The European Commission (EC) plan was revealed in a Staff Working Paper published on September 4th 2012 entitled  “Towards a European strategy for the development of civil applications of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems”.

The document  summaries the conclusions of the year-long European Unmanned Air Systems Panel which began meeting in July 2011and recommends setting up a European RPAS [Remotely Piloted Air Systems] Steering Group (ERSG).  The aim of the ERSG, writes Peter van Blyenburgh, President of UVS International, (the main European drone lobby group) on the UAVS Vision website is to “foster the development of civil RPAS by planning and coordinating all the activities necessary to achieve the safe and incremental integration of RPAS into European air traffic by 2016″.

Surprisingly – or not depending on your view of the inner workings of the EC – membership of the ERSG has already been decided and it has already met to begin its work before its existence was announced.  The group is co-chaired by the EC’s Directorate-General Enterprise & Industry and Directorate-General Mobility & Transport.  Other members include representatives of other EC directorates plus what it calls a whole range of “stakeholders”.  These include industry bodies including UVS International, the main drone lobby group.

The ERSG has established three working groups and is planning to publish by December 2012 a “comprehensive roadmap” towards the integration of civil drones into European airspace by 2016.

Picture of Taranis at Warton, released by BAE Systems.

According to the report by Defense News the first flight of BAE’s Taranis drone has been put back yet again until 2013.  Originally due to make its maiden flight in 2011, it was first delayed until early 2012 for “technical and other reasons” but now won’t fly at all this year.  Little has been heard about Taranis since it was unveiled to journalists (and protestors) in July  2010.  At the briefing journalists were allowed a distant peak at the drone as it sat in its hangar.  The UK government gave BAE Systems £40m of funding to develop unmanned combat systems in January 2012.

Perhaps surprisingly BAE told reporters that it was restarting its Mantis programme. Mantis is an armed medium altitude, long endurance (MALE) drone of similar size and shape to the Reaper.  Unlike Reaper, however Mantis is not remotely controlled but flies autonomously following a pre-programmed flight plan.  Mantis reached the end of its development phase when it flew for the first time at the Woomera test range in Australia in October 2009. Until now it has been suggested Mantis would simply form the basis of the proposed joint BAE-Dassault drone, Telemos.

BAE also said it hoped it would sign contracts with the UK and French government to further develop the Telemos drone  at the Farnborough airshow next month.  Telemos is BAE and Dassault’s offering to fill the UK-French ‘requirement’ for a new armed drone. However the change of administration in France has created uncertainty about the proposal as the newly appointed French defence minister announced in May that he was going back to “square one” on the plan to build a joint military drone.  

Elsewhere BAE continues to undertake work to in order to allow unmanned aircraft to fly within UK airspace.  As part of the ASTRAEA (Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment) programme, BAE will begin undertaking a series of test flights using a converted Jestream aircraft that can fly autonomously as an unmanned aircraft.   At least twenty test flights will take place over the Irish sea over the next six months.  BAE issued a glossy diagram to explain the work that they will be undertaking (large pdf here). 

The other main ‘British’ drone, Watchkeeper - which is being jointly developed by Israeli company Elbit Systems and Thales UK – seems to have missed out on being chosen by the French army as their new drone.  As part of the Anglo-French defence treaty, France was supposed to consider Watchkeeper for the contract but it was announced this week that they have instead bought further Sperwer MKII drones from French company, Sagem. Given this new contract and the fact that France have announced they are withdrawing early from Afghanistan it is unlikely that the French will want Watchkeeper as well.   For more info on Watchkeeper follow Wandering Raven’s blog and see this recent comprehensive article.

Finally, I can’t finish a post about British drones without mentioning the Reaper.  The Guardian reports this week that British reapers have now fired 281 weapons in Afghanistan up until the end of May 2012 and rightly points out that MoD continues to insist that only four civilians have been killed in these British drone strikes whilst at the same times maintaining that they cannot know how many people have been killed.  

 In the article, human rights lawyer Erica Gaston argues

“there has been little to no visibility on how drone targets are selected or reviewed. There have been many cases in Afghanistan and elsewhere in which the visual identification of a “target” through drone technology proved catastrophically wrong. Such past mistakes have raised the bar on the level of transparency and public accountability required. The ‘trust us’ approach is no longer good enough where drones are involved.” 

