Cranks see new item to drone on about

As founding president and sole member of the American Society of Curmudgeons (motto: "All Progress Isn't — and Your Modern Music Stinks Too") it falls to me to look askance at various societal changes.

When it comes to such changes, the sky literally is the limit. In less complicated times, a voice was heard to say: "Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird … it's a plane … it's Superman!"

But Superman is now living in the Community for Retired Superheroes in Florida. This is a blessing of sorts, because if Superman were plying his trade today he would have no place to change into his tights, due to the absence of phone booths. We curmudgeons deplore this development, too.

So what is so worrisome up there in the American skies? It is not the birds but instead planes of an irregular sort — drones, to be precise. The drones are coming. Where is Paul Revere when you need him?

Not that they are called drones. That name has a certain public relations problem — can't think why — and the Federal Aviation Administration calls them Unmanned Aircraft Systems.

On May 6, the FAA announced a partnership with industry to explore the next steps in what it likes to call UAS, beyond what the agency proposed in a draft rule published in February. As sure as the sky is blue, the drones are going to be coming in ways that will change how Americans live and do business.

As the UAS acronym does not trip lightly off the tongue — a latter-day Paul Revere won't be tempted to raise the alarm by riding through the streets on a bicycle yelling "The UAS are coming, the UAS are coming!" — we'll keep calling them drones for the purposes of this column.

The fact that the drones are coming is not in dispute. In fact, they are here already. Last year I was at an evening baseball game at Pittsburgh's PNC Park when a drone appeared over the outfield during play.

This turned out to be more exciting than the classic pierogi race — and it is a sad night in Pittsburgh when the fans must leave the ballpark with an aerial intruder sticking longer in memory than fleet-footed mounds of dough.

For the moment, any playful if misguided amateur drone operator — apparently an apt description of the culprit involved in the stadium alarm — does not have clearance for unrestricted flight patterns. But the FAA-industry initiative may expand all horizons.

As always with new innovations, some good will come of expanded drone operations, as hard as it is for curmudgeons like myself to admit.

Drones can be used to inspect railroad tracks and oil pipelines for damage and to check on livestock and make sure they are safe and not meeting to plot revenge on humans.

In addition, drones will allow journalists to monitor breaking stories from the vantage point of saloons. We curmudgeons do not object to that — in fact, we might be in those saloons to add our own perspective to the breaking news.

The problem is when the commercial drones leave rural areas and come into cities, because, to modernize the old song, how are you going to keep them down on the farm now that Amazon has books to deliver.

There will surely come a day when drones will be buzzing by your house like so many swarms of mercantile bees. How will they deliver their orders? Will they land and unload? Or will they drop packages from the air? It is the latter scenario I fear.

When I lived in suburban Pittsburgh, certain people — you know who you are — ordered so many items off the Internet that the brown uniforms of the UPS drivers became faded from overexposure to the elements

If drones drop all that load of bras, high-heeled shoes, scarves and gadgets, the borough will resemble the Ho Chi Minh Trail at the height of the bombing. Cats and dogs will not be safe and on the sunniest days people will have to walk under umbrellas.

Privacy is also a concern, and not only for the proprietors and patrons of nudist colonies. Some people become upset when Google takes pictures of their houses from the street — just wait until a drone appears over their backyard pool or garden party.

It is just another thing for curmudgeons everywhere to worry about, and because so-called progress is unstoppable, there is nothing for us to do but some creative grumbling, as usual.

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Reg Henry
(TNS)/ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Reg Henry is deputy editorial-page editor for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.