i can see drones, uav"s doing alot of things that piloted vehicles currently do. take for instance traffic copters or airplanes. even police choppers could all be done with an unmanned vehicle without risking the life of a pilot occupant. I have been fascinated with these marvels of technology for nearly 20 years now and i dont understand what the hold up is on there acceptance into the public service realm. I am also intersted to know how they have such an incrediable range or what type of radio equipment that they use. I ahve tinkered with several ideas myself, but could use a little help with some theories. Joe

The future of aviation and employment is very much focused on unmanned vehicles, design, and operation. UAV's are currently used for earth imaging, resource locating, mapping, pipeline and powerline patrol, firefighting, intel and ISR, and other operations. They would be pure hell on street corner drug dealers and over watch of high crime areas.

The airliner you fly in now is very close to being operated completely on an automated basis. The pilots are only there to make sure the systems are working correctly. Several auto land systems are so accurate they can put a plane down within inches of the same place it hit the runway the last time. The system on the Airbus A380 had to be de-tuned to prevent damaging the runway from hitting the same place too many times. Control of most upper end uavs is performed via a satellite link whereby they are flown at a location very remote from where the aircraft may be. Other systems use various line of sight telemetry systems, generally in the gigahertz frequency ranges. Line of sight in this case is limited only in reference to curvature of the earth factors, so using the right equipment provides for extremely long line of sight distances.

The lack of acceptance is multifaceted. Human pilots fear loss of jobs (righfully so), and air collision issues since much of civil aviation is based on a see and avoid principle. Reliability is still an issue with a lot of systems. You really don't want one suffereing a loss of directional control over populated airspace. In theory a human piloted aircraft would be steered away from people in the event of a crash but history clearly states that this is not always true.

Safe NAS integration is possible!

Yes it is and is being developed as we speak. Use of UAS would be a tremendous boon to law enforecemnt agencies with high crime rate areas. The bad guys hate it when they can't see or hear those watching and filming their activities.