Dear Friends,
Be Well.
David
Unmanned Flight
The Drones Come Home
Unmanned aircraft have proved their prowess against al
Qaeda. Now they’re poised to take off on the home front. Possible missions:
patrolling borders, tracking perps, dusting crops. And maybe watching us all?
By John Horgan
Photograph by Joe McNally
At the edge of a stubbly, dried-out alfalfa field
outside Grand Junction, Colorado, Deputy Sheriff Derek Johnson, a stocky young
man with a buzz cut, squints at a speck crawling across the brilliant, hazy
sky. It’s not a vulture or crow but a Falcon—a new brand of unmanned aerial
vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. The sheriff ’s office here in Mesa
County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone-hued mountains, is
weighing the Falcon’s potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the
lam. A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone’s flickering
images of a nearby highway.
Standing behind Johnson, watching him watch the
Falcon, is its designer, Chris Miser. Rock-jawed, arms crossed, sunglasses
pushed atop his shaved head, Miser is a former Air Force captain who worked on
military drones before quitting in 2007 to found his own company in Aurora,
Colorado. The Falcon has an eight-foot wingspan but weighs just 9.5 pounds.
Powered by an electric motor, it carries two swiveling cameras, visible and
infrared, and a GPS-guided autopilot. Sophisticated enough that it can’t be
exported without a U.S. government license, the Falcon is roughly comparable,
Miser says, to the Raven, a hand-launched military drone—but much cheaper. He
plans to sell two drones and support equipment for about the price of a squad
car.
A law signed by President Barack Obama in February
2012 directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American
airspace wide open to drones by September 30, 2015. But for now Mesa County,
with its empty skies, is one of only a few jurisdictions with an FAA permit to
fly one. The sheriff ’s office has a three-foot-wide helicopter drone called a
Draganflyer, which stays aloft for just 20 minutes.
The Falcon can fly for an hour, and it’s easy to
operate. “You just put in the coordinates, and it flies itself,” says Benjamin
Miller, who manages the unmanned aircraft program for the sheriff ’s office. To
navigate, Johnson types the desired altitude and airspeed into the laptop and
clicks targets on a digital map; the autopilot does the rest. To launch the
Falcon, you simply hurl it into the air. An accelerometer switches on the
propeller only after the bird has taken flight, so it won’t slice the hand that
launches it.
The stench from a nearby chicken-processing plant
wafts over the alfalfa field. “Let’s go ahead and tell it to land,” Miser says
to Johnson. After the deputy sheriff clicks on the laptop, the Falcon swoops
lower, releases a neon orange parachute, and drifts gently to the ground, just
yards from the spot Johnson clicked on. “The Raven can’t do that,” Miser says
proudly.
Offspring of 9/11
A dozen years ago only two communities cared much
about drones. One was hobbyists who flew radio-controlled planes and choppers
for fun. The other was the military, which carried out surveillance missions
with unmanned aircraft like the General Atomics Predator.
Then came 9/11, followed by the U.S. invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, and drones rapidly became an essential tool of the U.S.
armed forces. The Pentagon armed the Predator and a larger unmanned
surveillance plane, the Reaper, with missiles, so that their operators—sitting
in offices in places like Nevada or New York—could destroy as well as spy on
targets thousands of miles away. Aerospace firms churned out a host of smaller
drones with increasingly clever computer chips and keen sensors—cameras but
also instruments that measure airborne chemicals, pathogens, radioactive
materials.
The U.S. has deployed more than 11,000 military
drones, up from fewer than 200 in 2002. They carry out a wide variety of
missions while saving money and American lives. Within a generation they could
replace most manned military aircraft, says John Pike, a defense expert at the
think tank GlobalSecurity.org. Pike suspects that the F-35 Lightning II, now
under development by Lockheed Martin, might be “the last fighter with an
ejector seat, and might get converted into a drone itself.”
