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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
