By Arthur Holland Michel and Dan Gettinger 2015 was a very busy year in the drone world. The U.S. domestic commercial drone industry began to take shape, military drone exports grew significantly, the technology advanced in leaps and bounds, and certain public safety concerns became a hotly debated topic. We …
For proposed spending on the MQ-9 Reaper and other unmanned systems in Fiscal Year 2017, click here. For our Defense Spending on Drones project, click here. By Dan Gettinger The MQ-9 Reaper is a medium-altitude long-endurance surveillance and strike drone. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., the primary contractor for the …
By Dan Gettinger On August 21, 2015, Reyaad Khan and Ruhul Amin, two British citizens who had traveled to Syria to fight with ISIL, were killed in a British drone strike while traveling in a vehicle outside of Raqqa, Syria. According to the British government, the strike was necessary to …
This post was originally published on August 28, 2015 and updated on September 10, 2015. By Dan Gettinger and Arthur Holland Michel As domestic drone use has expanded in recent years, so too has the number of incidents in which manned aircraft have come into close contact with drones, as well …
This feature is based on an essay presented by the author at “Reconfiguring Global Space: The Geography, Politics, and Ethics of Drone Warfare,” which took place Indiana University – Bloomington in July of this year By Arthur Holland Michel The drone, most often represented in some variation of the …
By Dan Gettinger On August 28, 2013, an MQ-1 Predator drone took off from March Air Reserve Base in Southern California and headed north. The Predator’s mission was to provide aerial imagery to support almost 4,000 firefighters battling the Rim Fire, which by then had burned 160,000 acres and was …
For our analysis of all 333 exemptions issued in 2014-2015, click here. In July, we released a database of every company and individual currently operating drones commercially in the U.S. The dataset, which will be updated regularly as the FAA continues to grant exemptions, contains a wealth information about the …
This database has been updated to reflect new exemptions up to July 31, 2015. By Arthur Holland Michel and Dan Gettinger Until the Federal Aviation Administration implements comprehensive regulations for the use of unmanned aircraft within the U.S. sometime in 2016, only those companies in possession of a Section 333 …
By Arthur Holland Michel From May 4 to May 7, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) held its annual Unmanned Systems convention in Atlanta, Georgia. In any given year, Unmanned Systems is likely the largest gathering of drone technology in a single place by orders of magnitude. Hundreds …
By Roger Connor Retired in April 2015, the U.S. Navy’s two Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned air vehicles – known by their call signs as Salty Dog 501 and Salty Dog 502 – represent the most significant progress in Unmanned Combat Aerial Systems (UCAS) to date. Among a number of achievements, …
By Dan Gettinger On Thursday, April 23, President Obama acknowledged that a CIA drone strike had accidentally killed an American and an Italian in northwest Pakistan in January. The two men, Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, were aid workers who were captured by al Qaeda in Afghanistan and held …
By Kelley Sayler This post was published in conjunction with the Center for a New American Security, which has an ongoing project on Ethical Autonomy. CNAS’ statement to the CCW can be found here. For our backgrounder on the UN CCW meeting, click here. From April 13 to 17, the UN …