At least 50 other countries have drones, and some,
notably China, Israel, and Iran, have their own manufacturers. Aviation
firms—as well as university and government researchers—are designing a flock of
next-generation aircraft, ranging in size from robotic moths and hummingbirds
to Boeing’s Phantom Eye, a hydrogen-fueled behemoth with a 150-foot wingspan
that can cruise at 65,000 feet for up to four days.
More than a thousand companies, from tiny start-ups
like Miser’s to major defense contractors, are now in the drone business—and
some are trying to steer drones into the civilian world. Predators already help
Customs and Border Protection agents spot smugglers and illegal immigrants
sneaking into the U.S. NASA-operated Global Hawks record atmospheric data and
peer into hurricanes. Drones have helped scientists gather data on volcanoes in
Costa Rica, archaeological sites in Russia and Peru, and flooding in North
Dakota.
So far only a dozen police departments, including ones
in Miami and Seattle, have applied to the FAA for permits to fly drones. But
drone advocates—who generally prefer the term UAV, for unmanned aerial
vehicle—say all 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the U.S. are potential
customers. They hope UAVs will soon become essential too for agriculture
(checking and spraying crops, finding lost cattle), journalism (scoping out
public events or celebrity backyards), weather forecasting, traffic control.
“The sky’s the limit, pun intended,” says Bill Borgia, an engineer at Lockheed
Martin. “Once we get UAVs in the hands of potential users, they’ll think of
lots of cool applications.”
The biggest obstacle, advocates say, is current FAA
rules, which tightly restrict drone flights by private companies and government
agencies (though not by individual hobbyists). Even with an FAA permit,
operators can’t fly UAVs above 400 feet or near airports or other zones with
heavy air traffic, and they must maintain visual contact with the drones. All
that may change, though, under the new law, which requires the FAA to allow the
“safe integration” of UAVs into U.S. airspace.
If the FAA relaxes its rules, says Mark Brown, the
civilian market for drones—and especially small, low-cost, tactical
drones—could soon dwarf military sales, which in 2011 totaled more than three
billion dollars. Brown, a former astronaut who is now an aerospace consultant
in Dayton, Ohio, helps bring drone manufacturers and potential customers
together. The success of military UAVs, he contends, has created “an appetite
for more, more, more!” Brown’s PowerPoint presentation is called “On the
Threshold of a Dream.”
Dreaming in Dayton
Drone fever is especially palpable in Dayton, cradle
of American aviation, home of the Wright brothers and of Wright-Patterson Air
Force Base. Even before the recent recession, Dayton was struggling. Over the
past decade several large companies, including General Motors, have shut down
operations here. But Dayton’s airport is lined with advertisements for
aerospace companies; an ad for the Predator Mission Aircrew Training System
shows two men in flight suits staring stoically at a battery of computer
monitors. The city is dotted with drone entrepreneurs. “This is one of the few
new industries with a chance to grow rapidly,” Brown says.
One of those entrepreneurs is Donald Smith, a bearish
former Navy aircraft technician with ginger hair and a goatee. His firm, UA
Vision, manufactures a delta-wing drone called the Spear. Made of polystyrene
foam wrapped in woven carbon fiber or other fabrics, the Spear comes in several
sizes; the smallest has a four-foot wingspan and weighs less than four pounds.
It resembles a toy B-1 bomber. Smith sees it being used to keep track of pets,
livestock, wildlife, even Alzheimer’s patients—anything or anyone equipped with
radio-frequency identification tags that can be read remotely.
In the street outside the UA Vision factory a
co-worker tosses the drone into the air, and Smith takes control of it with a
handheld device. The drone swoops up and almost out of sight, plummets,
corkscrews, loops the loop, skims a deserted lot across the street, arcs back
up, and then slows down until it seems to hover, motionless, above us. Smith
grins at me. “This plane is fully aerobatic,” he says.
A few miles away at Wright-Patterson stands the Air
Force Institute of Technology, a center of military drone research. A bronze
statue of a bedraggled winged man, Icarus, adorns the entrance—a symbol both of
aviation daring and of catastrophic navigation error. In one of the labs John
Raquet, a balding, bespectacled civilian, is designing new navigation systems
for drones.
