Draganflyer X6 is a commercial unmanned aerial vehicle.

Description

Draganflyer X6 is a remote-controlled miniature

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

that allows users to control it to a maximum height of . It allows for a fixed altitude to be set. The helicopter is mounted with a camera that can collect up to five hundred gigabytes of real-time recording data. It can be set to record at 1080 HD, low-light vision and

thermal vision Infrared thermography (IRT), thermal video and/or thermal imaging, is a process where a thermal camera captures and creates an image of an object by using infrared radiation emitted from the object in a process, which are examples of infrared i ...

. The camera is mounted on the vibration-free bottom of the drone. The Draganflyer has six rotors and can fly up to a speed of . The drone is controlled by a single operator with a handheld controller. The controller wears glasses, which display a live feed of what is recorded by the camera.

Privacy concerns

The drone is in use in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

and the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

by law enforcement. In

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, the use of the Draganflyer X6 by police was prohibited by mayor

Mike McGinn Michael McGinn (born December 17, 1959) is an American lawyer and politician. He served as mayor of the city of Seattle, Washington, and is a neighborhood activist and a former State Chair of the Sierra Club. In what was characterized as a "s ...

due to protests from privacy advocates and the general public. The drones would have been used in missing persons cases and in limited criminal investigations, according to police. In May 2014, the

Los Angeles Police Department The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), officially known as the City of Los Angeles Police Department, is the municipal police department of Los Angeles, California. With 9,974 police officers and 3,000 civilian staff, it is the third-large ...

obtained two of the drones as a gift from the

Seattle Police Department The Seattle Police Department (SPD) is the principal law enforcement agency of the city of Seattle, Washington, United States, except for the campus of the University of Washington, which is under the responsibility of its own police department ...

. An official from the police department stated that the drones would only be used in limited cases such as hostage situations and that they would not be used to spy on law-abiding citizens. However, this did not stop criticism from the

American Civil Liberties Union The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1920 "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". T ...

, which questioned whether the marginal benefits of the drones justified their serious threat to privacy. On October 31, 2014, Los Angeles City Council instructed Los Angeles Police Department to create a drone policy in order to move forth with using their Draganflyer X6. In February 2014, the

Federal Aviation Administration The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the largest transportation agency of the U.S. government and regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the country as well as over surrounding international waters. Its powers include air traffic ...

allowed the Grand Forks, North Dakota police department to start using the drone. The

University of North Dakota The University of North Dakota (also known as UND or North Dakota) is a public research university in Grand Forks, North Dakota. It was established by the Dakota Territorial Assembly in 1883, six years before the establishment of the state of N ...

, in an attempt to preemptively solve objections regarding privacy, created a committee of private citizens and members of the government with the power to alter or completely stop the drone flights. However, the actual testing was met with little objection from the public.

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.draganfly.com Unmanned aerial vehicles of the United States Mass surveillance Aircraft first flown in 2008