DRONES WRONG FOR BORDER WATCH?

The Homeland Security Department has been using pilot­less spy planes to patrol the Mexican bor­der for nearly a year. Vigilante groups have been putting unmanned eyes in the sky for even longer. But a new report from the Congressional Research Service is warn­ing that there could be some pretty major draw­backs to using robotic bor­der guards.

The tech­ni­cal capa­bil­i­ties of the UAVs have been tested in a mil­i­tary con­text, but seri­ous safety and tech­ni­cal issues need to be addressed if the pro­gram is to be expanded domes­ti­cally
There are con­cerns regard­ing UAVs high acci­dent rate. Currently, the UAV acci­dent rate is 100 times higher than that of manned air­craftIf con­trol sys­tems fail in a manned air­craft, a well-​​trained pilot is bet­ter posi­tioned to find the source of the prob­lem because of his/​her phys­i­cal prox­im­ity. If a UAV encoun­tered a sim­i­lar sys­tem fail­ure, or if a UAV land­ing was attempted dur­ing dif­fi­cult weather con­di­tions, the ground con­trol pilot would be at a dis­ad­van­tage because he or she is removed from the event. Unlike a manned pilot, the remote pilot would not be able to assess impor­tant sen­sory infor­ma­tion such as wind speed
Another con­sid­er­a­tion is how well the [bor­der patrol] could respond to UAV imagery. Are there enough bor­der patrol resources to inves­ti­gate all UAV iden­ti­fied tar­gets? Would the lack of human resources ren­der high tech­nol­ogy like UAVs less effec­tive?…
A final poten­tial ques­tion per­tains to civil lib­er­ties such as per­sonal pri­vacy. Some are con­cerned that UAVs deployed over the United States may pro­vide gov­ern­ment agen­cies a new abil­ity to clan­des­tinely mon­i­tor citizens

However, the report sug­gests, there is an alter­na­tive to the drones: aerostats, “the helium-​​filled blimps that dont fly hor­i­zon­tally but are instead teth­ered to the ground with a cable that pro­vides power. Like UAVs, aerostats are unmanned and can loi­ter for long peri­ods of time. But the blimps crash less, have had exten­sive test­ing in civil set­tings, and may not cost as much as putting robots in the skies.
(thanks to Nick for the tip)

February 27th, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.