Monday, January 20, 2014

The reality of everyday drones...

So in Norway, they had a fire in a horrible place to have a fire: a mostly wooden historical town, where the average age of the buildings can be measured in centuries.  Not a whole lot of buildings up to modern fire code.  The fire was fast an merciless, and for a while it was fought entirely by locals.  The fire service worked quickly to get a firefighting helicopter up to douse the flames.  However, they had a problem.  It appears that local news stations had secured drones to use for their news coverage and as fast as they could, they deployed them to get great coverage of the calamity.  This forced the fire service to keep the helicopter out of the area because it would not be good to add to the problem by crashing a helicopter into the middle of the fire because it didn't see the ActionNews3DroneCam while on is way to drop water.  Here we have the beginning of the unintended consequences of drones.  Its bad enough when there are multiple helicopters swarming a news story.  With the advent of cheap drones (compared to a chopper) and the media's driving need to get a better scoop than their competitors, I foresee problems like this to be bigger in the future than overreaching law enforcement, tho I do anticipate that the latter will still be a plague upon our lives at some point.  While some complain that the FAA is moving too fast or slow on these things, I really what them to get the rules right.  Treating them more like aircraft and less like model airplanes is a good start.

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