The FAA seems to have suddenly realized every dad in America is getting a drone for Christmas. So, it’s setting up a ‘drone taskforce’ to try and register every drone before U.S. airspace is shut down by a million plastic quadrotors. Amazon, Google and Walmart seem to be on board.
Many drone businesses—like aerial pizza delivery!—don’t make sense when FAA rules require that humans have a clear line of sight to an aircraft. But the FAA’s drone boss just told us that naked eyes won’t always be a requirement.
The Justice Department inspector general's recent audit of the FBI's drone program revealed something surprising: the FBI drone pilot team is literally just two people sitting in a room.
The Federal Aviation Administration just published its proposed rulemaking on commercial drone regulations. These regulations come after a leak, reported by Forbes over the weekend, that outlined some of the FAA's thinking on what the future of American skies was going to look like.
If you want protection from privacy intrusions by private UAV pilots, don't go all Annie Oakley on your neighbor's quadcopter like this guy; that's super illegal in most American cities. Instead, try these simple means of dissuasion. You'll definitely look like a bit of a loon, but that's just the price of freedom.…
It would appear that we've finally reached the phase of UAV development where researchers get tired of coming up with new ideas and say, "You know what? Lets just smash a few of the ones we've already got together and see what happens." The result is, well, this ungainly mechanization but it's one that could save your…
Less than half a year after being greenlit, the US Navy's newest broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) platform, the MQ-4C Triton, has just passed a major developmental milestone—as well as the whole of the contiguous United States.
The FAA's rules about commercial drones have so far been ham-fisted: ban, except in special cases. But what would a world where we live, play, and work next to drones look like? What would city zoning for drones look like?
While the world is tied up in the mystery of what happened to Malaysian Air Flight 370, testers at Edwards AFB in south central California and at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland are hard at work developing the ultimate tool for solving such a mystery, the Northrop Grumman built MQ-4C Triton.
Last month, the Nationals were seen using a four-rotor drone to take publicity photos. The FAA took issue. "No, we didn't get it cleared, but we don't get our pop flies cleared either and those go higher than this thing did," a team official told the AP afterward. Which pretty neatly sums up the FAA's conundrum with…
Wow. Just wow. You can almost hear the corporate execs at the screening of this, Northrop Grumman's official music video for the MQ-4C Triton Unmanned Aircraft System's first flight, thinking to themselves, "This is the coolest thing ever. Just look at all those thumbs up, the kids are going to go nuts for this."
You don't joke about mining important maritime trade routes—Iran did and nearly started WWIII. And while America's fleet of MH-53E Sea Dragons and Avenger-class mine countermeasures ships are still quite effective, they're getting really, really old. Both platforms entered service in the mid-1980s and are quickly…
The Twitter feed for Islamic extremist group al-Shabaab lit up on May 27 publishing photos of aircraft wreckage and extolling the virtues of the group's fighters who, after several hours of shooting, brought down an unmanned drone near the town of Buulo Mareer. The Pentagon's confirmation that it did lose the UAS,…
Quad-copters have become a popular choice for aerial surveillance tasks, in both the public and private sectors, thanks to their portability and ease of use. Problem is, their diminutive nature also limits where and when they can fly—high winds can knock them clear out of the air. The new SkyRanger sUAS, however, is…
Being a commercial airline pilot isn't as glamorous as Leonardo di Caprio would have you believe; in practice, it's more akin to long haul trucking than aerial acrobatics. So rather than force a human pilot to endure the monotony of maintaining course, a European research consortium wants to replace them entirely—with…
The world's oceans are massive, easily big enough to hide a whole fleet of surface ships if not carefully monitored. That's why the Pentagon's newest Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) platform will keep its eyes peeled for enemy carrier groups from 60,000 feet up.
When scouting enemy positions, our forces rarely have the luxury of a proper airstrip—or even a fairway—with which to land an unmanned aircraft. That's why California's AeroVironment corporation has designed a drone that lands just about anywhere—water hazards and sand traps be damned.
