
Drone operator explains how he found missing man - rollthehard6
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28423252
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bagosm
It almost seems like I'm living in the start of an Orwellian novel.. "See how
good and beneficial the drones can be?"... I love the technology part, I love
the possible benefit for transportation etc, I hate the surveillance
connotation (Which seems to be the primary intent here albeit for "good
purpose")

~~~
klausjensen
I am as much against mass surveillance as the next guy - but I don't
understand why we should be worried about drones in that context? Should we
not work big to small and worry about our own governments (and foreign) spying
on our every electronic move?

~~~
pessimizer
I'm not sure why you think of internet and phone spying as big and drone
spying as small. You can opt out of internet and phone spying by not using the
internet or your own phone. The only way to escape from potential drone
surveillance is to stay in your house and avoid the windows.

~~~
kaybe
As long as a human operator is needed (per drone), it doesn't scale, so I
think the impression is not that strange.

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jcromartie
> "It was not the drone that actually spotted the missing man," David Lesh
> told the BBC.

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TomGullen
Hate the way the word "drone" is being conflated to mean giant bombing
machines and small home helicopters. I imagine this is deliberate. Article
feels like propaganda.

~~~
icebraining
They're both radio-controlled pilotless flying machines, why wouldn't they
both be called drones? Should we stop calling "ship" to the Navy boats, since
it's also used for cruises?

~~~
TomGullen
> They're both radio-controlled pilotless flying machines

Are you sure the 'drone' in the BBC article pilotless?

> Should we stop calling "ship" to the Navy boats, since it's also used for
> cruises?

Probably not, but there's a big ethical debate about drones at the moment and
pro media pieces showing "drones are good!" is only going to confuse the
debate.

~~~
icebraining
_Are you sure the 'drone' in the BBC article pilotless?_

By pilotless, I mean without a person inside it. If being remotely controlled
disqualifies it as a drone, then neither is Predator a drone. That wouldn't
make much sense, would it?

 _Probably not, but there 's a big ethical debate about drones at the moment
and pro media pieces showing "drones are good!" is only going to confuse the
debate._

On the other hand, if the media doesn't show that "drones" include private
"toys" as well, the backlash may affect them unjustly.

~~~
TomGullen
> On the other hand, if the media doesn't show that "drones" include private
> "toys" as well, the backlash may affect them unjustly.

Any unjustified backlash restricting people's use of toys is pretty low on my
list of things to be concerned about when the bigger issue is mass killing.

~~~
icebraining
I find it much more likely that the backlash will prevent local drones from
flying while mass killing will continue to happen.

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thret
Isn't anyone else surprised that an 82 year old man with Alzheimer's can
wander around in the bush for three days and only be mildly dehydrated?

He'd likely be dead if he'd gone missing in Australia.

~~~
engineerDave
FWIW He wasn't really in the bush. He was in a suburb of Madison called
Middletown where there are corn fields on the outskirts of residential
neighborhoods and the weather was fairly mild last weekend. Low humidity and
80ish F.

~~~
swimfar
Ahh, apparently there is a small town called Middletown right next to the city
Middleton.

~~~
XaspR8d
Well the "town" is a _township_ [1], not really a town as people outside the
Midwest US (edit: and parts of New England) would think of it. Just a level of
municipality lower than a county, a last vestige of the Northwest
Ordinance[2]. Lots of incorporated cities tend to border or be surrounded by
towns of the same name.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_township](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_township)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Ordinance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Ordinance)

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MasterScrat
A friend is working on drones that look for smartphone signals to locate
someone missing: [http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/16/drone-
disaste...](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/16/drone-disaster-
relief-survivors)

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warcode
I wish people would credit the "drone operator" for any drone that isn't
acting on its own.

~~~
weego
Worse than that, what does drone even mean in this context? Five years ago
this would have been "Man with toy helicopter finds missing man". Today it
should have been the same if not for the intended effect of removing the idea
that there is a difference between these toys and the 30ft wingspan eyes in
the sky hardware.

~~~
icebraining
What about devices like the Wasp III, which have less then 2.4ft wingspan, has
two cameras and GPS and is used by the Navy for recognition ("eyes in the
sky")? Should it not be called a drone?

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dm2
Don't police helicopters usually have thermal / infrared cameras? There's very
little chance this drone had an infrared camera, correct?

I'm thinking that the drone pilot just got lucky. Or he saw the man previously
and then found out he was missing, then knew almost exactly where to look
(complete speculation but more reasonable than the needle in a haystack
scenario)

What is the max range on a reasonably priced drone these days (transmitter
range or battery range)?

~~~
ck2
Police aren't going to task a helicopter to find a missing person.

Not unless that person shot at or killed another officer.

The low cost of drones is going to make good things like this happen.

But it is also going to allow the law enforcement to track every person at a
protest, figure out who they are and put them on a no-fly list or some other
watch list. I am completely convinced drones will be used at the next DNC and
RNC conventions for 2016.

~~~
msantos
> Police aren't going to task a helicopter to find a missing person.

Different country and circumstances but just out of curiosity, in London the
police helicopter searches for missing people quite often
[https://twitter.com/MPSinthesky](https://twitter.com/MPSinthesky)

~~~
look_lookatme
I expect it differs from city to city, but the police will sometimes search
for missing people with helicopters. It's not an across the board guaranteed
no as ck2 seems to believe.

