Unmanned aerial vehicles future use from conventional airports Research Paper

Unmanned aerial vehicles future use from conventional airports - Research Paper Example The army is already surveying sites for these field tests of the system and also looking at the new means of certifying the new aviation standards that are required to ensure the safety of the system not only for other aircraft sharing the airspace as well as populations living near or around the airfields (InsideDefense.com, 2012). Social Implications When we look at the social implications of the use of drones, there has been a great deal of debate about the use of these aircraft for peacetime activities. While initially when the use of these crafts was limited to military strikes in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, the huge possibilities for their use in non-military situations – such as in crop and wildlife stock monitoring, search and rescue in dangerous weather and other conditions, fighting forest fires – has resulted in a great deal of debate about how their use would be regulated and monitored, particularly for reasons of safety. The UAV business is now valued at more than $14 billion and projections are that it will go up to $82 million and support over 70,000 jobs by 2015 (Jank & Armentrout, 2013). Another reason that has come up in the regulation of the use of UAVs has been the issue of privacy (Sengupta, 2013). UAVs can be used in monitoring border security from altitudes that would otherwise be dangerous for manned aircraft and this brings about many issues about the invasion of privacy as these UAVs are equipped with sophisticated imaging equipment that can carry out detailed surveillance and some even have capability of intercepting electronic communications (Electronic Privacy Information Centre, n.d.) These social and privacy concerns have to be dealt with before widespread use of drone technology is licensed and...The use of UAVs not only in civilian applications but also at conventional commercial airfields is now not a question of â€Å"if† but â€Å"when† as the technological, commercial and other barriers that hinder the expanded use of UAVs continue to be surmounted and overtaken. Technological Aspects One of the key technological barriers to the use of UAVs in more conventional flights has been the safety of these operations. The major difficulty has been that with conventional manned air transportation the presence of a pilot who can look outside his window and see any other aircraft that is near in the same area as them and take corrective action. This drawback has not only made it difficult for the UAVs to be used in the same airspace with other craft but it has also meant that the test and training flights of these UAVs have had to have a trailing manned aircraft making it expensive to conduct such training and in a way, defeating the whole purpose of unmanned aircraft. There are quite a slew of things that do need to be implemented before the UAVs can be incorporated into operation in the airspace currently occupied by manned aircraft, in particular the adaptation of air traffic management and air traffic control processes to cater for the new unmanned aircraft.