Quite. Interestingly, the Labour MP Madeleine Moon, who is on the Commons defence select committee, also said: “Greater priority must be given to ensure those killed in drone attacks are not innocent civilians. Current figures coming out of the Ministry of Defence do not indicate that the level of scrutiny needed is in place. It is imperative that steps are put in place, not only to protect innocent civilians, but demonstrate that have done so.”

In stark contrast to this suggestion, the MoD have written to me (letter here) saying they will no longer answer my Freedom of Information requests on the use of UAVs in Afghanistan “until at least the end of operations in Afghanistan.”  Needless to say I have appealed (letter here) and will continue to demand more transparency and public accountability on the use of  British drones.

According to CNN, a strike in which seven  suspected Al-Qaeda militants were killed was followed by a strike on local residents rushing to the scene to help the injured.  Local sources said that between eight and twelve civilians were killed in the second, follow-up strike.  A Yemeni security officials expressed regret for the civilian casualties and injuries. “The targets of the raids were not the civilians, and we give our condolences to the families of those who lost a loved one.”

Over the past few weeks US drone strikes and other military activity has been ratcheted up in Yemen as the White House has given ‘greater leeway’ to the CIA and JSOC to launch attacks.  Micah Zenko at the US Council on Foreign Relations estimates there will be more US strikes this month in Yemen than there has ever been in a single month in Pakistan.  For details see the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s excellent database of US covert activity in Yemen.

Drone strikes continue in Pakistan of course and no doubt in Afghanistan although almost no details of these are released.  Last week the US apologised after a strike killed a mother and her five children in Afghanistan but it was not revealed if the strikes was from a drone or a manned aircraft.

Drone fatalities continue to spread around the globe.  As we reported last year, US drones from Iraq were moved to Turkey to help the Turkish military “monitor” Kurdish separatists.  Today (16 May) it was revealed by the Wall Street Journal that information from one of these drones led directly to a Turkish military attack in which 38 civilians were killed last December.   Last week an engineer  working for an Austrian company was killed and two others injured when a drone they were demonstrating to the South Korean military crashed.

Meanwhile preparations aimed at  enabling the use of unmanned drones to fly  in civil airspace continues at a brisk pace both in the US and the UK.

Yesterday the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that it had met the deadline for the first changes demanded by the new FAA Act aimed at allowing drones to fly in US civil airspace by September 2015.  The Act mandated that the FAA must streamline the process for government agencies to gain Certificates of Authorization (COA) to fly drones  within US civil airspace within 90 days.

Meanwhile in the UK BAE Systems has begun a series of flight tests over the Irish Sea as part of a programme aimed at allowing  unmanned drones to fly within UK civil airspace. BAE Systems is one of a number of military aerospace companies funding the ASTRAEA (Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation & Assessment) programme.  According to the  ASTRAEA website it is “a UK industry-led consortium focusing on the technologies, systems, facilities, procedures and regulations that will allow autonomous vehicles to operate safely and routinely in civil airspace over the United Kingdom.”

According to The Engineer, BAE has fitted an “autonomous navigation system” on a Jetstream 31 passenger aircraft to enable it to fly without a pilot – although a pilot was on board in case of problems.

A BAE spokesperson told the Guardian that the tests “will demonstrate to regulators such as the Civil Aviation Authority and air traffic control service providers the progress made towards achieving safe routine use of UAVs [unmanned air vehicle] in UK airspace.”  Further flights  will take place over the next three months  testing infra-red systems as well as ‘sense-and-avoid’ systems.

An article on the Public Intelligence website asks the basic questions “Is it even logistically possible to operate thousands of pilot-less aircraft in domestic airspace?”  The authors examine two basic practical problems with unmanned drones.  Firstly how they tend to become “zombies” by losing their wireless data-link to the remote operator – and then crashing.   And secondly how without ‘sense and avoid’ capability drones are unable to avoid other aircraft and cause mid-air collisions.   In both cases the more drones that fly – and the FAA predict up to 30,000 drones will be flying in the US by the end of the decade - the more incidents of lost data links and mid-air collisions there will be.

