THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

I am not suggesting that you deserve to have Uncle Sam bust a Hellfire on your ass. According to the latest report, the drone industry has been exploring many peaceful uses for their little and some not so little boogers.

Spend a few minutes on the gigantic exhibition floor at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) 2014 convention and it becomes clear that the military drone business is alive and well. Uniformed men and women from all over the world stroll among the 600 or so displays while representatives show off everything from quadcopters that can fit in the palm of your hand to hulking high-altitude drones capable of carrying wingloads of high-precision missiles.

But the future of the drone industry is not just military; it’s civilian. “The commercial industry is going to be taking over,” said Bill Powers, a research fellow at the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s going to become a huge market.”

According to Michael Toscano, president of the AUVSI, the commercial market will outstrip military demand within the next decade. “Most people understand that the growth is going to be in the commercial world,” he said. Despite the very visible presence of military representatives (who attend the convention for free) 76 percent of the AUVSI’s 8,000 attendees registered as having affiliations with the commercial sector.

But the large defense companies that have been producing military drones — in some cases for more than two decades — have no intention of forgoing the commercial market. They plan to follow demand, bringing drones from the skies over conflict hot spots to the civilian world.

The key is how do you maintain order in the skies to prevent the soon to be plethora of unmanned flying hazards from hitting obstacles and other units in the sky? Even at low altitudes, the FAA needs to find a way to put order into their flights. Probably we will have to wait until enough of the boogers have smashed up and dropped onto innocent people.