Mini-drones
Dubious military expenditures unabated
The Pentagon asked the defense industry’s wizards to come up with tiny surveillance drones that mimicked the natural world.
Five years and $4 million later, according to the Associated Press, a California company called AeroVironment has developed the hummingbird spy plane.
One would have thought a fake pigeon would have been a better choice. Hummingbirds attract attention. Pigeons are anonymous. Disguise a drone as a pigeon and you can slip it into any city in the world – flocks of drones, for that matter.
But the hummingbird has skills that pigeons do not. It can hover, take off vertically and fly backward. And it’s tiny. AP says the hummingbird drone, armed with video and audio equipment, has a 6- 1/2-inch wingspan and weighs less than an AA battery.
The U.S. military already uses a small drone in Afghanistan, the 4-pound, hand-launched Raven. But the search is under way for even smaller drones – really small drones.
AP says Lockheed Martin has developed a fake maple-tree seed loaded with sensors that weighs .07 ounces. Left unsaid is whether the drone can be partially split to make a comically upturned stick-on nose.
The Pentagon is also looking at equipping insects – real ones – with cameras or sensors and dispatching them on remote-controlled espionage missions.
Among the possible uses of birdlike drones are said to be searching buildings in urban combat, scouting the debris for survivors after an earthquake and detecting hazardous-chemical leaks. But we know what they’re really for – snooping.
That cute little birdie on the bedroom windowsill might be on a mission from a peeping Tom. Soon there may be only one way to look at the activity in your backyard bird feeder – with suspicion.
Scripps Howard News Service