THE PROLIFERATION OF CIVILIAN DRONES AND ALL THE TALK ABOUT THEM
IS SENDING SHIVERS THROUGH THE HELICOPTER COMMUNITY. IT’S HARD TO TURN ON THE TELEVISION, OPEN A NEWSPAPER, OR BROWSE YOUTUBE WITHOUT A DRONE STORY POPPING UP:
o Someone’s been arrested for flying a small drone to take pictures of an automobile accident, claiming he was going to provide it to the local TV
station.
o A law-enforcement agency has received a grant to experiment with drones carried in the trunks of patrol cars.
o A pessimistic reporter claims that drones will supplant helicopters in daily news operations.
o E-commerce vendors are hatching plans to deliver packages by drone, even as their competitors buy up drone companies to provide high-altitude
Internet points of presence. It’s now not unlikely that one might be driving on the expressway and see a microdrone
fl ying over a construction site conducting a survey. A Chicago resident may look out their apartment window and see one fl ying down the river. Some people even report them as UFOs.
When asked, FAA representatives sternly reiterate that commercial drone fl ight is illegal—or express confusion as to what is legal and what is not. In several articles in the trade press, we have argued that the small ones – microdrones – will continue to pop up all over the place, but that they will complement manned helicopter missions, fl ying in spaces and under circumstances that manned helicopters cannot fl y safely or at acceptable costs. The big ones – machodrones–will have to run a gauntlet of regulatory requirements that probably will make them so expensive to buy and operate that no rational decision maker will prefer them over helicopters.
The President of HAI, Matt Zuccaro, argued in a recent column that the helicopter community could benefi t from drone technology because drones will round out the aviation support capabilities that it can off er customers. We agree with him. Being both helicopter and airplane pilots, we have undertaken serious research over the last six months into the unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) phenomenon. We have fl own several diff erent kinds of drones, from bumblebee size to the much-featured Phantom 2, and are now building a larger microdrone particularly designed to explore capabilities in the arenas of electronic newsgathering, power line and pipeline patrol, law enforcement support, real estate marketing, and farming.
GET IN THE GAME
Helicopter pilots and operators should not sit back in the shadows, counting the days or minutes until drones and DRone OPerators (DROPs) replace them. Instead, we should off er our expertise in rotorcraft operations to shape the future of drones. Microdrones don’t threaten our jobs, but they do threaten our safety. Unless we become proactive in channeling the FAA’s regulatory response to this new technology, we may spend a signifi cant part of the rest of our careers with adequate job security but regularly dodging drones.
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