We've discussed to death the use of drones on the so-called war on terror. I will not re-cover this ground here. But, drones also have positive non-military applications. Here's a story of using a drone to provide needed reconnaissance for the Colorado flood disaster. Due to the low cloud cover we have not been able to see the damage of the Colorado floods using manned aircraft. Enter Falcon UAV to provide a solution.
FEMA's freak out below the fold.
This operation was not some dude with a radio plane. Here's a description from IEEE Spectrum:
Falcon UAV is a Colorado company that makes a fixed-wing UAV (called a Falcon) that uses GPS and cameras to autonomously generate (among other things) highly accurate maps of the ground. The UAV is hand-launched, with an endurance of about an hour, and generally operates between 300 and 1,500 feet above the ground. It has public safety flight approvals from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly in some parts of Colorado. Basically, the point here is that we're not talking about some random dude with a quadrotor flying around taking pictures: the Falcons are designed for (and governmentally approved for) mapping missions in public airspace.
For the last three or four days, Falcon UAV has been volunteering with the Boulder County EOC (Emergency Operations Center) to coordinate mapping flights around the towns of Longmont and Lyons, just northeast of Boulder. This is the kind of thing they end up with, with a turnaround time of just a few hours from launching the drone to delivering a high resolution, georeferenced map.
You can see a subset gif
here and download a full version for Google Earth
here.
The problem came when the Boulder County EOC handed things off to FEMA.
Early Saturday morning Falcon UAV was heading up to Lyons to complete a damage assessment mapping flight when we received a call from our Boulder EOC point of contact who notified us that FEMA had taken over operations and our request to fly drones was not only denied but more specifically we were told by FEMA that anyone flying drones would be arrested. Not being one to bow to federal bureaucrats we still went up to Lyons to do a site survey for how we can conduct a mission in the near future to provide an adequate damage assessment to this storm ravaged community.
While we were up there we noticed that Civil Air Patrol and private aircraft were authorized to fly over the small town tucked into the base of Rockies. Unfortunately due to the high terrain around Lyons and large turn radius of manned aircraft they were flying well out of a useful visual range and didn't employ cameras or live video feed to support the recovery effort. Meanwhile we were grounded on the Lyons high school football field with two Falcons that could have mapped the entire town in less than 30 minutes with another few hours to process the data providing a near real time map of the entire town.
[...] We are very disappointed in FEMAs response to actively prevent the use of UAVs and drone technology when these services were offered for free and at a time when manned helicopters could be used for more critical missions such as evacuations and high mountain search and rescues in inaccessible communities.
A trillion gallons of water is not a threat because, you know, terrorism. Sigh.