While safety is rightly the primary concern, civil liberties issues are also seriously affected by the new legislation. Last week the co-chairs of the Congressional Privacy Caucus, Ed Markey & Joe Barton, wrote an open letter to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) pointing out the “potential for drone technology to enable invasive and pervasive surveillance without adequate privacy protection” and requesting information as to how the FAA were to address privacy concerns.

In particular the pair want to know

• What privacy protections and public transparency requirements has the FAA built into its current temporary licensing process for drones used in U.S. airspace?
• Is the public notified about where and when drones are used, who operates them, what data are collected, how are the data used, how long are they retained, and who has access to that data?
• How does the FAA plan to ensure that drone activities under the new law are transparent and individual privacy rights are protected?
• How will the FAA determine whether an entity applying to operate a drone will properly address these privacy concerns.”

A couple of days later an ‘op-ed’ piece in the Washington Post by two Brookings analysts also raised the privacy issue:

“The current legal framework with respect to observations from above by government is not particularly protective of privacy. Two of the most relevant Supreme Court cases, California v. Ciraolo in 1986 and Florida v. Riley in 1989, addressed law enforcement’s use of manned aircraft to perform surveillance of a suspect’s property. In both cases, the court held that observations made from “public navigable airspace” in the absence of a warrant did not violate the Fourth Amendment.

These precedents suggest, in a world in which UAVs will be inexpensive and plentiful, that government operators might have broad legal latitude to use them for surveillance. Non-government operators may have even fewer constraints regarding surveillance. And today’s cameras are far more capable than those of the 1980s and can acquire stunning high-resolution imagery from hundreds of feet away — imagery that can be processed using ever more capable computers.”

However, the op-ed’s authors, John Villasenor and Ben Wittes also make the not unreasonable point that given “the challenges the agency will face in safely providing for the operation of what may soon be tens of thousands of UAVs, operated by tens of thousands of people from unconventional flight locations… to broaden its already unenviable task, to include this hotly disputed field [of privacy] that lies far from its core competency, is a recipe for bad and technologically uneven outcomes that will satisfy no one.”

The consequences of allowing unmanned drones to fly within domestic airspace both in terms of safety and privacy are beginning to be apparent to all.  That such a serious step should be taken in such a rush and under such pressure, simply  because of industry lobbying is ludicrous.   There needs to be a serious re-think, as well as an investigation into how companies with a vested industry were able to force through such a huge change with little apparent regard to the consequences.

This deadline, along with several other provisions were pushed by the US drone lobby group, Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI).  In fact AUVSI boast on its website about helping to draft some of bill. 

Given that there is as yet no proven technology that would allow drones to ‘sense and avoid’ other aircraft, the deadline of just 3½ years before full integration is either incredibly ambitious – or just plain foolish.  Already pilots are expressing their disquiet as Business Week reports:

Commercial airlines and pilots are less than thrilled with the idea of sharing the sky. They point out there’s no system that allows operators of unmanned aircraft to see and steer clear of piloted helicopters and planes. Nor are there training requirements or standards for the ground-based “pilots” who guide them. It’s also not clear how drones should operate in airspace overseen by air-traffic controllers, where split-second manoeuvring is sometimes required. Until unmanned aircraft can show they won’t run into other planes or the ground, they shouldn’t be allowed to fly with other traffic, says Lee Moak, president of the Air Line Pilots Assn.  

Privacy issues also seem to have been ignored by the bill (and AUVSI, naturally).  Hours before the bill was passed Jay Stanley of the ACLU urged Congress

“to impose some rules (such as those we proposed in our report) to protect Americans’ privacy from the inevitable invasions that this technology will otherwise lead to. We don’t want to wonder, every time we step out our front door, whether some eye in the sky is watching our every move….  The bottom line is: domestic drones are potentially extremely powerful surveillance tools, and that power — like all government power — needs to be subject to checks and balances.”

Despite these safety and civil liberties concerns, thanks to the drone lobbyists thousands of drones will soon be flying in US airspace.  The question then is could it happen here?  Will unmanned drones be allowed to fly freely in UK civil airspace too?  While it may seem like science fiction at the moment, there are many vested interests working hard behind the scene to make it happen.

