The other was the military, which carried out surveillance missions with unmanned aircraft like the General Atomics Predator. One was hobbyists who flew radio-controlled planes and choppers for fun. Offspring of 9/11Ī dozen years ago only two communities cared much about drones. “The Raven can’t do that,” Miser says proudly. After the deputy sheriff clicks on the laptop, the Falcon swoops lower, releases a neon orange parachute, and drifts gently to the ground, just yards from the spot Johnson clicked on. “Let’s go ahead and tell it to land,” Miser says to Johnson. The stench from a nearby chicken-processing plant wafts over the alfalfa field. An accelerometer switches on the propeller only after the bird has taken flight, so it won’t slice the hand that launches it. To launch the Falcon, you simply hurl it into the air. To navigate, Johnson types the desired altitude and airspeed into the laptop and clicks targets on a digital map the autopilot does the rest. “You just put in the coordinates, and it flies itself,” says Benjamin Miller, who manages the unmanned aircraft program for the sheriff ’s office. The Falcon can fly for an hour, and it’s easy to operate. The sheriff ’s office has a three-foot-wide helicopter drone called a Draganflyer, which stays aloft for just 20 minutes. But for now Mesa County, with its empty skies, is one of only a few jurisdictions with an FAA permit to fly one. ![]() He plans to sell two drones and support equipment for about the price of a squad car.Ī law signed by President Barack Obama in February 2012 directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by September 30, 2015. government license, the Falcon is roughly comparable, Miser says, to the Raven, a hand-launched military drone-but much cheaper. Sophisticated enough that it can’t be exported without a U.S. Powered by an electric motor, it carries two swiveling cameras, visible and infrared, and a GPS-guided autopilot. The Falcon has an eight-foot wingspan but weighs just 9.5 pounds. Rock-jawed, arms crossed, sunglasses pushed atop his shaved head, Miser is a former Air Force captain who worked on military drones before quitting in 2007 to found his own company in Aurora, Colorado. Standing behind Johnson, watching him watch the Falcon, is its designer, Chris Miser. ![]() A laptop on a table in front of Johnson shows the drone’s flickering images of a nearby highway. The sheriff ’s office here in Mesa County, a plateau of farms and ranches corralled by bone-hued mountains, is weighing the Falcon’s potential for spotting lost hikers and criminals on the lam. It’s not a vulture or crow but a Falcon-a new brand of unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, and Johnson is flying it. ![]() This story appears in the March 2013 issue of National Geographic magazine.Īt the edge of a stubbly, dried-out alfalfa field outside Grand Junction, Colorado, Deputy Sheriff Derek Johnson, a stocky young man with a buzz cut, squints at a speck crawling across the brilliant, hazy sky.
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