Btw, the UAV guys don't "fly from the cockpit" in real time when the plane is out of sight. As I understand it most (if not all) of them use sat. links, an autopilot to do the real flying and GPS for control. Basically the "pilot" just says "fly here, loiter, fly there", and the autopilot does the real flying. Except for takeoff and landing, most of the smaller UAVs switch in to manual control for that part, but some can and do auto-takeoff and auto-land.

There are "UAVs" like the Dragon Eye that are basically electric motor gliders hand-tossed by a single Marine. But those planes do stay line-of-sight to the pilot, while looking down over hills or whatever. This kind of thing is easy to do with models, and a lot of people are doing it. But the model stays line-of-sight.

Part of the reason is that there is a noticeable lag for the signal to go from the UAV up to the sat, then back to the control center. Any other non-line-of-sight radio link is going to be too unstable to fly by in anything close to a reliable manner, the plane needs to be able to handle itself when contact is lost with the base station until contact comes back, and that means auto-pilot.

One company here did some of their autopilot testing at our field (before the AMA changed the rules about UAVs and commerical activity), and just getting the plane to fly laps within sight was a trick.

There are some commerical off the shelf auto-pilot systems out there, I think "Micro Pilot" is one of them, but they aren't cheap, and they aren't trivial to set up.