1.7 Top UAV Manufacturers
The global unmanned aerial vehicle market is witnessing a strong compounded annual growth, even in 2020 where the COVID‐19 emerged as a global pandemic. By January 2019, at least 60 countries were using or developing over 1,300 various UAVs. Top unmanned aerial systems and air vehicles in the market are Northrop Grumman (US), General Atomics (US), AeroVironment (US), Lockheed Martin (US), Elbit Systems (Israel), Israel Aerospace Industries (Israel), BAE Systems (UK), Parrot (France), Microdrones (Germany), SZ DJI Technology (China), Ehang (China), Yuneec International (China), Textron (US), Saab (Sweden), and Raytheon (US). The overall market is expected to reach $21.8 billion by 2027.
A number of European countries (France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden) are collectively developing the next generation of UCAVs (most notably the nEUROn) and the MALE unmanned aircraft. It is interesting to note that, as of March 2020, DJI accounts for around 70% of the world’s consumer UAV market. The dominant US UAV manufacturers include Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Aurora Flight Sciences, General Atomics, Northrop Grumman, and AeroVironment.
1.8 Ethical Concerns of UAVs
All engineering products share some ethical issues, but the ethical concerns in UAVs are new and not yet regulated. Like other engineering products, there are many ways that UAVs are utilized unlawfully or unethically (e.g., drug trafficking). There are basically two ethical issues in employing UAVs: (1) invasion of privacy and (2) killing innocent individuals (lethal use). For instance, between 2004 to 2010, the US drone program in Pakistan [3] has killed several hundred civilians accidentally.
There are many unanswered questions regarding these two major areas. There are much less ethical concerns regarding mechanical robots than UAVs. When a UAV is flying over houses and is collecting data, this is a case for ethical concern. Due to these concerns, when a user of an UAV does not feel accountability, he/she may trespass the privacy of other citizens and cause loss of life of other individuals.
According to the US government accountability office, there are still four areas of concern for UAVs in using airspace: (1) the inability to recognize and avoid other aircraft, (2) lack of operational standards, (3) vulnerability in command and control of UAV, and (4) lack of Government regulations necessary to safely facilitate the accelerated integration of UAVs into the national airspace system. Moreover, the utilization of unmanned aerial systems for military applications is currently a contested and debated issue.
Having a center in ethics‐informed interdisciplinary research and the integration of ethical literacy throughout the UAV curriculum is a valuable step toward removing ethical concerns. It is promising that AIAA has developed a code of ethics, and recommends all aeronautical engineers to observe these codes in designing and developing air vehicles.
There are concerns about the risks of flying the military UAVs outside war zones. There are reports that US UAVs have repeatedly crashed at civilian airports overseas throughout the world. Among the problems cited in the reports “are pilot error, mechanical failure, software bugs, and poor coordination with civilian air‐traffic controllers. Since an initial report of a crash in January of 2011 at a US base in Djibouti, there have been ‘at least six more Predators and Reapers’ crashes” in the vicinity of civilian airports overseas.
In 2021, the FAA announced [3] two final rules for unmanned aircraft, which will require Remote Identification (Remote ID) of drones and allow remote operators of small drones to fly over people and at night under certain conditions. This is a major step toward further integrating UAVs into the National Air Space.
A great many arguments challenge the ethical justifiability of remote weapons (UAVs) by US military. One of the questions is: Does it really matter if a human kills an enemy or if a machine (UAV) kills that enemy as long as the enemy is eliminated? The issues at stake in the “UAV ethics” discussions are complex. The authors are not ready to answer these types of questions, but we invite scholars to dive deep into this topic and help law makers to cast laws to resolve these concerns.
Questions
1 What do UAV, RPV, RPA, GPS, UAS, MTI, SAR, MPCS, GCS, PGM, CLRS, HMMWV, EO/IR, LOS, BLOS, FLOT, and SIGINT stand for?
2 Write the titles that are employed in the literature for the unmanned air vehicle.
3 Briefly write what Chapter 1 presents.
4 When was the first real use of UAVs by the United States in a combat reconnaissance role?
5 What UAVs were used in the operation during the Kuwait/Iraq war?
6 What UAVs were used in the Operation Iraqi Freedom?
7 How many bidders were competing in 1971 on the UAV program for a call by US DOD?
8 Name four companies that worked on a UAV in the early 1970s in response to a call by the Defense Science Board.
9 When did the US Navy and Marine Corps enter the UAV arena? What did they purchase in that year?
10 What UAV systems – and by which countries – were used in combat operation during the invasion of Iraq to Kuwait in 1990–1991?
11 What was the mission of NATO UAV operation in Bosnia in 1995?
12 Which UAV was the primary UAV used in Bosnia in 1995? Where was the UAV flying from?
13 What UAVs were used extensively during the war in Iraq (from 2003 to 2011)?
14 What UAV was used during the battle for Fallujah in Iraq in 2004 to locate and mark targets and keep track of insurgent forces?
15 How many missions did the Global Hawk fly during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003?
16 What term is adopted by the press and the general public as a general term for UAVs?
17 What
