‘Back to the Future’ got drones right
‘Chalk up another one’ for movie’s creators
In Back to the Future: Part II, a camera drone hovers as the town’s bad guys are arrested, one of many prescient technology predictions in the 1989 movie.
The bulky drone in the movie, operated by USA TODAY, is equipped with cameras and antennas and bears little resemblance to the streamlined models operated by hobbyists today. “The classic cliché about any TV news or newspapers is, ‘Who’s on the scene first?’ ” says Bob Gale, who wrote the movie screenplay. “We knew about stringers. So we thought, OK, how crazy can we be here? What if we had the new stuff automated?” The movie’s director, Robert Zemeckis, “is the one who deserves the credit for coming up with the idea. We’d all hang out and spitball stuff.”
News organizations have gone far beyond spitballing. The com- mercial use of drones is still prohibited unless companies receive exemptions from the Federal Aviation Administration. In an effort to get the FAA to relax the rules, 16 media organizations interested in using drones for newsgathering — including The New York Times Co., the Associated Press and USA TODAY’s parent, Gannett — have partnered with Virginia Tech to test small drones for photos and videos and training journalists.
But with viral videos perhaps the quickest way to fan more clicks, new federal rules greenlighting commercial drones will surely drive other digital-savvy start-up media outlets to jump into the fray. Gale’s and Zemeckis’ branding of their drones with “USA TODAY” didn’t foresee the news industry disruption triggered by the Internet. “We were trying to make jokes,” Gale recalls. “But our view was that conglomerates would get bigger and bigger. And there might be only one newspaper in the whole world, and that would be USA TODAY. And there would be all these local editions.”
Several media companies have already started using drones, with the FAA’s blessing. The FAA grants some exemptions if users agree not to fly them in restricted areas, such as airports, and not over people, says Joel Roberson, an attorney at Holland & Knight, which is working with the news organizations.
About 1,600 companies have received exemptions. “It’s going to only expand,” Roberson says.
The FAA plans to issue its rules allowing the commercial use of small, unmanned drones in the first half of next year. A key restriction that the news industry would like to repeal is the requirement that drones must be piloted by an FAA-certified pilot. The coalition at Virginia Tech is “establishing a training protocol” so that trained journalists can fly them, Roberson says.
When the reports of drone use by news organizations first began to surface, Gale and Zemeckis gave each other a virtual highfive. “Either Bob or I emailed the other and said, ‘OK, chalk up another one for us,’ ” Gale says.