Home is where the drones is (Courtesy the EFF):
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| View EFF's new Map of Domestic Drone Authorizations in a larger window |
Today EFF posted several thousand pages of new drone license records and a new map that tracks the location of drone flights across the United States.
These records, received as a result of EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), come from state and local law enforcement agencies, universities and—for the first time—three branches of the U.S. military: the Air Force, Marine Corps, and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Military Drone Flights in the United States
While the U.S. military doesn't need an FAA license to fly drones over its own military bases (these are considered "restricted airspace"), it does need a license to fly in the national airspace (which is almost everywhere else in the US). And, as we've learned from these records, the Air Force and Marine Corps regularly fly both large and small drones in the national airspace all around the country. This is problematic, given a recent New York Timesreport that the Air Force's drone operators sometimes practice surveillance missions by tracking civilian cars along the highway adjacent to the base.
The records show that the Air Force has been testing out a bunch of different drone types, from the smaller, hand-launched Raven, Puma and Wasp drones designed by Aerovironment in Southern California, to the much larger Predator and Reaper drones responsible for civilian and foreign military deaths abroad. The Marine Corps is also testing drones, though it chose to redact so much of the text from its records that we still don't know much about its programs.
The capabilities of these drones can be astounding. According to a recent Gizmodo article, the Puma AE ("All Environment") drone can land anywhere, "either in tight city streets or onto a water surface if the mission dictates, even after a near-vertical 'deep stall' final approach." Another drone, Insitu's ScanEagle, which the Air Force has flown near Virginia Beach, sports an "inertial-stabilized camera turret, [that] allows for the tracking of a target of interest for extended periods of time, even when the target is moving and the aircraft nose is seldom pointed at the target." Boeing's A160 Hummingbird (see photo above), which the Air Force has flown near Victorville, California, is capable of staying in the air for 16-24 hours at a time and carries a gigapixel camera and a "Forester foliage-penetration radar" system designed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). (Apparently, the Army has had a bunch of problems with the Hummingbird crashing and may not continue the program.)
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