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Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, November 27, 2019 Department of Justice Announces Update to Policy on Use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems The Justice Department announced today the publication of its updated Policy on the Use of Unmanned Aircraft Systems.  In light of advancements in unmanned aircraft system (UAS) technology, and lessons learned from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s limited use of UAS, the Policy enables the Department of Justice’s law enforcement components to safely and responsibly employ UAS technology within a framework designed to provide accountability and protect privacy and civil liberties.“UAS technology...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)The Georgian-style estate comes with a five-bedroom house and four wood-burning fireplaces, a separate studio and a heated pool on two acres in Greenwich, Conn. But it has a $6.1 million price tag, and more than a dozen showings since October had yielded no buyer. It was time to bring in the drone. Controlled remotely by a hand-held console, it took off from the driveway with a loud mechanical whine and hovered around 20 feet in the air to record video of the house against a wintry landscape of snow-flecked trees. Its handler later launched it inside, where it whirred...

GRAND FORKS, N.D. — Unmanned aircraft vehicles. Remotely piloted vehicles. Unmanned aerial systems. The future of aviation is set to include vehicles without a human pilot on board, and people in the industry have one request about their aircraft. Please don’t call them “drones.” The oft-used term is splashed on headlines in print, on TV and on the Internet, but those who work closely with the technology said the word carries negative connotations which damage the industry’s reputation. “Don’t call them ‘drones,’” UND unmanned aircraft systems student Andrew Regenhard said Friday at the Unmanned Aircraft Action Summit in the Alerus...

Milestones seem to be all in a day's work for the employees who develop and sustain the Army's unmanned aircraft fleet. First, there was a celebration last spring with Army and congressional officials at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., to commemorate reaching 1 million flight hours of unmanned aerial vehicles. Of those hours, about 89 percent were combat flight hours

Few people remember the movie Stealth with and that’s probably because it was a bit of a disaster at the box office. But those who watched it probably do remember the Artificial Intelligence-driven Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) named Extreme Deep Invader (EDI). You know, the one that crashes in the end. As far as the public knows, the world’s leading aerospace companies are far from developing an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with the kind of intelligence that EDI had and just as well, considering how smart machines usually end up turning on their human masters in Hollywood flicks. They...

Insitu has teamed with BOSH Global Services to train U.S. Air Force Academy cadets on the disciplines critical to planning and executing missions using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), specifically Insitu's ScanEagle, from within the Air Forces' Air Operations Center (AOC). The training is designed to familiarize academy cadets with UAS and to give them first-hand knowledge of how these systems can be integrated into Air Force Operations to support warfighters worldwide. "ScanEagle was chosen because it is a superior system that is extremely intuitive, giving cadets a hands-on learning experience almost from day one," said U.S. Air Force Academy Lt....

U.S. Air Force researchers are asking industry to develop autonomous control technologies that will enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to operate together with piloted aircraft in congested airport terminal areas, and to achieve what the Air Force calls "same base, same time, same tempo" operations. Scientists at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, released a broad agency announcement (BAA-10-05-PKV) this week for the Autonomous Control of UAS Ground Operations in the Terminal Area program to enable UAVs to operate with manned aircraft by equipping unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to act autonomously and react like a...

Boeing recently revealed that it has built a new, jet propelled, combat UAV, the Phantom Ray. It looks remarkably like the X-45C that Boeing was developing for the air force, before that project was cancelled four years ago. Boeing admitted that Phantom Ray is, in effect, an upgraded X-45C. Since the X-45 was cancelled, enthusiasm for such aircraft has grown in the air force and navy. So Boeing, using its own money, went ahead and built the X-45C/Phantom Ray, and plans to have it make its first flight before the end of the year. After that, who knows? Boeing is...

TEL NOF AIR FORCE BASE, Israel — Israel's air force on Sunday introduced a fleet of huge pilotless planes that can remain in the air for a full day and fly as far as the Persian Gulf, putting rival Iran within its range. The Heron TP drones have a wingspan of 86 feet (26 meters), making them the size of Boeing 737 passenger jets and the largest unmanned aircraft in Israel's military. The planes can fly at least 20 consecutive hours and are primarily used for surveillance and carrying diverse payloads. At the fleet's inauguration ceremony at a sprawling air...

