Droning on

Hello! Good morning. Let’s talk about drones.

Earlier this year, not long after Christmas, my husband and I went with one of our best friends to a historic village in North Carolina. We hadn’t been there since we were kids and wanted to experience it as adults. (See: walking into a building labeled “tavern” and walking right back out, dejected that there were no actual beers to be had.)

About halfway through the day, we exited an old building into a side yard just in time to see a drone taking off. The guy manning it was just a few feet away. He launched it off the ground and into the air, and I had two simultaneous thoughts:

“Wow, he’s gonna get some awesome photos of this place” and

“Wow, that sound is really, REALLY annoying, especially here!”

Such is the conundrum of life in 2019. There are so many tech things that make our lives cooler, easier, or safer while also being annoying, intrusive, or otherwise harmful. In the past I don’t think the developers of these technologies have done a great job anticipating future issues or needs. I do think that’s changing. But in the meantime, these are the kinds of things we have to deal with (and frankly, we probably will always have some degree of this issue).

I was recently reporting a piece about medical drones (coming soon) and came across this study that determined drones to be the most annoying of all vehicles. And that’s saying a lot, considering we also have motorcycles and 18-wheelers below them and airplanes above.

From a great New Scientist piece on the study:

“We didn’t go into this test thinking there would be this significant difference,” says study coauthor Andrew Christian of NASA’s Langley Research Center, Virginia. It is almost unfortunate the research has turned up this difference in annoyance levels, he adds, as its purpose was merely to prove that Langley’s acoustics research facilities could contribute to NASA’s wider efforts to study drones.

It’s a bummer all around, really. The study found that people (only 38 people, but still) experienced drone buzzes in a similar way they would experience a car that was twice as close as normal. These people didn’t even know what they were listening to, by the way, so we can’t just assume they’re anti-drone.

The piece I’ve been reporting is about the use of drones to save time and money moving blood samples and medical supplies. I wonder if people might find drones less annoying if they knew they were up there to help people? I hope that research is being done somewhere (I would not be surprised, as NASA and the FAA are doing a lot of work to study drone impact right now).

But even if we can get used to the sound of drones, or assuage ourselves with the thought that some of them are saving lives, we still have to look at them. It bugged me to see a black plastic mini-spaceship buzzing around a historic village, but it didn’t scare me or make me feel unsafe. Driving down the road and suddenly seeing a flock of them overhead, and not necessarily knowing their purpose…. would be a different story.