Catching up on some reading, I was thumbing through my Oct. 2007 issue of National Defense (NDIA’s Business and Technology Magazine) — on the front cover is this headline:

Civilian Drone Market Struggles

As the demand for unmanned aerial vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to increase, government agencies and contractors are clamoring to use aerial drones for domestic missions in U.S. national airspace.

When I first saw the headline, my initial instinct was, maybe the market is struggling because there just isn’t that much demand or need for aerial drones in the civilian marketplace…

But the article explains that the cause of the “struggling market” is the exceptionally restrictive requirements imposed by the FAA. And that if/when the FAA rewrites it’s policies and procedures for the certification of unmanned air systems, that there is a huge ($$) civilian (and by “civilian”, we mostly mean “government agencies”, such as Customs) market for these aircraft:

If the FAA can write its policies by 2010, the industry will quickly take off, he [Basil Papadales, principle with Moire Inc.) asserts. By his company’s estimates, the civil market will be worth $2.6 billion between 2008 and 2017 if the agency can make the 2010 date.

I can see some civilian uses — agriculture, traffic and law enforcement, mapping, meteorology and a few government agencies, such as Customs and Homeland Security in the government agency department — for these drones.

Police and fire departments want to use unmanned drones to patrol crime scenes and relay fire information, among other missions.

But before they can be used, the FAA is worried about:

The ability to identify and avoid other aircraft is critical to the successful deployment of unmanned systems in national airspace, experts say.

Which is great news…since our company already does this to some extent in the military market. It’d be nice to tap into that $2.6 billion dollar civilian budget, too.