Before the first drone hits an airplane, the FAA wants to be ready. Small unmanned flying objects can damage a plane, like in the tragic case where a bald eagle crashed into a small plane and caused an accident that killed everyone on board. Reports of drones flown near airplanes are increasingly common, even if the drones in question sometimes turn out to instead be plastic bags. Still, the FAA wants to be ready, so to make sure they can spot a drone flying at an airport, earlier this month they flew a bunch of drones at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport.
The ocean is coming for us. It is a sort of primordial cosmic justice: life oozed forth from the sea, spent millions of years conquering the land, and finally, over the past century, human-caused greenhouse gas emissions mean a warming planet and a rising ocean. This year's Paris Agreement is a step to halt the process, but the world is already warmer, and the ocean is rising.
Animals normally get time to adapt to human change. Agriculture took thousands of years to spread and alter landscapes. Cities, too, were generally built up over hundreds of years, with nearby species figuring out how to adapt or at least move away from them. But drones? Drones are new, and while animals haven't yet had time to adapt to the small flying unmanned vehicles, they often react defensively, and with anger.
This first draft of history is messy. We accept now that the Wright Brothers were the first to achieve powered, human flight, and that they did so on December 17th, 1903. They were hardly the first to experiment with flight, though, and at the time the brother's work was viewed skeptically by many rivals. In the new age of drone flight, video and the internet make success easier to prove, but it's the exact definition of success that's hard to pin down. Today, DHL claimed major progress in drone delivery, joining the ranks of other companies claiming the same.
Runways are inconvenient, and helicopters are inefficient. Between these two statements is the quest for Vertical Takeoff and Landing, or VTOL, flying machines. Hampered for decades by the difficulty of building such an aircraft that can switch from hovering to forward thrust mid-flight without jeopardizing the humans inside, drones have rapidly adapted to the task. Like this one, the V-Bat from Martin UAV, on display at the drone industry's Xponential conference in New Orleans this week:
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