2014 has been a year of growing awareness in the media of the dangers posed by civil drones, while the drone lobby and entrepreneurs on both sides of the Atlantic continue to push regulators to relax current restrictions. It is… Read More ›
Drones in civil airspace
New British drone FoI releases and news round-up
The MoD and Department for Transport have responded to recent FoI requests helping us to shine some light on use of drones in Afghanistan and plans for drone use in the UK. Reaper drones The UK MoD released figures for UK Reaper… Read More ›
Drone Wars: Surveying the home front
Today Statewatch and Drone Wars UK are co-publishing a new report into the use of unmanned drones in UK airspace. Back from the Battlefield: Domestic Drones in the UK written by Chris Jones of Statewatch examines the current use of… Read More ›
Civil drones join military drones falling from the skies
As regular readers will know, Drone Wars UK tracks crashes of the larger type II and III military UAVs in our Drone Crash Database (details of UAV classifications here). We have just updated our list with a further six crashes during… Read More ›
Europe to open skies to drones by 2016 says Commission document
In an obscure working document, the European Commission has announced it is working on plans to open European civil airspace to unmanned drones by 2016. This follows the signing by President Obama earlier this year of the FAA Appropriations bill… Read More ›
Latest news on British drones
Some new information has emerged this week about future British drone programmes as BAE Systems held a media briefing at their Warton site to talk about their unmanned projects (our invitation was presumably lost in the post). According to the report by… Read More ›
Drones: as military use expands, civil use being developed
Just a few days after a senior US counter-terrorism expert warned that US drone strikes were turning Yemen into the “Arabian equivalent of Waziristan”, US drone strikes yesterday aped the tactic of ‘follow up’ strikes used by the US in… Read More ›
Implications of US drone lobby success beginning to dawn
The repercussions of the drone lobby’s success in forcing open US domestic airspace to unmanned drones by 2015 are beginning to be felt across the US as civil liberties groups and politicians wake up to the implications for safety and privacy. An… Read More ›
Drone lobby cracks open US skies – will it happen in the UK?
The drone lobby in the US has had a stunning success in pushing its agenda of enabling unmanned drones to fly freely in civil airspace. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Bill has been passed by both Senate and Congress and… Read More ›
Romancing the drone…
Anyone with even a passing interest in the military soon discovers the peculiar phenomenon of ‘military speak’, in which a spade can never quite be called a spade. Bombs and bullets are called ‘ordnance consumables’, a missile strike or bombing raid… Read More ›
Extent of unmanned drone use within UK civil airspace revealed
Analysis of information received in response to a series of Freedom of Information requests to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has revealed that around fifty to sixty companies and public bodies per year are being granted “blanket permission” to fly… Read More ›
Drones for Peace?
On 7 September the awkwardly named ASTRAEA (Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment) programme held its annual conference at the Royal Aeronautical Society in central London. The aim of the ASTRAEA programme is “to enable the use of drones… Read More ›
Investigation into Drone and Helicopter near miss
The Guardian has revealed that a British Desert Hawk III drone was in a near collision with two military helicopters over Salisbury Plain. The incidents, revealed by safety investigations by the UK Airprox Board, took place on February 12th. According to the Guardian, the… Read More ›
Surveillance drones in the UK?
Speaking about armed drones to a group in Essex last night I was asked about the use of drones to spy on people in the UK. I get this question regularly since the Guardian reported in January that a number… Read More ›
