POWER LINE’S DRONES GO ROGUE (VIDEO): I think Steve Hayward is just kidding around in this video, but in any case, it reminded me that it’s all fun and games playing with a drone until it decides it’s done talking to the remote control. I discovered that the hard way last month a couple of times when operating the drone we rented for video overflights of the location in Texas where we’ll be having Bullets & Bourbon in December. (Where Glenn Reynolds, Dana Loesch, Ed Morrissey, Roger L. Simon, Kevin D. Williamson, VodkaPundit Steve Green and Mark Rippetoe will be speaking.) That’s why I had to chuckle at a link from Glenn last week to the New York Times, who noted, “As Stress Drives Off Drone Operators, Air Force Must Cut Flights.” As Glenn wrote in response:
People think that there’s no stress because it’s like a videogame, and when the day is over you go home. But it’s not a videogame. And the contrast may actually make the stress worse. One of my former UT colleagues flew B-52s in Vietnam, and he said the weirdness of leaving your nice apartment, and then a few hours later being in combat, and then back in your apartment a few hours after that, was really trying even though it sounded like it ought to be a cushy life. I think the drone operators may experience something similar.
Exactly. In a video game, if you crash the plane, all that’s hurt is your pride; you reboot the program and start again. But crashing a drone, even a small video drone such as the DJI Phantom 2 Vision Plus we rented has real world consequences – it can tangle into a power line; it can crash onto the roof of a house (err, like my house!) it can crash into people. And for an Air Force operator, the risk of crashing a large armed drone into someone who wasn’t intended to be its target has got to be an enormous constant fear. Particularly given the tenuous connection between the drone and its operator is likely little more than a video screen and a computer interface, which must feel very different than being inside the cockpit of a traditional aircraft. The higher the drone we rented flew, and when it overflew the lake at Rough Creek Lodge in Glen Rose, TX, the more bullets I was sweating, if you’ll pardon the pun.
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That said, as I was packing up our drone to go back to the rental agency, I had the same feelings I had when I first used an Altair 8080 computer in 1976 at Doane Academy, and logging onto CompuServe and assorted BBSs for the first time about five years later on my TRS-80: good or bad, this was a glimpse of the future.
Hopefully though, as drones increase in numbers, things won’t be anywhere near as scary as this Hitchcock-esque recent BWM commercial…