Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

            When you think Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) you are generally thinking about military or special ops applications, but they have more uses then just military. The civilian applications for UAVs consists of remote sensing, commercial aerial surveillance, commercial and motion picture filmmaking, domestic policing, oil and gas exploration and production, disaster relief, scientific research, search and rescue, conservation, maritime patrol, and archaeology. The only way those civil operators of UAVs are obtaining an experimental airworthiness certificate. The certificate regulations preclude carrying passengers and property for hire, but do allow operations for research and development, flight and sales demonstrations and crew training.

 The FAA is currently working with operators to collect information to develop a future path for safe integration of civil UAVs into the NAS. The problems I foresee in civil UAVs is the potential for terrorism through hacking the aircraft. Amazon has already released that the company plans on using UAVs to deliver packages from their warehouses to the customer’s front door and plane on doing this potentially in less than 30 minutes. Although I find it a good idea there are some problems I see in the choice in delivery. There is potential for possible thievery, as in someone might shoot down the UAV and steal the packages.

I support the military application of UAVs because of the dangerous situations that pilots or soldiers could be put in. I find it much safer to send in a UAV over a pilot in some cases to be beneficial because of potential loss of life. In 2012, the United States air force actually trained more UAV pilots then actual fighter jet pilots.

In my research I found multiple job postings for UAV pilots. On of the jobs I found was for a Sensor Operator in palmdale California.