When the rules go into effect, “the growth will be tremendous,” says Michael Toscano, president and CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. The FAA is working on comprehensive regulations scheduled to be released sometime this year (though several deadlines have already been missed). Also, drones must be kept in sight at all times, so that even if the pilot is flying with a first-person view, an observer must track the vehicle visually. These entail not exceeding an altitude of 400 feet and, if flying within five miles of an airport, notifying the airport operator and air traffic control tower. But for the time being, the vast majority of civilian UAVs are governed by the rules originally written for radio-control models. Last September, the FAA exempted six aerial photo and video production companies from the ban on commerical use of drones. Still, he says, “I have taught five-year-olds who are familiar with iPads to fly.”Īt the moment, the Federal Aviation Ad-min-istration generally prohibits UAVs from being used for commercial purposes (though this ban is routinely flouted by, among others, real estate agents who want video footage of the properties they’re listing). Granted, Edwards already held a private pilot’s license, and he was flying an entry-level, ready-to-fly quadcopter. “I literally charged the battery, and then I took off,” says 28-year-old Scott Edwards, who was so amped by his first experience that he founded PDXDrones, a UAV club in Portland, Oregon. Many more are aviation newbies seduced by a new breed of relatively inexpensive multi-rotor aircraft fitted with cameras and a suite of sophisticated electronics that make flying them ridiculously easy.įor this emerging breed of do-it-yourselfers, flight training usually consists of breezing through the owner’s manual, watching some YouTube videos, and lots of trial and error. Some of them have transitioned from the radio-control community. And several other schools are now offering short courses in UAV pilot training.īut the lion’s share of the new pilots are coming from the hobby segment of the market, where “drone” is the preferred term. With a bit more effort, he would have discovered that bigger, more-established schools with noteworthy aviation curricula, such as Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the University of North Dakota, have created UAV programs of their own during the last few years. Gonzalez came across Unmanned Vehicle University-a new, largely online school devoted entirely to remotely piloted vehicles-through a Google search. “So when I heard about this program, I said, ‘I’m going to give it a shot.’ I didn’t even think twice about it.” “Drones are like the wave of the future, and I really want to pursue a career flying them,” he explains. But he’s intrigued by the potential of UAVs. He’d originally intended to return overseas to work in security. Marine in Afghanistan and recently earned a degree in Arabic and Middle Eastern studies from the University of California at Los Angeles. “Now let’s get something to eat, and we’ll go over some of the autopilot functions.” “You did really well for the first day,” he tells Gonzalez. So McCurdy takes control of the vehicle and lands it himself. But he wants Gonzalez to get some more seat time before attempting a landing, and the batteries in the airplane are nearly spent. “You could totally land it from here,” McCurdy tells him. Gaining confidence, Gonzalez guides the airplane over the field and lines it up with the runway. Army veteran who flew the Shadow UAV in Iraq, now works as an instructor at Embry-Riddle. Sitting in a sliver of shade in a bare-bones airfield, gazing through a pair of Oakley sunglasses at a computer screen showing the view from the tiny camera mounted in the distant aircraft’s cockpit, he calmly tells Gonzalez, “That’s because we’re a little bit behind the roof. It’s a small, remote-control scale model of an ICON A5, a two-seat amphibious light sport aircraft.īut Unmanned Vehicle University instructor pilot Matt McCurdy, who flew a 22-foot-wingspan, 260-pound TigerShark UAV in Afghanistan as a civilian contractor for the U.S. “I’m losing control!” Pedro Gonzalez is three hours into his first day of unmanned aerial vehicle flight training in the blistering heat outside Florence, Arizona, and he’s nervous about the fate of the white speck fluttering a few hundred feet overhead through the sun-drenched sky.
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