Drone Beat: Search and Rescue UAVs, Amazon's Online Store and More

The U.S. government uses them to bomb alleged terrorists in far-away places. Tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook are all toying with the idea of using them, and now they're a photographer's secret weapon. Drones are a big part of our lives, whether we see them or not. Drone Beat collects the best and most important stories every week.

If you want even more on Drones, subscribe to the Center for the Study of the Drone Weekly Roundup, which features news, commentary, analysis and updates on drone technology.

Drone Beat's coverage areas this week

Last update: Sept. 12, 10;05 a.m. ET

Search and rescue company gets permission to use drones to find missing woman

The Federal Aviation Administration announced on Wednesday that it was giving the Texas-based search and rescue organization EquuSearch temporary permission to use its drones to locate a missing woman.

EquuSearch will use three small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to find the 23-year-old woman who disappeared on Aug. 30 in Plano, Texas, according to local news reports. The FAA granted EquuSearch a so-called Certificate of Authorization to use the drones from Sept. 11 until Sept. 15.

This episode seems to indicate that the FAA might be warming up to the use of drones to help locate missing people. As we've noted many times, drones have a big potential in these situations, but these kind of efforts have sometimes been stifled.

Earlier this year, the FAA and EquuSearch went through a legal battle after the agency sent a series of cease-and-desist letters to the company. In the end, the judge ruled that it was legal for EquuSearch to use drones. At the time, EquuSearch announced it was going to resume flights right away. Now, legal battle aside, the FAA itself is — temporarily — greenlighting the use of drones by EquuSearch.

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Canadian police use drone to find missing family

Speaking of search and rescue operations, The Royal Canadian Mounted Police used a drone to help rescue a family that got lost in a forest near the Topsai Lake in Nova Scotia, Canada.

The police deployed the drone after they weren't able to locate the family using sirens, according to Global News.

Amazon unveils online drone store

Amazon has very ambitious aspirations when it comes to drones. For now, though, while it clears all the regulatory hurdles to truly launch its delivery drones, the company unveiled an online store for flying robots — but no Amazon Prime Air delivery for now.

The Drone Store offers recreational and cheap unmanned aerial vehicles such as those made by Parrot, as well as some more expensive ones catered to photographers such as the DJI Phantom.

Interestingly, a banner in the middle of the front page of the store warns potential drone hobbyists: "Fly responsibly." The banner leads to a page with links to the FAA website as well as links to flight safety guides by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International(AUVSI), and the Academy of Model Aeronautics.

How NASA plans to make American skies safe for drones

Last week, we wrote about how NASA was working on technology to allow commercial drones to fly safely in U.S. airspace. This week, Motherboard reveals some details about NASA's plan.

The idea is to create "highways in the sky," Parimal Kopardekar, the NASA scientist helming the project, told Motherboard, with drones going in the same direction using a some sort of a "corridor." In some ways, it sounds a lot like Back to the Future 2.

Kopardear said he hopes to have a prototype for this drone air traffic management system ready in five years, And as Motherboard's Jason Koebler notes, while it sounds like a long time, "it seems pretty short when you consider the different factors the system is going to take into account."

Drone research center releases comprehensive 'primer'

If you've never heard of drones, or you don't understand some of the issues surrounding this new technology, we've got good news. The Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College has released a comprehensive and exhaustive report precisely for you.

The Drone Primer is "a short, one-stop online and print publication for the layperson" who's looking to understand the key issues concerning drones, according to Arthur Holland Michel, the founder of the Center for the Study of the Drone, which opened in 2012, before drones were all over the headlines and under much public scrutiny as they are now.

You can read the Drone Primer here.

New York City gets its first-ever drone film festival

Forget about Cannes, drones are getting their own film festival, too, now. Randy Scott Slavin, a New York City-based filmmaker, will host the first-ever flying robot film festival in 2015.

Slavin's idea is to showcase how drones can make great movies.

"This festival is about showing how kick-ass, interesting, and beautiful drone cinematography can be," Slavin, who shot the video embedded below, told Mashable. "The drone is the most amazing cinematic innovation since the steadycam and deserves its due attention."

The New York City Drone Film Festival will have various categories such as most beautiful aerial cinematography, most innovative flight technique, most epic dronie, and best crash footage.

