There are plenty of good peacetime uses for remote controlled aircraft—Drones—Unarmed Aerial Vehicles—that are currently being experimented with. Such as NOAA's experimentation with drones based in the Caribbean, and used for close-in investigation of hurricanes and possible developing hurricanes (often too dangerous for manned aircraft).

Other agencies are beginning to use them in the Arctic for such things as monitoring polar bears and various migrating animals (e.g., caribou), plus monitoring icebergs that can become potential navigation hazards (anybody remember the Titanic?).

And with all the oil drilling in the Arctic, oil spills are another reason why drones can be useful. For example, with the number of pipelines running from the Arctic, not only can they help to detect oil spills in the first place, they can then help figure out exactly where oil is moving. As I recall, a few years ago, there was a bad leak in a pipeline leading down from the Prudhoe Bay oil field, and it leaked oil for several days before it was discovered. A regular, frequent survey with drones would minimize ecological disasters like that.

Hunting for people who are lost in wilderness areas is an obvious use of drones. Mountain climbers who are stranded or hikers who are lost or may be injured, for example. Usually helicopters are used for such missions. But drones—several drones—can cover a wider area less expensively, and if one crashes (as happens from time to time with helicopters on such search missions), you lose a relatively inexpensive drone instead of a very expensive helicopter—and no one gets killed.

When I worked doing morning and evening rush hour traffic reports over the radio in the early 1970's, I had to monitor four Seattle Police radios and two Washington State Patrol radios simultaneously, listen to the conversation back and forth, and try to put together a comprehensive report of areas to avoid and good alternate routes for the commuters who depended on such reports to get to work on time. Being psychic would have helped, but I never knew when I voiced the report if it bore any relation to what was actually happening on the streets and freeways out there. Apparently I was doing okay, because people kept telling me I was doing a great job.

One of the other radio stations in town had a small plane flying over the freeways and radioing in reports. But Seattle is a pretty big city and when he was checking out the Northgate area traffic, he had no idea of what was happening in the south end of the city.

Looking back on it, a fleet of drone aircraft equipped with cameras could make duck-soup out of compiling drive-time traffic reports.

Peacetime drones can be very useful for many worthwhile purposes, including saving lives.

Don Firth