On the pilotâs computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards from the airport runway in Grand Forks, N.D., the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.
To the pilotâs right, a sensor operator was aiming a camera on the plane to pan, tilt and zoom in a search among the houses on the ground for people who had been reported missing.
On his screen, cartoonlike human figures appeared in a gathering around a camp fire between the houses.
âThere they are,â Andrew Regenhard, the pilot and a student, said in a flat tone that seemed out of place with a successful rescue mission.
In fact, no one was missing; the entire exercise used imaginary props and locales, Matthew L. Wald reports in The New York Times on Monday. Mr. Regenhard was taking part in a training session at the University of North Dakota. The university, the first to offer a degree program in unmanned aviatio, is one of many academic settings, along with companies and individuals, preparing for a brave new world in which cheap remote-controlled airplanes will be ubiquitous in civilian air space, searching for everything from the most wanted of criminal suspects to a swarm of grasshoppers devouring a crop.
âThe skyâs going to be dark with these things,â said Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired, who started the hobbyist Web site DIY Drones and now runs a company, 3D Robotics, that sells unmanned aerial vehicles and equipment. He says it is selling about as many drones every calendar quarter â" about 7,500 â" as the United States military flies in total.
The burst of activity in remotely operated planes stems from the confluence of two factors: electronics and communications gear has become dirt cheap, enabling the conversion of hobbyist radio-controlled planes into sophisticated platforms for surveillance, and the Federal Aviation Administration has been ordered by Congress to work out a way to integrate these aircraft into the national airspace by 2015.