Unmanned Aerial Vehicles - the 21st Century Game Changer

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The 21st Century Game Changer

Unmanned aerial vehicles, also named as drones, are those aircrafts that have no human inside. They can be controlled by pilots on ground and signals containing operating information will be transmitted via satellites. The UAV was first invented shortly after the World War I, it wasn’t fully developed at that time since the war had just ended. But nowadays, up to 31% of U.S. military aircrafts are UAVs (Spencer & Noah, 2012), which reflects the rapid growth of UAVs within a few decades. This essay will discuss how UAV has changed the regulations of wars, the initial and boost that made it a success in military, and its potential in other sectors of human beings’ lives.

The unmanned aerial vehicles changed the rules of warfare because they are not only combinations of advantages that manned fighter aircrafts have, but also include one of the leading technology in the world----the remote control. Since aircrafts appeared in battlefields, it has been widely acknowledged that air force, especially fighters and attack aircrafts, plays a significant role in battles. Their brilliant design provides them with extreme agility and their capacity of diverse advanced weapons guarantees devastating damage. Combination of these two main characteristics plus one more edge, allow for remote control, generated huge success and extensive application of UAVs into conflicts. With the additional function, fighter pilots are able to spy on and attack ground targets on the other side of the world from a darkened controlling station by seeing imagery captured by cameras onboard, which enables superpowers such as USA to hit distant strategic desserts where there is no military base nearby. On top of all that, the unmanned aerial vehicles, ensuring the safety of directors, is the perfect combine of traditional attack aircrafts and modern robotics.

The reason why UAVs succeeded largely is increasing concern of losing pilots over hostile territory and numerous capital invested in the research of UAVs program. During the World War II, American pilots who flew fighters died at a rate of 1,500 per day, which means each flight was a deadly mission (Quentin Aanenson, n.d.). Recently, a couple of months ago, ISIS excused a video of burning the jailed Jordanian pilot Kasasbeh seized by ISIS soldiers during a bombing mission (Cassandra, 2015). These cruel facts encouraged people to look for a solution to decrease sacrifices of aviators and UAV is the exact solution. Thus, more and more countries took action. They launched the UAV program and built control stations. Simply take the USA as example, the Pentagon, already spent $8.5 billion on unmanned aircraft systems (Colin,2014), still plans to spend part of the upcoming 2016 military budget approximately $2.9 billion on obtaining various unmanned systems (Dan,2015). The voluminous expenditure on the study of UAVs makes it possible to improve at a rapid pace in recent years.

In addition to the above military sector, unmanned aerial vehicles have variant applications in many other aspects, which drives the existing technology of UAV to maturity. For civilian use, drones, as eyes in the sky, help constructors explore terrain when building new dams across rivers while ensuring safe operations, give support to meteorologists in hunting hurricanes without risking lives, assist farmers in monitoring growth of certain kind of crop planted in distant area and so on (Brian, 2013). For commercial use, the popularity of drone service, such as pizza delivery is growing larger and larger. Despite of these, some individuals even use them to deliver rings for marriage proposal! It seems, that potential drone applications are unlimited, from news report, to cargo delivery, infrastructure inspection, as long as there is up to date technical support.