Merry Christmas To All -- December 25, 2015

Updates

December 28, 2015: in the post below I link a New York Times story about the drone industry in North Dakota. James Pethokouki over at AEI weighs in on this story, from an FAA regulatory point of view. Worth reading.
 

Original Post

 

Wow, talk about a beautiful morning: 59 degrees at 9:00 a.m., sunny, not a cloud in the sky, and no breeze. I've already taken my short bike ride this morning to confirm that nothing is open. I have just finished a wonderful Christmas morning breakfast, and enjoying the first full day of four free days. My next scheduled event is Monday, late evening, picking up the granddaughters and their parents at the airport.

A reader sent me a link to a great NY Times article; I saw "North Dakota" in the URL and was sure it was going to be another schadenfreude story on the oil situation in the Bakken. Not to be. It was an incredibly good article: the story of drones in eastern North Dakota. The article references the oil industry in North Dakota but I reminded the reader that the drones in Fargo are on the opposite side of the state. Western North Dakota (oil) and eastern North Dakota (universities, technology and potatoes) have nothing nothing in common except the word "Dakota" and perhaps a fairly similar language.

It's very similar to Boston - Cambridge in the early 1800's I suppose: the blue collar folks, the bourgeoisie, the merchants were in Boston and their university-minded, well-schooled brethren were in Cambridge. I wouldn't know that except I'm continuing to enjoy The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall. More on that later, but back to the drones.

The New York Times is reporting:

For years, entrepreneurs have come here to farm and to drill for oil and natural gas. Now a new, tech-savvy generation is grabbing a piece of the growing market for drone technology and officials want to help them do it here, where there is plenty of open space and — unlike in other sparsely populated states — lots of expertise already in place.

Silicon Valley has the big money and know-how, Mr. Muehler and others say, but North Dakota can take unmanned aerial vehicles, as they prefer to call drones, from a fast-growing hobby to a real industry. And just as Silicon Valley got its start with a combination of military contracts, entrepreneurs and cooperative universities, they believe they can do the same with drones.

“The potential up here is tremendous,” said Jack Dalrymple, the state’s governor. “It’s not about supporting a company or two; it’s creating the leading edge of an industry.”

North Dakota has spent about $34 million fostering the state’s unmanned aerial vehicle business, most notably with a civilian industrial park for drones near Grand Forks Air Force Base. The base, a former Cold War installation, now flies nothing but robot aircraft for the United States military and Customs and Border Protection.

Right now, private sector drones are where personal computers were in the 1970s: a hobbyist technology waiting for something to take them into the mainstream. The technology research firm Gartner figures that, barring regulatory hurdles, the United States drone business could be worth $7 billion in a decade.

Companies are moving fast. Last month, Amazon released a video showing its planned delivery drone, and companies like Google and Facebook are working on big drone projects. DJI, a Chinese company that is the world’s largest maker of small drones, was funded last spring at a valuation of $10 billion.

Small drones may bedevil cities with privacy concerns, even landing on the White House lawn, but rural states with farming, oil and rail lines see many practical reasons to put robots in the sky. Infrared imaging can judge crop health. Cameras can spot leaks and cracks in pipelines. Smaller copters can inspect windmill blades. Livestock can be located easily.

I completely missed "drones" on my "next big thing." That really, really bugs me. One has to give Amazon's Jeff Bezos most of the credit. He was the first several years ago to talk about home delivery using drones and, as I recall, everyone who wasn't "marching" in #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations was laughing at his idea. 

Now, it's just a matter of time, and that time is not far off.  

Like the internet, the government's ability to "control" and "regulate" drones will be unable to keep up, at least for the first few years. The government now imposes a $5 fee if one wants to fly a drone, but my hunch is that a lot of teenagers will be getting a drone for Christmas and the last thing on their mind is filing the $5 fee. Though I assume the smart retailers will include the form and addressed envelope in the box.

By the way, converting the manned nuclear bomber base at Grand Forks, ND, into an unmanned aerial vehicle site was really, really clever. When one of the premier air bases in Germany was shut down -- Bitburg Air Base -- the local folks converted the runway into drag strips for racing radio-controlled toy cars. That tells me all I need to know about the entrepreneurial gulf between the US and the EU.  

Anyway, enough of this for now. Have to move on.

Previous stories on North Dakota drones:

• Northrop Grumman coming to North Dakota, October 11, 2015
• North Dakota becomes first state to legalize drones for police use, The [London] Independent, September 11, 2015
• North Dakota approved for night-testing drones, August 23, 2015 
• First drone to be manufactured in North Dakota, rolled out in Wahpeton, June 8, 2015
• Update on drones in North Dakota, May 10, 2015

The last link provides additional links taking the story back to the beginning. California was specifically denied an early opportunity by the Federal government to compete in drone development (story at one of the links above). The Los Angeles Times was stupefied, unable to understand why.

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Christmas Day Breakfast