At the European level, the EU has been having a series of meetings over the past year to prepare a strategy document for the introduction of drones within European airspace  as the Sunday Times recently reported last week  (quoting us).

European and UK lobby groups acting on behalf of the drone industry are pushing the advantages of drones and talking up their usefulness in many news publications.  New Scientist magazine reports how Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a lobby group based in the Paris, says that drones will become “vital tools in many fields, from helping police track stolen cars to assisting emergency services in crisis situations such as fires, floods and earthquakes, to more prosaic tasks like advertising or dispensing fertiliser from the air.”  (“High time to welcome the friendly drones” said the New Scientist editorial) .  The BBC website also last week reported on how drones are cheaper and better at checking on whether farmers are complying with Common Agricultural Policy rules. 

In the UK, as regular readers will know, the ‘industry-led consortium’ ASTRAEA, aims “to enable the routine use of UAS (Unmanned Aircraft Systems) in all classes of airspace  without the need for restrictive or specialised conditions of operation.” 

The programme is funded 50% by the taxpayer and 50% by some of the UK’s biggest military companies.   According to the ASTRAEA website, the UK drone lobby group, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems Association (UAVS) and the Ministry of Defence are also ‘stakeholders’ in the programme.  As the UAVS website states on their website much of their representation takes place “behind closed doors”.

There are two main hurdles for the drone lobby to overcome before unrestricted drone flying will become the norm in the UK.  First is the safety issue.  At the moment the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) which is responsible for UK civil airspace severely restricts the use of drones (but see our article here ).  Their main objection comes from a safety perspective.   At last years ASTRAEA conference, John Clark from the UK CAA  told delegates that it is for industry and the UAV community to prove that it will meet standards – “whatever you propose it must be safe” he said.  There is a long way to go before the drone industry will satisfy the CAA and the public that drones are at least as safe as ‘manned’ aircraft.   

Second is public skepticism.  The MoD and the drone industry are well aware that the public do not like the thought of drones flying above their heads in the UK.  While there will be a lot of activity over the next year or twoby lobbyists focusing on reassuring the public that drones are neither frightening nor dangerous, there also needs to be discussion about what is acceptable to the British public.  As Ben Hayes of the campaign group Statewatch says in the BBC piece mentioned above, while  there are lots of things that drones can be useful for, ”the questions about what is acceptable and how people feel about drones hovering over their farmland or their demonstration – these debates are not taking place.” 

Unlike the US, the debate on drones in civil airspace is still wide open.  We need to make sure it is not just the industry lobbyists whose voices are heard.

Bombs and bullets are called ’ordnance consumables’, a missile strike or bombing raid is known as a ‘kinetic event’, and despite its offensive purpose, the industry and its business must always be described as ‘defence’.  Military speak is essentially about maintaining a psychological distance between the day-to-day sanitized business of planning, preparing (and profiting) from armed conflicts and the awful brutal reality of warfare.   

The same coyness over language applies of course to drones.  Over the past few years I‘ve lost count of the number of times I been told not to call drones ‘drones’.  The current preferred term in the military is ‘Remotely Piloted Air System’ (RPAS) after they rejected ‘Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’ (UAV) as being ‘off message’ (“such a generic term can be unhelpful, particularly when working with an uninformed audience” said the MoD last year). 

Pretty in Pink?

The term ‘drone’, though widely used and understood by the public and media alike, is snubbed both by the military and those wanting to get a civil drone industry of the ground.  Not only is it seen as too dull a name for such a ‘sophisticated piece of kit’ but its association with death and destruction is of course problematic.

This week the Guardian revealed that the Unmanned Aerial Systems Association, a UK lobby group, is planning a public relations offensive to counter the negative image of drones.  This website (Drone Wars UK) was cited by the lobby group as part of the problem to be overcome.   They recommend  that drones deployed in the UK “be decorated with humanitarian-related advertisements, and be painted bright colours to distance them from those used in warzones”  As the guardian reports:

“John Moreland, the general secretary of UAVSA, said the industry was uncomfortable with the word “drones” and wanted to find new terminology. “If they’re brightly coloured, and people know why they’re there, it makes them a lot more comfortable,” he said.

The idea that the public could be persuaded to accept drones by painting them bright colours has rightly been mocked across the blogosphere.

