Age of drones is hovering
Alistair Bone looks at the burgeoning use of drones in the Waikato.
Peter Kirby’s been flying model planes for 25 years, so hovering a little helicopter a metre or so outside a first-floor office window is a piece of cake. There’s a camera on the chopper, so anything going on in there can be captured and broadcast to the world, live even, if it warrants it. Practice is the trick. Anyone can go out and buy a drone and put it in the air, but keeping it in one place and shooting what you want is the tough bit.
It’s got four motors and he calls it a multicopter. He’s a telecoms tech and he built this one for a couple of thousand dollars. He reckons you could get the same for about $5000 ready to fly, but any electronics chain will sell you a tiny one for a hundred bucks that will go for about 5 minutes up to 30 metres and shoot video to an SD card.
The army flies drones, the police are getting them – they are already all over the country. If you haven’t seen one yet, you almost certainly will this year.
Most Christmas toy helicopters and their cameras end up in a pile of junk by the new year. They aren’t that easy to fly and people have to learn new forms of spatial awareness. Using your fingers to control a quick thing far away and moving in three dimensions is not yet an evolutionary skill.
Mr Kirby says the PlayStation generation does very well and it’s getting easier anyway. Some new drones will automatically hold it in the hover while you point and click. He doesn’t like the word drone, as he believes people imagine assassinations in far-away places when they hear that.
The United States Air Force is a big fan, with 333 strikes launched in Afghanistan alone last year from its ever-increasing fleet. USAF drones take off and land in places like Kandahar, but are flown by people sitting in a comfortable room in the US Midwest, who commute back to their homes in the suburbs after their shift.
For some reason, our own military are not going for the super-long-range drones that seem absolutely custom made for patrolling our vast seascape. Last year’s Defence White Paper prompted the defence forces to say they were still working out where drones ‘‘might fit in the mix of technology available’’.
Mr Kirby could drop things on people far away, too, if he wanted, but that’s not really considered cricket by many in the aviation community and absolutely everyone in the police force and court system. Even the office snooping was at a newspaper inside a gated security zone with reporters standing next to him. The possibilities are intriguing, though.
He is a fibre-optic platform designer and in his garage he has built himself something that would have been the province of Boeing’s black ops division 10 years ago. It flies for 10 minutes and can video downlink to a two-inch screen in front of him and a bigger 12-inch monitor if that is needed.
It can handle 30kmh winds, and it can be used at night and go up over 1200 metres. If he wanted to, he could set the downlink to a pair of video goggles and fly it as if he were sitting in it. It can’t fly in the rain in its current configuration, but that is possible, too, if you want to spend the money. For an extra $3000, you can add an infrared camera. He is building another five machines in the garage for other people.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says it’s working on some rules.
Its manager of special flight operations and recreational aviation, Rex Kenny, says laws governing pilotless aircraft are still in the early stages of development.
Operators generally take this to mean they can operate small drones freely under 400 feet (120m) and more than 4 kilometres from an airfield. If it’s outside those limits or if it’s commercial work being done by a big drone, the paperwork starts to get heavy, requiring a written authorisation from CAA.
The authority doesn’t keep any numbers on how many drones there are and claims to believe the industry will be selfregulating. This might be hard when an over-the-counter flying machine can be launched and landed from someone’s backyard.
‘‘Initially ensuring compliance will be difficult,’’ says Mr Kenny, ‘‘however, as more and more operators become authorised, the industry will tend to police itself as happens in other sectors — those that have authorisations don’t want to see ‘their’ work going to others who don’t have an authorisation.’’
Eight authorisations are in effect and another 12 are applied for.
CAA also investigates aerial malfeasance and misfortune and has two incidents involving drones on its books. No-one will go into details except to say that one might be acted on ‘‘by another agency’’. That may or may not be the incident caught on camera in Auckland late last year where a helo-drone was launched among the highrises and crashed into one, falling 50 metres to a (luckily empty) pavement.
The possibilities for more deliberate deviancy are obvious. Fun-loving drone pilots in France have posted video showing their multicopter landing on a truck and cruising around on the host until they find a police car. They take off and follow the cop car until the gendarmes get too obviously annoyed. Then they just fly away, uncatchable.
The New Zealand Police are buying one for themselves from New Zealand company Hawkeye UAV. Hawkeye’s product allows for a 90-minute-plus flight time and is optimised for sophisticated 3-D mapping. The police say they will use their aircraft for criminal investigations – scanning large crime scenes and the like – but it seems unlikely it will stop at that.
Councils will find them irresistible for checking consents and it’s impossible to believe the police won’t eventually use them for revenue-gathering opportunities – finding marijuana patches and speeders. There may even be air battles when the antisocial wake up to the possibilities.
The US Federal Aviation Administration thinks there will be about 10,000 civilian drones (including those belonging to law enforcement) flying in the US within five years and possibly 30,000 by 2020.
‘‘Their use is as wide as the imagination,’’ Mr Kenny says.
Aviation Industry Association chief executive Irene King says things look good for Kiwi drone makers, though there are only about three serious manufacturers here. ‘‘They are exporting some. There is undoubtedly potential. The technical development here is good and not outrageously expensive to do.’’
She says regulation around drones is coming, extremely slowly, and keeping drones out of the way of everything else in the sky – airspace separation – will be critical. Overseas, some working drones are equipped with the same kind of collision avoidance software airliners are now required to use.
That unplanned merging of manned and unmanned flying machines is the nightmare that keeps Rodney Pilbrow awake. His Gatewing X100 is about the size and weight of a big seagull, but it buzzes around the Waikato a couple of hundred feet in the air at 75kmh.
‘‘The worst thing that I can envisage is a helicopter popping up over a hill,’’ he says.
The X100 is the upper end of the market, a 50,000 (about NZ$80,000) Belgian carbon fibre and extruded polypropylene device. The price includes a trip to Europe to learn how to work it. Pilbrow Surveying Ltd uses it on the job. It’s launched from a metal slingshot before its motor kicks in. From there it will fly to a set series of GPS points in a grid, snapping its camera fulltime before returning home to land.
Mr Pilbrow does a lot of work in quarries, where the volume of stockpiles has to be routinely measured. Stricter safety measures are making this harder and harder for surveyors on the ground. A regular client used to take about 24 hours to cover the area, but the X100 will do it in half an hour of flight with the data back by midafternoon the next day.
Mr Kirby is winding up his operation. There is an approved training scheme for UAV pilots now and the strong suspicion it will become compulsory soon. He will still fly as a hobbyist, but for serious money to be made, there will have to be health and safety plans and all the other guff that happens when government gets involved.
Globally, the market for UAVs is expected to be worth more than NZ$100 billion in a decade, with little firms being gobbled up as giant companies muscle in on the act. The Wild West days of the industry may be over already.