If you have a beautiful and compelling video shot entirely with a drone, and limited to five minutes, the festival is still seeking submissions until Nov. 30. It will be held in Manhattan on Feb. 21, 2015.

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai is a reporter at Mashable's New York headquarters, where he covers cybersecurity, tech policy, privacy and surveillance, hackers, drones, and, more in general, the intersection of technology and civil liberties. Before Mashable, Lorenzo was an intern at Wired.com, where he wrote for Danger Room, and Threat Level. A recent graduate of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism Lorenzo is also a Law graduate at University of Barcelona. To email him, visit: www.lorenzofb.com/contact

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Can David Cameron Stay if Scotland Goes?

Prime Minister David Cameron makes his last campaign trip to Scotland on Monday. By the end of this week, he will know whether the country he was elected to run has shattered on his watch.

The polls suggest the Scots' decision whether to end the United Kingdom and go their own way is on a knife-edge. If they choose independence, it is hard to see how David Cameron could lead his party into the next general election in May 2015.

The "Rump UK" left behind without Scotland (no one even has a name for the remainder country yet) would probably end up over time with more Conservative governments as Scotland tends to elect Labour MPs to Westminster.

But the immediate thoughts of the Party of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher would be dominated by a sense of humiliation and loss.

Even if the Scots choose to stay in the UK it looks like it would be by a narrow margin and political life will be convulsed in ways David Cameron neither predicted nor wanted.

So could David Cameron have dealt with all this differently?

Way back in 2011 when David Cameron first confronted the issue of whether he should allow a referendum (power over such constitutional matters still rests with the UK government) his advisers thought he could swat the independence cause with a hefty victory. Support for independence often didn't make it over the 30% mark in some polls.

While there was lethargy and a lack of buzz on the pro-union side, Alex Salmond's campaign team was creating a grassroots campaign that has elements of the Europe-wide anti-Iraq war campaign grafted on to the first Obama presidential campaign.

But did there have to be a referendum? Did there have to be a referendum quite like this one?

The man who was Alex Salmond's policy chief until 2012, Alex Bell, says ministers at the top of David Cameron's coalition floated an offer of big new devolution powers to Alex Salmond's team in the months after May 2010. Back then, Alex Salmond's Scottish National Party didn't have a majority in the Scottish government so wasn't going to have the mandate to pressure London to demand a referendum. Big new powers, volunteered by London to Edinburgh, might have quelled the calls for independence, Alex Bell believes. But David Cameron didn't go down that route.

Once Alex Salmond's SNP had won a majority in the 2011 elections for the Scottish Parliament, David Cameron felt he had to allow them the referendum they wanted. But he could have signed up to a two option ballot paper which Alex Salmond was pushing for: offering the Scots voters independence or much more devolution ("Devo Max," as it became known). David Cameron turned that down too.

The team at 10 Downing Street (and the main Labour opposition party) were deeply suspicious of the Salmond wheeze and thought independence wouldn't appeal to enough people to be a worry. Well, it's worrying them now.

Having done down the route of a straight independence vote, senior figures in the UK government ignored advice from veterans of the Canadian government that fought and won Quebec's second referendum on independence in 1995. They said the UK government must have a clear, rival offer to independence. The UK government, along with the two other main parties in Westminster, only cobbled that together last week when the polls put independence support in the lead and when many Scots had already cast their postal votes.

In the meanwhile, a lot of Scots had come to see the debate as a binary choice between "independence" versus "no change." The "more powers" offer from David Cameron and the Labour and Lib Dem leaders may be what pulls Scotland back from independence at the last minute but it has come too late for many who've grown comfortable over time with the idea of independence, too late to avoid this heart attack moment for the Westminster establishment.

Even if he wins a narrow victory, a giant question mark will be placed next to David Cameron's judgement in the minds of many in his party. He will have to convince a restless Conservative Party that his hastily assembled plan to rush through devolution to Scotland is not unfair to England.

His plan to hold and win a referendum to keep the UK in the European Union looks a lot shakier given his stewardship of Scotland's referendum.

The referendum some in the Cameron team thought was a sideshow has turned into the main show. And main shows don't get much bigger or immediate than whether your country can survive the week.

BY GARY GIBBON

Gary Gibbon has been Channel 4 News' political editor since 2005. An award-winning journalist, he gives his take on the latest news and gossip from the corridors of power in Westminster and beyond. Follow him on Twitter: @GaryGibbonBlog.

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