Why we should all be deeply worried about the rise and rise of drones
Retail giant amazon has decided it wants to own a slice of sky. Not the broadcaster, but the beautiful and occasionally blue thing above our heads. Why? So that it can ‘cordon off’ a strip of the atmosphere, between 200 and 400 ft, in which to fly unmanned aerial vehicles — or drones — to deliver its products in record time.
its website boasts that it is ‘excited’ about this proposal (which, with typical corporate naffness, it has dubbed a ‘vision’) as it means that in the future, packages will be delivered to customers worldwide in 30 minutes or less.
One day, amazon enthuses, seeing drones shuttling around the sky ‘will be as normal as seeing mail trucks on the road’. How ghastly!
When so much of the world at eye-level is covered with man-made, consumerist guff, from advertising hoardings to garish shop-fronts, the sky is still largely the preserve of the natural world. But in the amazon vision, it won’t be so much lark ascending as drone ascending — nasty metal pigeons of profit to sully the view, all in the name of the great modern gods Convenience and Speed.
its plans to carve up the sky are working their way through the U.S. regulatory system. So far, the Federal aviation administration has granted amazon permission to test prototypes in public airspace if they’re travelling no faster than 100 mph. it does not yet have permission to fly the drones commercially, but the U.S. Congress has declared a deadline of next month for the ‘safe integration’ of civil unmanned aircraft — i.e. drones — into the national airspace system. So the swarm of amazon mosquitoes could come sooner than we think.
it highlights a worrying phenomenon: the steady march of drones from the skies over afghanistan and Pakistan, where they are used to target militants, into our everyday lives.
For as little as £100 you can buy a quadcopter fitted with a camera and, as long as it weighs less than 20 kg, send it up, up and away with no permit. the British public have taken to drones with gusto — Maplin reported a quadrupling of sales last year.
as George Orwell observed, we love solitary hobbies; we are a country of ‘stamp-collectors, pigeon-fanciers, amateur carpenters, couponsnippers, darts-players’ and, we can now add, drone-flyers.
the vast majority of owners enjoy their hobby in harmless ways, using drone-mounted cameras to photograph their house from the air, for example, or their daughter’s wedding party; the frill of surf at the coast and other beauties of the natural landscape. Pleasures previously reserved for the birds are now available to us all.
DrONeS are useful, too: they are hovering over the remote jungles of Gabon, keeping an eye on endangered chimps. there are plans to save lives in the world’s poorest countries by flying blood samples on a drone from rural communities to clinics for a speedy medical diagnosis. in farming, Old MacDonald can now check livestock or spray crops by remote control; one New Zealand sheep farmer even uses a drone to herd his flock. Who needs lassie?
the possibilities are great. But so, too, are the threats — for in the wrong hands, a drone can wreak havoc. We have sleepwalked into an extraordinary situation where, without a licence or background checks, people can buy something that can film voyeuristically, trespass stealthily, crash spectacularly — and even has the potential to bring down planes or cause terrorist incidents.
the alarm was sounded earlier this year by lord West, the respected former security minister, during a House of lords debate on counterterror legislation. He argued that laws hadn’t kept up with the ‘ huge and rapid march of technology’ in drones.
Pointing to the ‘ Maplin factor’ — that drones are widely and cheaply available — and concerned that terrorists could ‘buy lots of them’, he suggested beefing up the law with nofly zones for drones and the specific criminal offence of using a drone for purposes of terrorism.
His proposals were batted away with the line that the Government was ‘closely monitoring’ the situation.
aviation experts, meanwhile, fear it is only a matter of time before one of these relatively tiny machines brings an airliner down after getting sucked into one of its engines. as Patrick Smith, a U.S. pilot and author of the the pilot reported seeing a helicopterstyle drone about 20ft from the wing of the jet, which did not appear on the air traffic control radar.
the Civil aviation authority (Caa) has said such potential collisions are increasingly likely and could have ‘extremely serious consequences’.
to try to avert disaster at worst, and haphazard handling at best, the Caa has set out a Dronecode, which attempts to clarify the current law. it prohibits drone-flying beyond the operator’s line of sight ( 500m horizontally, or 121m vertically) and instructs them to avoid aircraft, helicopters, airports and airfields.
Further, drones fitted with cameras must not be flown within 50m of people or buildings, or over congested areas such as music concerts.
But while the Dronecode urges ‘common sense’, it is barely policed.
there has been one notable prosecution: a Cumbrian man who flew his gadget over a nuclear submarine facility faced fines and costs of more than £4,000 last year.
Other reckless idiots include the man who steered a drone over Buckingham Palace last September, and the tennis fan whose mini-copter hovered over Wimbledon’s Centre Court this year.
all are one mistake away from causing injury or even death. in australia, a drone filming a triathlon fell onto an athlete, knocking her to the floor and causing ‘rivers of blood’ to stream from her head.
Yet it is not the accident-prone we really need to worry about. it is those determined to bend the drones to darker or more dangerous purposes.
the size and stealth of these machines makes them perfect for spying. Chief inspector Nick aldworth of the Metropolitan Police has warned of drones ‘hovering outside bedrooms for whatever nefarious reasons’. He has spoken of the difficulty in collaring offenders when one simply ‘whizzes past your window and catches something that you’d rather it didn’t catch’.
LaSt month — in what sounds like a scene from Carry On Droning — a hobby aircraft was spotted over a nudist beach in Dorset, where those in the altogether were altogether not amused. it was a different kind of exposure to the one they were after.
as for the smuggling possibilities, officers at Bedford Prison recently found a drone stuck in the razor wire of the prison’s perimeter, packed with a cargo of drugs, mobile phones, screwdrivers and a knife. Only last week, another security scare was sparked when a drone with a camera crashed into a jail for sex offenders, Whatton Prison in Nottinghamshire.
the Ministry of Justice has revealed that between February and May this year there were seven drone seizures. Who knows how many slipped through the barbed wire?
and, of course, there remains the terrible threat of a drone-based terror attack. Security chiefs are said to be extremely fearful of terrorists packing drones with explosives and using them to attack large outdoor events such as football matches or festivals.
a report led by ex- Government Communications Headquarters chief Sir David Omand last year warned of large crowds being ‘vulnerable’ in the event that ‘a future terrorist group were to look for means of dispersing chemical or biological agents’.
it is a chilling thought. So what is being done to stop drones being misused by weirdos, criminals and terrorists? the answer is: very little. the domestic use of unmanned aircraft has soared well ahead of any rules controlling it.
this spring, a House of lords committee suggested making drone flights traceable, creating an online register of drone owners and increasing the use of ‘geo-fencing’ — pre-programming the device with information on where it is safe to fly. Using GPS, if it encounters a ‘fenced’ area, such as an airport, the drone will ‘bump’ into the invisible electronic barrier and be programmed automatically to land.
the British airline Pilots association suggested that geo-fencing could be mandatory on all but the smallest drones.
regulation can be seen as a bore, throwing up thickets of red tape to spoil people’s fun. But it would be foolish to allow mass drone ownership to carry on completely unmanaged.
Otherwise, we risk looking at skies increasingly thick with drones — and thick with threats.