A more serious strategy in the attempt to rebrand drones is for advocates to play up their potential to be used by green or human rights groups. Last week the New York Times carried a think piece arguing that drones should be used to monitor human rights abuses. Like many drones themselves however, the idea has come crashing down to earth after being comprehensively rubbished by human rights advocates (see the excellent post from Laurenist and also from Mark Kersten).  Even one noted supporter of drones, @drunkenpredator,  ridiculed the idea on twitter.

Drones do not have a negative image because of the work of Drones Wars UK, but because of the awful impact that they have in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, and because of the serious concern that remote warfare will mean more warfare. 

The public will not be reassured by any renaming or rebranding exercise.  What is needed is for the legitimate concerns about drones in warfare and their impact on civil liberties to be taken seriously.

Aerovironment Wasp III - one of drones being flown in UK civil airspace

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 unmanned drones within UK civil airspace.   With very few exceptions each flight must remain under 400 feet and within 500 metres of the operator.

While names of companies and institutions who have been granted permission to fly drones has not been revealed, the type of work being undertaken includes aerial photography and filming,  surveying of buildings and land, emergency services work, and surveillance in support of law enforcement, data collection, evidence gathering and security.

The Civil Aviation Authority grants three types of ‘permissions’ to fly unmanned aircraft : a) permission for a one-off flight,  b) permission for a series of flights in a limited time frame, or c) blanket permission which must be renewed on an annual basis.

The CAA has told Drone Wars UK that out of the 100 applications submitted between January 2010 and September 2011, 98 blanket permissions were issued.  With one exception all the applications were for drones weighing less than 20kg.  While in the time frame many of the 98 applications will have been renewals a conservative estimate is that around fifty to sixty companies and public bodies are regularly flying unmanned drones in  UK civil airspace.

Chris Cole of Drone Wars UK said:  “I expected to find that the CAA would have mostly granted one-off permissions to fly drones in UK airspace, with perhaps a handful of blanket permissions granted each year. However around ten times the number of blanket permissions are being granted. Once this blanket permission has been granted, who monitors what these companies are doing with their drones?”

Some work being undertaken by these drones seems fairly innocuous, including application for tasks such as “surveys for geography, environment and archaeological survey”  and “data gathering for insurance, building surveys, health and safety etc.“  The majority of applications however, contain little real information about the work being undertaken with  “stills & video photography from the air” and “aerial photography & video” being common.  Occasionally other types of work are mentioned such as: “evidence gathering, surveillance and search” and “surveillance in support of UK law enforcement.”

While the CAA are responsible for ensuring that these unmanned flights within UK civil airspace are flown  safely, who is ensuring that the public’s privacy and civil liberties are protected?

The aim of the ASTRAEA programme is “to enable the use of drones (sorry, Unmanned Aircraft Systems) in all classes of airspace without the need for restrictive or specialised conditions of operation”. In other words its an ‘industry-led’ programme to develop systems and technology to allow drones to fly in civilian airspace in the UK.  The programme has a £62m budget and is 50% funded by the tax-payer and 50% by AOS, BAE Systems, Cassidian, Cobham, QinetiQ, Rolls-Royce and Thales.

Tim Robinson from the Royal Aeronautical Society has written a thorough report on the conference, cheerily called ‘Drones for Peace’ on the RAES blog.  While ASTRAEA likes to portray itself as about ensuring the safety of the public, the real guardian of public safety in respect of airspace, the Civil Aviation authority (CAA) told delegates at the conference ‘that it is for industry and the [drone] community to prove that it will meet standards – “whatever you propose it must be safe” said John Clark from the UK CAA according to Tim Robinson’s report.  Given the amount of drones that crash, it would seem that there is a very long way to go before it can be argued that drones are safe to fly in civil airspace.

Another concern of the conference was to highlight the civil use of drones.  This is in part about demonstrating that there are ‘exploitable markets’ beyond military use and partly about trying to  reassure a sceptical public that drones are ‘a good thing’.  Environmental surveys, monitoring protection of wildlife habitats and disaster relief were all highlighted as potential uses of drones.  And it is certainly true that drones have the potential to be used for good.  But before we get carried away let’s not forget who is funding ASTRAEA:  BAE Systems, Cobham, QinetiQ, Rolls-Royce and Thales the biggest military companies in the UK.  ASTRAEA is first and foremost a military project.

