Boeing’s Phantom Eye is powered by 2.3-liter, four-cylinder Ford truck engines.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration announced that the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) test site program is ready to conduct long needed research on how to integrate UAS, aka UAVs, into our airspace. The site is the last of six nationwide to be made operational.
The unmanned planes represent the latest government and/or private industry assault on personal privacy. If you think speeding cameras are bad, wait a couple of years. They also pose a real safety threat to other aircraft, and depending on how you cut the statistics they are up to 300 times more likely to crash than small, manned aircraft that are currently used for surveillance and traffic enforcement.
Commercial drone flights will begin next year under a Congressional law passed in 2012 before the snooping revelations of Edward Snowden came to widespread public attention and outrage. Police operations most assuredly will increase exponentially.
The FAA gave Virginia Tech seven Certificates of Waiver or Authorization (COAs) for two-years. UAS operations will happen at test areas in Virginia, New Jersey and Maryland. Research in the three states will eventually include agricultural spray equipment testing, development of aeronautical procedures for integration of UAS flights in a towered airspace and developing training and operational procedures for aeronautical surveys of agriculture.
The FAA selected six Congressional-mandated test sites on 30 December 2013 after years of inaction by the agency.
“We have undertaken the challenge of safely integrating a new and exciting technology into the busiest, most complex airspace in the world,” claimed Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. The government maintains they will be safe, but is being quiet about the threat to privacy they pose.