GPS is vulnerable, he explains. Its signals can be
blocked by buildings or deliberately jammed. In December 2011, when a CIA drone
crashed in Iran, authorities there claimed they had diverted it by hacking its
GPS. Raquet’s team is working on a system that would allow a drone to also
navigate visually, like a human pilot, using a camera paired with pattern-recognition
software. The lab’s goal, Raquet repeatedly emphasizes, is “systems that you
can trust.”
A drone equipped with his visual navigation system,
Racquet says, might even recognize power lines and drain electricity from them
with a “bat hook,” recharging its batteries on the fly. (This would be
stealing, so Raquet would not recommend it for civilians.) He demonstrates the
stunt for me with a square drone powered by rotors at each corner. On the first
try the drone, buzzing like a nest of enraged hornets, flips over. On the
second it crashes into a wall. “This demonstrates the need for trust,” Raquet
says with a strained smile. Finally the quad-rotor wobbles into the air and
drapes a hook over a cable slung across the room.
Down the hall from Raquet’s lab, Richard Cobb is
trying to make drones that “hide in plain sight.” DARPA, the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency, has challenged researchers to build drones that mimic
the size and behavior of bugs and birds. Cobb’s answer is a robotic hawk moth,
with wings made of carbon fiber and Mylar. Piezoelectric motors flap the wings
30 times a second, so rapidly they vanish in a blur. Fashioning bug-size drones
that can stay aloft for more than a few minutes, though, will require enormous
advances in battery technology. Cobb expects it to take more than a decade.
The Air Force has nonetheless already constructed a
“micro-aviary” at Wright-Patterson for flight-testing small drones. It’s a
cavernous chamber—35 feet high and covering almost 4,000 square feet—with
padded walls. Micro-aviary researchers, much of whose work is classified,
decline to let me witness a flight test. But they do show me an animated video
starring micro-UAVs that resemble winged, multi-legged bugs. The drones swarm
through alleys, crawl across windowsills, and perch on power lines. One of them
sneaks up on a scowling man holding a gun and shoots him in the head. The video
concludes, “Unobtrusive, pervasive, lethal: micro air vehicles.”
What, one might ask, will prevent terrorists and
criminals from getting their hands on some kind of lethal drone? Although
American officials rarely discuss the threat in public, they take it seriously.
The militant Islamic group Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, says it has obtained
drones from Iran. Last November a federal court sentenced a Massachusetts man
to 17 years in prison for plotting to attack Washington, D.C., with drones
loaded with C-4 explosives.
Exercises carried out by security agencies suggest
that defending against small drones would be difficult. Under a program called
Black Dart, a mini-drone two feet long tested defenses at a military range. A
video from its onboard camera shows a puff of smoke in the distance, from which
emerges a tiny dot that rapidly grows larger before whizzing harmlessly past:
That was a surface-to-air missile missing its mark. In a second video an F-16
fighter plane races past the drone without spotting it.
The answer to the threat of drone attacks, some
engineers say, is more drones. “The new field is counter-UAVs,” says Stephen
Griffiths, an engineer for the Utah-based avionics firm Procerus Technologies.
Artificial-vision systems designed by Procerus would enable one UAV to spot and
destroy another, either by ramming it or shooting it down. “If you can dream
it,” Griffiths says, “you can do it.” Eventually drones may become smart enough
to operate autonomously, with minimal human supervision. But Griffiths believes
the ultimate decision to attack will remain with humans.
Another Man’s Nightmare
Even when controlled by skilled, well-intentioned
operators, drones can pose a hazard—that’s what the FAA is concerned about. The
safety record of military drones is not reassuring. Since 2001, according to
the Air Force, its three main UAVs—the Predator, Global Hawk, and Reaper—have
been involved in at least 120 “mishaps,” 76 of which destroyed the drone. The
statistics don’t include drones operated by the other branches of the military
or the CIA. Nor do they include drone attacks that accidentally killed
civilians or U.S. or allied troops.