Rescue without human touch: The Air-Mule UAV which assists in medical evacuation has recently passed its initial flight tests. The new UAV, which weighs a ton, will be able to carry equipment and fly into complicated places, such as in urban areas and crevices. In addition to that, the Air-Mule takes off vertically, similar to a helicopter, and its stability will be guaranteed by a unique flight supervision system. Urban Aeronautics, the company producing the UAV, is one of the world's leading companies in the development of propellers which are installed inside the aircraft instead of outside. The advantage of...

Texan researchers are mimicking the physical and biological characteristics of a pterosaur to create a 'pterodrone' - an unmanned aerial vehicle that flies, walks and sails like the original. "The next generation of airborne drones won't just be small and silent," said Texas Tech University, "they'll alter their wing shapes using morphing techniques to squeeze through confined spaces, dive between buildings, zoom under overpasses, land on apartment balconies, or sail along the coastline." The research team consists of palaeontologist Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech, University of Florida aeronautical engineer Rick Lind, and their students Andy Gedeon and Brian Roberts. The...

The military's reliance on unmanned aircraft that can watch, hunt and sometimes kill insurgents has soared to more than 500,000 hours in the air, largely in Iraq... the Air Force more than doubled its monthly use of drones between January and October... The dramatic increase in the development and use of drones across the armed services reflects what will be an even more aggressive effort over the next 25 years... For some Air Force pilots, that means climbing out of the cockpit and heading to places such as Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where they can remotely fly the...

Preparations are well under way for the Valley's premier aviation event - the Edwards Air Force Base Open House and Air Show. The free two-day event is set for Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 28 and 29, at the base that has been home to flight testing nearly every aircraft in the Air Force inventory - past, present and future. That heritage is reflected in the event's theme - "The Edwards' Edge: Making History, Reaching New Heights." This year's festivities also will honor the 60th anniversary of the Air Force, one of the first official events to do so. Headlining the...

WASHINGTON - The day is fast approaching when unmanned aircraft of all sizes and purposes will ply the skies, sharing the airspace with the now familiar manned airplanes. Before this future may become a reality, however, the means must be found for these unpiloted aircraft to operate in harmony with others without the safety net of a human in the cockpit to see the surrounding airspace. The task of establishing the means for unmanned vehicles to participate fully in the national airspace falls to the Federal Aviation Administration. "Our job is to make sure the vehicles and the environment they...

LANCASTER - Aircraft flying without pilots in the cockpits may be the future of aviation, but before such vehicles can become commonplace they must be able to operate safely, routinely and reliably in the existing national airspace system. To that end, NASA is teaming up with the aerospace industry, the Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration to establish the policies, procedures and supporting technology necessary to safely integrate unmanned aircraft with existing air traffic. The project, called HALE ROA in the NAS - for high-altitude, long-endurance remotely operated aircraft in the national airspace system - kicked off this week...

Ever since Vietnam, the American public's threshold for casualties has been thought to be very low, putting the country in a peculiar position -- equipped with the world's most powerful weapons and best-trained soldiers, but fearful of putting any of them on the line. That's one reason it became a preoccupation for a generation of military planners to devise new means of combat that no other country -- neither America's current allies nor its potential foes -- can match. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld came into office as a self-avowed champion of these ideas. The dream, held by Rumsfeld...

The CIA is using unmanned aircraft not just for surveillance, but for attack. A new generation of air superiority is being born before our eyes. by Christian Lowe 11/08/2002 12:00:00 AM LAST WEEKEND'S attack by an unmanned RQ-1A Predator drone on a group of six al Qaeda terrorists was the first known strike by an unmanned aerial vehicle outside Afghanistan. The strike, which killed a top al Qaeda operative who was suspected of having been a key player in the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, also heralds a new phase of Bush administration's anti-terrorism strategy. And it is...