Drones: useful or useless?

Whether they’re delivering packages, flying into the White House or helping in search and rescue operations, drones have been making headlines.

Drone technology, while having been used for some time by militaries around the world, has only recently been used for commercial and consumer markets. However, despite the late start, drones are quickly rising in popularity and giving lawmakers headaches.

Central students use drones for creative purposes

Jobe Layton, a senior film and video studies major and owner of five drones, said one of the largest applications for drone tech has been in the film industry.

As a film student, Layton is interested in using drones as a filming tool and convinced his father to purchase a drone kit.

“We built it ourselves, and it was a really fun process. Challenging, but fun,” Layton said.

The challenging part for Layton and his father was learning how to build and program the drone.

“[Quadcopter’s] popularity is relatively new. When I first started…[we] had to do some digging, looking through forums to find manuals on how to build them,” Layton said. “There’s definitely a subculture of drone fliers.”

Drones give people the creeps

For all their uses, drones have been looked down upon by the general populous.

In 2013, when the Seattle police department purchased drones, public backlash forced them to shut down the program.

“It’s a wise decision,” said Doug Honig, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Washington, to the Seattle Times. “Drones would have given police unprecedented abilities to engage in surveillance and intrude on people’s privacy and there was never a strong case made that Seattle needed the drones for public safety.”

Federal cases about drones have been popping up across the country. In February, a bill passed before Washington lawmakers that would add a year of prison time to any sentence if a drone was used during the crime.

Cole Heilborn, senior film and video studies major and drone pilot, believes public distrust of drones comes from a lack of understanding about what drones can and cannot do.

“I think people have a misconception about what drones can do,” Heilborn said. “They think it can be this tool to go around and spy on people with and invade people’s privacy.”

Heilborn acknowledged that “if you really wanted to, you could be a creeper” using a drone, but said that it isn’t as easy to do as people think.

“They’re not designed to shoot in a small area, it’s hard to pick out details,” Heilborn said. “If you wanted to shoot through a window for example, you’d have problems with glare and the camera wouldn’t even be able to see inside.”

But public opinion is based on the cases where drones were misused or flown improperly, Heilborn said.

“If you people have people who don’t know how to use them, or they don’t respect the rules set in place, and they don’t respect people’s privacy, then they can ruin it for everyone,” Heilborn said.