On a small ranch amid old farm equipment and rustic silos 10 miles southeast of San Marcos, a crew of researchers from Texas State University has been routinely launching an unmanned aircraft.
Its mission is not to track rivers and wildlife. Called Ronnie, short for Ronald McDonald, because of its cheery yellow-and-red coloring, the aircraft is a 7-foot-wide polystyrene craft that weighs 8 pounds and is laden with GPS, batteries and two digital cameras. It is operated by a three-person crew from the River Systems Institute at Texas State.
It’s a far cry from the Predator — its distant and infinitely more lethal CIA-affiliated cousin. But in libertarian and land-rich Texas, drone activities throw into relief a 21st century balance between environmental management and privacy rights.
Ronnie is a Utah import, along with one of its inventors, an aquatic biologist and civil engineer named Thom Hardy. Hired by the River Systems Institute three years ago as its chief science officer, Hardy brought the aircraft with him.
One year into a $260,000 two-year grant from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, Hardy and his crew of biologists, geographers and spatial analysts have used the aircraft to track bird habitat in Galveston Bay and the growth of invasive tamarisk on Texas rivers.
It has identified pockets of water in the drought-ravaged Blanco River for removing nonnative fish and conducted surveys of fly-fisherman on a portion of the Guadalupe River. The aircraft can track ecosystems along a proposed pipeline or power line route, Hardy said, and map canal vegetation to help weed control.
“If you need an image and take the pilot out of it, this is cheaper and quieter” and safer, he said.
Once launched, via a kind of bungee cord, the battery-powered plane can reach 60 miles per hour, though it typically flies at half that speed.
The drone generally flies at an altitude of 400 to 600 meters and has a range of roughly 10 miles. In each trip, the cameras can take up to 700 overlapping images, which the researchers upload to computers and inspect using spatial analysis software. After a whoosh on launch, the plane has a soft whinny, and silhouetted against the sky, it looks like a miniature version of a stealth fighter plane.
“Buzzards think it’s their long-lost Cousin Joe,” Hardy said. Once, an eagle tried to knock it out of the air.
But artfully taped together with relatively cheap materials, it remains a resilient craft. The whole thing, from development to construction, costs $30,000, Hardy said.
By comparison, renting a basic Cessna starts at $150 an hour at the Austin Academy of Aviation, not including pilot fees.
“The idea was that it be low-cost, easy to use, and have digital imagery,” Hardy said.
The crew, true to their fish-and-wildlife background, have given themselves names as they trade off operating the craft with a silver-and-black joystick gizmo: not Maverick and Iceman, but Darter, Flounder and Mullett.
“I get paid to fly around a little plane — that’s pretty cool,” said James Tennant, a geographer who handles much of the flying. He once worked in the Air Force, repairing C-130 aircraft. Not much is the same beyond the basics of flight structure, he said.
The Texas State UAS programme is one of several state or local agencies authorized to fly unmanned craft in Texas, according to a list the Federal Aviation Authority released in April in response to a suit from the Washington-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, the A&M Texas Engineering Experiment Station headquartered in College Station, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Houston Police Department also have had authorization to operate unmanned aircraft, according to the list.
The Public Safety Department unmanned aircraft programme ran from 2008 to the fall of 2010. Department spokeswoman Katherine Cesinger said it was discontinued because of “concerns surrounding complicated Federal Aviation Administration restrictions, battery life of the device, maintenance costs and deficient video quality.”
Cesinger said that the aircraft, which were used in fewer than 10 missions, were meant to “increase officer safety by leveraging technology in potentially dangerous and unstable situations without placing law enforcement officers in harm’s way.”
Source: Statesman