 30 years, all sorts of paranoid about the use of drones in U.S. airspace because (insert wringing hands), &amp;quot;Oh, what if it crashes? Then it will be all our fault and one of us will lose a comfortable 9-5 job! We can&amp;#039;t have that!&amp;quot; Yet they allow Rhesus monkeys to carry us across the continent. Seriously, ok, I get it. Thirty years ago was probably too early to change the rules. I mean, they used five computers on the original Space Shuttles to get them up into Outer-Freaking-Space back in the 1980&amp;#039;s. But now? Now I have more computing power on my out-of-date iPhone than all five of those machines, and probably 50 more like them. Now we have the ability, and are developing the software, that makes autonomous (by machines) transport possible, and that has been the case for at least ten years. So now think about the morality of what the FAA has been doing, blocking drones. They have stopped the commercial development of drones that could do medical evaluations on America&amp;#039;s highways. By now, you know, if there was a commercial reason for it, we could have that ability. What is more, because 10 or 20 hospitals could each have their own drone and only have to pay for the cost of 3-4 pilots shared among all of them, we could have massively faster response times to those highway wrecks. That is even before you explore truly autonomous flight, which believe me, is possible now. How many American lives has the FAA cost us with this hyper-conservatism, and is that not immoral? Autonomous aircrafts can now maintain an exact position, down to a few feet. Make channels in the sky for them, do whatever paperwork is needed, but dammit, Americans die without the robots we could have in the sky. They die on highways and in cornfields, beneath tractor trailers and plain old tractors. They get lost on mountains and in forests, and they fall off of cliffs. Give us our robots. Unleash that mighty beast, American greed, and see the skies change our lives. Fer cripes sake people, if Lindbergh had to follow FAA rules in 1927, the man would never have left the ground. Yes, of course, there are some risks in all of this and I can hear the worried among you already thinking, &amp;quot;But then corporations could use them to spy on us...&amp;quot; or any of a multitude of variations thereof. Get over it, they already &amp;quot;spy&amp;quot; on us in a million more ways than does any government, including our own, and that is saying something. Think of the positives for now. We, collectively, will figure out how best to (try to) militate against the negatives once the technology is in place. *If you didn&amp;#039;t notice, 57 mph might look like a strange number, until you remember that the FAA (and the flying world) think in terms of knots. One knot is 1.15 (well, actually, 1.15077944802) of what we now call a &amp;quot;statute mile.&amp;quot; It also happens to be one &amp;quot;nautical mile&amp;quot; per hour. And a nautical mile? That is derived by the needs of mariners to know where the hell they were at sea. Chop the planet in half, at the equator. Look down at either half and divide it into 360 equal slices (degrees). Then divide each one of those &amp;quot;degrees&amp;quot; into 60 sub-slices, those are called &amp;quot;minutes.&amp;quot; One minute is one nautical mile. **Already the U.S. military is working on one that can act as a rescue chopper, essentially a flying rescue pod, one which is ready to fly on a moment&amp;#039;s notice, and which could be remotely operated from hundreds or thousands of miles away. But of course, that is going to be a little bigger than 55 pounds. Robert Bateman (Lt. Col., Ret.) was once a soldier. He is currently sailing up and down the East Coast, getting to know the country he served for a couple decades. He can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a30235/droning-on-and-on/>