Look for Military Drones to Begin Replacing Police Helicopters by 2025
Look for Military Drones to Begin Replacing Police
Helicopters by 2025
An MQ-9B from General Atomics on the tarmac at Grey
Butte, California. Taken on August 19, 2017.
BY PATRICK TUCKER AUGUST 28, 2017
General Atomics is working hard to put a close cousin of
its Reaper anti-terrorism drone in the hands of local law enforcement.
By 2025, enormous military-style drones – close relatives
of the sort made famous by counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq –
will be visible 2,000 feet above U.S. cities, streaming high-resolution video
to police departments below. That is the bet that multiple defense contractors
are placing, anyway, as they race to build unmanned aircraft that can pass
evolving airworthiness certifications and replace police helicopters. And if
that bet pays off, it will radically transform the way cities, citizens, and
law enforcement interact.
There’s a reason big drones like the General Atomics
Reaper aren’t already flying over the United States. The federal rules that
govern aircraft in U.S. airspace are much stricter than those that cover U.S.
military drones overseas. Many of the Federal Aviation Authority’s regulations
were drafted for manned aircraft, long before unmanned flight across the United
States was even a possibility. Now the FAA is working with the private sector
to update its rules for the age of ubiquitous unmanned flight, and that will
open the floodgates.
“The market won’t exist until the regulations exist,”
said Matthew Scassero, director of the University of Maryland Unmanned Aircraft
Systems Test Site. “The FAA was a little slow in coming around to the
realization that we needed to get those in place.”
Unlike many new industries, which grow unfettered until
emerging problems prompt regulation, unmanned flight needs relief from existing
restrictions in order to blossom, Scassero said. Once that happens, the market
for large unmanned planes could be enormous.
“Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, they all have irons
in the fire. But I don’t know that any of them are pushing as hard as General
Atomics, or as early on the civil commercial side,” he said.
That’s because the California-based firm believes that
its future depends on building an unmanned aircraft that can fly more or less
freely over civilian areas in the United States and Europe. Right now, U.S. and
European militaries have special permission to fly Predator and Reaper drones
beyond line of sight of the operator. The Department of Homeland Security also flies
Predator drones over specific portions of the U.S. Mexico border.
“If we wanted to continue building out to the ten,
15-year, 20-year future, the legacy flight releases would not be sufficient,”
General Atomics CEO Linden Prause Blue told a handful of reporters at the
company’s headquarters outside of San Diego in August.
So the company is pouring money into a new version of the
Reaper, a longer-winged, farther-flying variant dubbed MQ-9B.
“It is a huge investment that the company is making. But
this is what we do,” said David
Alexander, who leads GA’s Aircraft Systems division.
GA officials are aiming to have the MQ-9B receive FAA
certification for free flight in 2025. That hard push recently came in for a
soft landing on a tarmac in Grey Butte, California…
Leaving the Nest
General Atomics can’t match big, publicly traded companies
like Northrop and Lockheed Martin in terms of cash and reach. But they do have
a head start in the race to FAA certification. On Aug. 19, the company staged
an historic demonstration, flying an MQ-9B some 275 miles from an airfield in
Yuma, Arizona, to the company’s private airstrip in Grey Butte, just north of
Los Angeles. Part of the flight took place in civil airspace, and required a
special FAA waiver and a piloted chase plane.
What does a drone maker need to do get the feds’ stamp of
approval? The FAA guidelines for air-worthiness mandate certain physical
characteristics: the plane must be able to fly in all sorts of weather and
survive a direct lightning strike. That requirement isn’t one that General
Atomics had to deal with when it was selling drones to the military to fly over
the desert.
Unlike conventional small planes, the Predator and the
Reaper are made of an extremely light fiber composite material. You can lift a
27-foot Predator drone with one hand. (The slightly larger Reaper takes two
people or one Dwayne Johnson.) That light composite airframe are key to the
plane’s endurance and low cost.
To meet FAA requirements, the company created a new skin
with a thin mesh of copper just beneath the surface, creating a flying Faraday cage that can keep
high electric charges away from sensitive electronics. To fight ice, the wings
will have a unique and brand-new electro-expulsive de-icing system.
A much bigger obstacle in the FAA guidelines is the
see-and-avoid clause, which mandates that a plane’s pilot must be able to see
forward and take evasive action to avoid hitting another plane.
The MQ-9B, like all General Atomics aircraft, requires at
least one human operator who monitors what’s going on via a 50mbps video link.
But a satellite video link to a human operator on the ground doesn’t satisfy
the see-and-avoid standard. The next iteration of the FAA guidelines will turn
see-and-avoid to something more like sense-and-avoid. General Atomics is
getting ready for that chance, testing a radar system that detects oncoming
aircraft and then tells the plane to move without waiting for the human
operator. Like a self-driving car, the plane is supposed to be able to avoid
collisions on its own.
All General Atomics drones are remotely piloted from a desk
of monitors and controls, called a ground control station, that sits inside a
big trailer. General Atomics, much like the U.S. Air Force, isn’t a big fan of
the term “drone,” preferring to emphasize the how human operators make not only
the flying decisions but also the targeting decisions in those places where the
military is using armed versions of the planes. But today’s unmanned planes
need a lot less human piloting and supervision than they did just a few years
ago, when every General Atomics plane required a dedicated ground crew, sensor
operator, and pilot to put every drone in the air and then a separate pilot and
sensor crew to take over piloting via satellite once the bird was aloft.
