“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” – Leonardo Da Vinci, but for how long will pilots be experiencing actual flight?
Flying: the quickest route of transport (except for perhaps a rocket), and not the best one for getting to school. But instead of having a pilot alongside you through the journey to Marbella, how about a computer system? This is the role that UAVs could uptake in the future. A UAV is an unmanned aerial vehicle (an aircraft piloted by remote control or onboard computers). Aviation companies have been developing UAVs since the first World War, with the first being the ‘Aerial Target’ created by Archibald Low – a physicist, a writer and Captain in World War I. He was drafted into the War due to his good health, and began developing the “Aerial Target”, with the intention to fool the Germans into thinking that the British had the capabilities to create drones. However, General Sir David Henderson – the director of Aviation at the time – believed it was such a great proposal that he asked the Experimental Corp to develop the first ever working drone with explosives in the nose of the aircraft. There you have it – drones were a happy accident meant to deceive the Germans.
Unaided flight progressed further after World War II, where in 1951 the U.S Air Force and Turkish Air Force created the Ryan Firebee, with the purpose of being a Gunnery Target (which is meant for training). The birth of the modern UAV was in 1960 when a U-2 aircraft was shot down over Soviet territory during the Cold War, when the US were participating in reconnaissance – however much they denied it. The same sort of incident occurred in 1964 in the Tonkin Gulf during the Vietnam War. However, even after this, they never upped the quantity of drones until the late 1980s, when the higher ranks of the US Air Force realised what a saviour of American lives unmanned planes could be. With this in mind, the US Air Force began developing a drone that could participate in ‘dog fights’ and carry out the duties of a manned aircraft. The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator was born in 1994. Until In February 2013, it was reported that UAVs were used by at least 50 countries, several of which made their own: Iran, Israel and China. In a matter of 79 years, the evolution of drones has gone from just a myth to intimidate the Germans, to 2014 – where its now more advanced than ever.
The evolution of drones took another step forward at the beginning of this year, with the launch of Amazon Prime Air. The Prime Air project consists of a small drone known as an Octocopter, delivering the purchase of anyone around the world – within just 30 minutes of buying the item. This project has only just been announced, and it’s been predicted the first delivery should be happening within the next five years, putting it at 2019. Quite a time to wait. But this is the first sign of drones no longer being used for just military purposes but for the good of the people – this is all good. The Octocopter is a tiny, lesser advance drone. Unlike Amazon, the CEO of FedEx believes the setup of Amazons Prime Air is laughable, with FedEx themselves now developing drones the size of a jet (they are developing the Boeing’s X-48C) with the purpose of delivering larger shipments. This is the first time we have seen a plane of this size being unmanned.
As an aspiring pilot myself, the fear that my job could no longer involve travelling vast distances to exotic countries – that I do not even dare to spell – is a horrible one. The reason for my aspiration to become a pilot is to experience a new dimension of travel, where traffic is no longer a problem (and also the pay, of course). But with the development of flying in the RAF, and the military now allowing pilots to sit in a room flying a plane from a joystick, you wonder how long it will be until commercial pilots are doing the same. This causes many worries for pilots themselves, but also for the general public. As the evolution of planes is developing, we now see such developments in EMPs (an electro-magnetic pulse) which causes electronic disturbance. In the wrong hands, they could cause devastation.
Do I really intend on being in a room with a controller for up to 7 hours? Do I want to get paid a substantially smaller amount, due to not receiving the same amount of stress on my body? No. I want to experience the stress and the exhilaration of flying at 300,000 feet with nothing below me. With that in mind, I thoroughly believe it won’t be just pilots hesitating over the idea of drones flying you to your holidays.
The Sixth Form Journal 