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coldcode
Why is the FAA so against drones (or whatever you want to call them) is any
case? Sure none of us want police drones circling our backyards, but there are
so many positive uses that the FAA seems intent on stifling like search and
rescue, agriculture and surveying.

~~~
bsder
I suspect that the FAA's reaction is mostly just "Oh shit, we need a ruling on
this before it gets out of hand and something becomes fait accompli. We'll
default to no and let up later once we have some visibility."

However, if you want reasons:

1) Hazard to the uninvolved

A car is confined roughly to roads. A car failing on a road is unlikely to
deviate much from the road (likely to encounter telephone poles, trees, curbs,
guardrails, etc.) and is unlikely to kill unrelated people even it it hurts
another motorist.

A drone falling from the sky is a hazard to non-drone people--when it fails it
_IS_ coming out of the sky.

Sure, you could confine the drones to over roads, but the disruptive effects,
as you point out, are mostly about _NOT_ being confined to a road.

2) Liability

How do you trace that failed drone back to the person controlling it? It's
wireless. Now all drones need to be registered.

3) Autonomy

Do you want a drone to have some autonomy? Before you say no, I would
personally rather have a functioning drone fly home safely if it loses radio
link rather than drop out of the sky. Who's responsible for that autonomy?

4) Collisions

Drones would be a huge hazard near where planes are flying. Sure, banning
drones near airports can be done. However, commercial airplanes have fairly
heavily traffic corridors by virtue of the ATC system, and some of the
corridors go over land in the middle of nowhere where drones would like to be
operating.

5) Law enforcement/military

Drones render terrain control suspect. This has _NOT_ sunk in to most law
enforcement (and probably not much military, either, since the US hasn't yet
fought an enemy armed with drones of its own.). Using a drone to put even
something as simple as a flashbang _behind_ a police line would cause total
chaos. Police are used to winning by surrounding--smaller overall force, but
only deployed as a greater number against a smaller number in terrain control.
Drones can come from any direction, can be totally automated, and are
extremely hard to target (we use shotguns for bird hunting instead of rifles
for a reason). I would be stunned if some of the drug gangs aren't already
deploying drones--we're talking about people who deploy _submarines_ for
crying out loud.

There are good reasons for the FAA to knee-jerk to "NO! STOP!"

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nick_riviera
How many times does a drone (operator) not locate the person? All statistics
are relative to something unless there is a political spin.

Edit: add operator in brackets.

~~~
icebraining
What statistic? It's just a single fact.

~~~
nick_riviera
My point exactly. To make a rational judgement about a statistic we need
statistics (plural) otherwise it's an isolated piece of data.

~~~
icebraining
But this is not a statistic (singular), it's just a fact. There's no implicit
judgment about drones as a whole. It's simply something that happened.

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flexd
A more appropriate and less sensationalist title would be "Man on holiday uses
his remote controlled quad-copter to search for missing man", or "Man with
remote controlled helicopter got lucky, found missing man after just 20
minutes because he searched in the right place".

The 'drone' is not the news here, he could have been flying around in a
helicopter, if he looked in the same place he would have found him.

~~~
hug
If by 'drone' you mean 'unmanned multirotor', it's actually quite an accurate
topic. What's more, it provides more insight into why this is actually a big
deal in modern society.

A 'drone' is a cheap and effective way to have a camera with a huge field of
view operating in areas that humans and helicopters cannot, or just doing
things that it would be prohibitively expensive to do otherwise.

You can fly a 'drone' over a river, where a human would be hard pressed to
follow, and you can fly a drone amongst trees where helicopters could not fly.
You can do both of these things cheaply, and in a far more scalable fashion.
'Drones' don't need roads or other such infrastructure, and can carry decent
sized payloads practically anywhere.

The application of 'drones' has huge impact on a large number of areas of
applications, and it would be silly not to recognise that.

Somewhat sensationalist it may be, but in my opinion the advent of these
things is worth it.

~~~
raverbashing
Exactly

Flying a drone is much easier and cheaper than flying a helicopter.

Sure, you can go ride a chopper to look for the person, it's about $500 an
hour

Not to mention risk and hard to reach places.

~~~
pessimizer
So in this case, that's $167.

~~~
raverbashing
Add coming and going from its base to the search area, planning the search
(flight plan), etc

It's not "hop in and fly" usually

~~~
avn2109
Yeah, the startup costs of helicopters are large. A Marine quartermaster once
told me that it costs $N,000 just to turn a military helicopter on, because
after you turn it off you have to do a bunch of maintenance tasks no matter
what. And chopper technicians aren't cheap.

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creyer
I wish people would accept drone world wide. Unfortunately in many places they
are forbidden :( This is sad, because if tomorrow someone would invent a
flying car, something like the taxi from "The Fifth Element", then most
probably that will be forbidden as well, on the same principles.

