The 500ft View
Sen Feinstein took to Twitter this week to rally support for her consumer drone bill (as seen on The Buzzer #34). Citing an incident in which a drone interfered with water drops on a California wildfire, she traveled the high road claiming “My bill would help firefighters do their jobs.” This isn’t Sen Feinstein’s first brush with drones, by the way. Back in 2014 at a Senate Commerce Committee meeting, Feinstein told a story in which she destroyed a drone with her stern gaze alone, pausing to relish the schadenfreude.
--
Speaking of drone laws, prominent drone lawyer @dronelaws (aka Brendan Schulman) has joined DJI as their VP of Policy and Legal Affairs. Given Brendan’s contributions to drone policy discussions, it’s a huge win for DJI and, with DJI’s resources at his disposal, hopefully it’ll be a win for the drone community as a whole. That said, we’ll miss his brand agnosticism.
--
Lastly comes news that the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection has finally admitted they're hemorrhaging funds in the service of their Predator drone fleet. With 10 drones, each flying an average of only 1.4 hours per day, they managed to rack up a $62M bill for operations alone (not to mention initial acquisition costs) in 2013. That amounts to roughly $12,000 per flight hour, with little to show for it.
“Unfortunately, despite its 8-year effort and significant investment of taxpayer dollars, CBP could not demonstrate how much the program has improved border security, largely because the program lacks performance measures and CBP was unaware of the true cost of the program”
The initial pitch was that "unmanned aircraft [would] reduce border surveillance costs by between 25 and 50% per mile" but, instead, that cost has ballooned as a result of the program. The expectation that “drones + ???? = savings” is a common fallacy and one we've cautioned against previously (#21). Taking a page out of Sen Feinstein’s book, we’ll pause here for a bit of schadenfreude.
|