The newest version of the drone can autonomously take off
and land. A single operator can both fly the plane and operate the “sensor
ball,” a globe full of high-resolution sensors and thermal imaging sensors
manufactured by defense contractor Raytheon. The newest version of the camera
has 720p HD resolution, enough to show faces in a crowd from 2,000 feet up. And
optics are rapidly improving.
During the MQ-9B test in Grey Butte, journalists peeked
out the door of the ground-control trailer to the tiny, barely visible plane
overhead. Back inside, the monitors showed that we could easily easily
distinguish each another, pick out clothing patterns, discern other markings,
etc. It looked like a view from 30 feet up, not 2,000.
Hunting New Prey
Why would anyone need big, $12 million drones when the
skies over the United States are increasingly full of cheap consumer
quadcopters? The answer is distance and endurance. Small drones, which
typically run on electric batteries, can stay up only short times. Larger
drones like the MQ-9B and many others in its class have endurance measured in
days, and are rapidly improving. In 2009, a Reaper drone could fly for 23
hours; in 2017, it’s more than 41 hours.
That endurance allows the military — and eventually, U.S.
police departments — to do a lot of things differently. For starters, it vastly
improves the value of the drone. If the Reaper can fly for twice as long, you
need far fewer secret drone bases in Africa to run missions. A long-endurance plane with clearance to fly
in national air space (and international waters) can get on station faster and
with less logistical support.
General Atomics CEO Blue: “It’s not just national space,
it’s international space. You go out into the ocean farther than your [air
traffic control] radars can cover, [and then] you’ve got the problem again.
We’ve learned that with real users with our experience over the border
protection.”
Long-endurance drones also offer new capabilities to
firefighters. General Atomics has an agreement with the City of San Diego to
explore how persistent surveillance can help crews follow wildfires, anticipate
their next moves, and find their hottest spots — a feat currently especially
difficult at night.
But the biggest domestic opportunity is as a replacement
for police helicopters. Putting cops in choppers is dangerous, as evinced by
the recent deaths of two Virginia State Police officers who were monitoring the
civil unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Manned chopper flights are also
limited by how long the pilot and operator can endure the mission. The ability
to silently monitor multiple suspects for days and nights on end without
putting a human pilot in harm’s way would represent an enormous improvement in
police intelligence and surveillance.
Police Drones as Privacy Threat
It might also represent a big problem for privacy
advocates. Glimmers of that future battle are today already visible. In 2009,
the military planned to launch JLENS, a 242-foot aerostat over Maryland.
Original documents show that the unmanned blimp was supposed to have cameras,
similar to aerostats deployed to Afghanistan. Members of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center sounded an alarm. “There is a lot of potential for privacy
abuse if a surveillance device can identify a human at five kilometers away,”
Julia Horwitz, the group’s consumer protection counsel, told The Washington
Post. JLENS went up without the cameras attached. (It later broke loose,
causing havoc over multiple states.)
Reaper drones can also carry highly advanced jammer and
electronic warfare payloads into battle and still retain their satellite link.
That means a police drone could carry a wide variety of signals intelligence
collection payloads as well.
Ultimately, individual police departments and the
communities that they serve, not drone makers, will decide what sort of sensors
to carry aloft, and what happens to the information gathered. But the
relatively low costs of long-endurance drones, coupled with the growing
capability of the camera equipment attached to them, will likely hasten new
debates about police use of surveillance, and, in all likelihood, a lot of new
arrests.
As that happens, you might start hearing a lot more about
Florida vs. Riley, the 1989 case involving a police helicopter that spotted
someone growing marijuana in a greenhouse. The Supreme Court ruled that police
helicopters flying over private property did not violate privacy because
anything that can so observed is in the open…even the contents of a greenhouse
with high shades blocking the view of the street.
The only legal restriction that really applies to police
use of helicopters doesn’t apply to drones flying at 2,000 feet. The court
ruled that flyovers violate the 4th Amendment against “unreasonable search and
seizure” only when the helicopter is flying so low, kicking up so much wind and
dust that it becomes like a home invasion. (In 2015, a New Mexico court ruled
similarly.) High-flying drones effectively removes the chance of the a search
being deemed illegal because it’s too disruptive.
That’s good news for General Atomics and hawkish police
departments, bad news for anyone concerned about growing surveillance powers of
law enforcement. Even if the eye in the sky isn’t carrying Hellfire missiles,
there’s something deeply dystopian about a machine whose cousin track Al-Qaeda
across Afghanistan turned to track communities of color in places like
Baltimore.
“Drones make indiscriminate and persistent aerial
surveillance feasible and can easily be equipped with technologies like facial
recognition. Without proper restrictions, drone surveillance will become the
norm of public space, undermine our constitutional rights and chill First
Amendment activities,” said Jeramie D. Scott, the director of the Domestic
Surveillance Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Although
many states have passed laws restricting the use of drones by law enforcement,
there is no federal law providing baseline privacy protections.”
The ability to continuously survey an entire city opens a
wide variety of potential uses, and misuses, that will test communities’
comfort level with far more constant police presence overhead.
For the most, this revolution will happen without much
notice. You likely won’t notice the absence of the police helicopters until
long after they’re gone.
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