Even some proponents insist that drones must become
much more reliable before they’re ready for widespread deployment in U.S. airspace.
“No one should begrudge the FAA its mission of assuring safety, even if it adds
significant costs to UAVs,” says Richard Scudder, who runs a University of
Dayton laboratory that tests prototypes. One serious accident, Scudder points
out, such as a drone striking a child playing in her backyard, could set the
industry back years. “If we screw the pooch with this technology now,” he says,
“it’s going to be a real mess.”
A drone crashing into a backyard would be messy; a
drone crashing into a commercial airliner could be much worse. In Dayton the
firm Defense Research Associates (DRA) is working on a “sense and avoid” system
that would be cheaper and more compact than radar, says DRA project manager
Andrew White. The principle is simple: A camera detects an object that’s
rapidly growing larger and sends a signal to the autopilot, which swerves the
UAV out of harm’s way. The DRA device, White suggests, could prevent collisions
like the one that occurred in 2011 in Afghanistan, when a 400-pound Shadow drone
smashed into a C-130 Hercules transport plane. The C-130 managed to land safely
with the drone poking out of its wing.
The prospect of American skies swarming with drones
raises more than just safety concerns. It alarms privacy advocates as well. Infrared
and radio-band sensors used by the military can peer through clouds and foliage
and can even—more than one source tells me—detect people inside buildings.
Commercially available sensors too are extraordinarily sensitive. In Colorado,
Chris Miser detaches the infrared camera from the Falcon, points it at me, and
asks me to place my hand on my chest for just a moment. Several seconds later
the live image from the camera still registers the heat of my handprint on my
T-shirt.
During the last few years of the U.S. occupation of
Iraq, unmanned aircraft monitored Baghdad 24/7, turning the entire city into
the equivalent of a convenience store crammed with security cameras. After a
roadside bombing U.S. officials could run videos in reverse to track bombers back
to their hideouts. This practice is called persistent surveillance. The
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) worries that as drones become cheaper and
more reliable, law enforcement agencies may be tempted to carry out persistent
surveillance of U.S. citizens. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution
protects Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures,” but it’s not
clear how courts will apply that to drones.
What Jay Stanley of the ACLU calls his “nightmare
scenario” begins with drones supporting “mostly unobjectionable” police raids
and chases. Soon, however, networks of linked drones and computers “gain the
ability to automatically track multiple vehicles and bodies as they move around
a city,” much as the cell phone network hands calls from one tower to the next.
The nightmare climaxes with authorities combining drone video and cell phone
tracking to build up databases of people’s routine comings and goings—databases
they can then mine for suspicious behavior. Stanley’s nightmare doesn’t even
include the possibility that police drones might be armed.
Who’s Driving?
The invention that escapes our control, proliferating
whether or not it benefits humanity, has been a persistent fear of the
industrial age—with good reason. Nuclear weapons are too easy an example;
consider what cars have done to our landscape over the past century, and it’s
fair to wonder who’s in the driver’s seat, them or us. Most people would say
cars have, on the whole, benefited humanity. A century from now there may be the
same agreement about drones, if we take steps early on to control the risks.
At the Mesa County sheriff ’s office Benjamin Miller
says he has no interest in armed drones. “I want to save lives, not take
lives,” he says. Chris Miser expresses the same sentiment. When he was in the
Air Force, he helped maintain and design lethal drones, including the
Switchblade, which fits in a backpack and carries a grenade-size explosive. For
the Falcon, Miser envisions lifesaving missions. He pictures it finding, say, a
child who has wandered away from a campground. Successes like that, he says,
would prove the Falcon’s value. They would help him “feel a lot better about
what I’m doing.”
Science writer John Horgan’s most recent book is The
End of War. Joe McNally likes technology; his photos of the electrical grid
appeared in July 2010.
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