Rise of the Drones Has Police and Regulators Scrambling to Catch Up

from The Guardian

Wardens at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopsville, South Carolina, were taken aback a few weeks ago when they conducted a routine sweep of the prison grounds. They discovered quantities of marijuana, cigarettes and cellphones scattered among the bushes in the no man’s land that surrounds the maximum-security institution.

The guards were even more astonished to find in the middle of the stash of contraband a small, lightweight object, with propellers attached. Closer inspection revealed the item to be an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), better known as a drone, whose operators had evidently made an audacious attempt to breach the prison walls that had come unstuck when it crash-landed.

Another day, another drone controversy. The failed smuggling attempt in Bishopsville, disclosed this week, is just one among an ever-intensifying rash of stories relating to the remote-controlled devices as they make their onward march into American civilian life.

The little buzzy planes seem to be everywhere these days. At the glamorous high-end of American public life they have been given a huge publicity boost by Amazon who last month applied for formal federal approval to set up a testing site to develop its futuristic idea of a drone delivery service called “Prime Air”.

You know that an innovation has arrived in the country when even Martha Stewart embraces it. The doyenne of good living this week wrote a paean to UAVs for Time magazine titled “Why I love my drone”.

At the mass market end of the spectrum, drones are also increasingly impinging on the public consciousness, often for unfortunate reasons. Pilots of passenger jets have complained that there have been near misses with drones, such as an incident in Florida in March at Tallahassee regional airport.

Even more sensationally, the New York police department last month claimed that a DJI Phantom drone had flown at 2,000 feet above the George Washington bridge and had forced a police helicopter to veer off course. The two operators of the UAV have been charged.

This plethora of headlines belies the fact that drones – or model aeroplanes as they used to be called – have been popular in the US since at least the 1930s. The fuel behind the current flurry of interest is that technology and mass production have suddenly brought relatively cheap and sophisticated machines within the grasp of the general public.

DJI Phantoms of the sort flown over the George Washington bridge sell on Amazon for under $500, and if you add to it a high-definition video camera it still comes in at just $1,300.

“Interest is exploding because you can put eight hundred dollars on a credit card and walk out of the store with a DJI Phantom, charge a battery and fly. The good news is that more and more people are getting involved. The bad news is that they include some who misuse the equipment or just don’t know any better,” said Steve Cohen, a drone enthusiast who organises the New York city drone user group.

A powerful driver of the new fad for flying drones is the high-definition video camera that can be attached to the UAVs. Many of the new enthusiasts pouring into the hobby are not coming for the thrills and challenges of aviation, but for the photography. The technology has opened up new vistas, such as the dramatic footage captured on 4 July by drones flying through Independence Day firework displays.

Continue Reading at TheGuardian.com…