And that leads to what Tim Robinson called in his post the greatest challenge to drones: the ‘public perception’ issue.

As noted earlier (almost) all military usage so far has skewed public perceptions that they are ‘killer’, ‘spy’ ‘robots’, evoking thoughts of big brother ‘drones’ snooping far above…  However, these cultural concerns over ‘machines taking over’ – which stretch all the way back to Luddites, the Industrial revolution, through to Metropolis, Terminator films and Blade Runner – should not be easily dismissed. The public, politicians and media need engaging and reassuring that these drones can be a ‘force for good’. As a study by aviation consultancy Helios notes: “A concerted effort needs to be made to sell the efficiency, environmental and agility benefits that UAS offer over manned aircraft operations.”

This need to “engage the public” has so far led the ASTRAEA  to launching a video competition to “improve the public perception” of drones.  The contest, won by ACC Media of the University of Central Lancashire can be seen below.

We have previously reported that the UK MoD has stressed the need to develop a communication strategy to win over public opinion about drones.   With industry now joining in, it seems we will be bombarded with more propaganda aimed at connecting in our minds the word ‘drone’ and the word ‘peace’.  The age of Big Brother has truly arrived, in more ways than one.

Desert Hawk III Drone

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 Airprox investigation found that:  

An Apache helicopter escorting a Chinook on a simulation exercise entered the landing zone and was at one stage “on a collision course” with the drone… Last-minute manoeuvres by the UAV controllers prevented a collision.  Three hours later a Sea King helicopter entered the same drone’s airspace and came within 300 metres of it.  The UAV operator spotted the helicopter and avoided collision with an “emergency orbit”. “This was a very close encounter and had the [UAV operator] not reacted so quickly a mid-air collision could have occurred,” the report said. 

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) put the blame for the near miss on the helicopter pilots.  “On both occasions Desert Hawk 3 was operating safely under remote pilot control when a manned aircraft incorrectly entered the dedicated air space allocated to it,” it said. 

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) which controls UK airspace has specifically allocated dedicated airspace – over Salisbury Plain and Parc Aberporth in Wales – to allow military drones to be tested.  Even within this test space,  it seems that near misses or collisions may be  inevitable.   

 The CAA is coming under increasing pressure from drone manufacturers like BAE Systems as well as the security services to allow much wider use of unmanned drones within UK airspace  (see Surveillance drones in the UK?).  Given the amount of  drones that crash and go rogue (see Crash of the Drones) this must be opposed.

Currently the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) does not allow unmanned drones to be flown in UK airspace with the exception of certain military test sites.   When Merseyside police jumped the gun and used a drone to track a stolen car, they were threatened with prosecution by the CAA  and had to promise not to use drones again.    (I have been told that drones have been sighted at various demos but presumably after the high-profile rebuke of Merseyside police this is not happening now).

It is not just the UK that does not allow unmanned drones to be flown in civil airspace for safety reasons .  Frustrated by this, the military industry has been working on ways to put pressure civil aviation authorities.   The latest  bit of pressure is a ‘year long study by 23 European military companies’ into how manned and unmanned aircraft can fly together.  Flight Magazine reports:  

“One of the major issues at the heart of UAS development today is the integration of these vehicles into civil airspace. We need to ensure proper segregation of existing air traffic and maintain a high level of safety for all airspace users to the standards of international civil aviation,” says Pierre-Eric Pommellet, Thales senior vice-president in charge of defence mission systems.   While calling the SIGAT findings “decisive” and “a major outcome for European defence ministries” considering the technical and regulatory aspects of operating manned and unmanned aircraft in the same airspace, no details on the findings were released.

In my experience the military industry usually gets what it  want.  Whilst the CAA holds the upper hand at the moment, I suspect that over the next few year, in particular in the run up to the 2012 Olympics,  there will be increasing pressure to allow drones to undertake surveillance work in UK airspace.

Meanwhile, as I am beginning to regular say at the end of these posts, there has been another drone stike in Pakistan.

PS -  The existing six-mile training area aound Parc Aberporth in Wales to be extended.