Small is beautiful

摘要

While much of the public perception of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) concerns so-called 'drones', these large unmanned aircraft won't be routinely seen in the skies above the UK for some time. They are specialist military aircraft operating in segregated airspace, and while the persistence offered by these vehicles would be useful for commercial applications, until the 'sense and avoid' issue is solved (where the vehicles will carry onboard sensors to sense potential collisions and automatically take avoiding action), routine operation of large unmanned aircraft in controlled airspace will not happen any time soon.