SPECIAL SERIES
What Is Left Without an Objective Drone Press
Four dispatches on airspace, advocacy, economic/national security, and the mission that began in the early 2000s with the RCAPA Reporter.
The Western unmanned mission is too important to abandon. Over twenty-some-odd years, the low-altitude economy has been poked, partitioned, and sold in pieces. What follows is not a press release. It is an accounting. The press should act as a bulwark to safeguard and protect one’s industry, brethren, or country.
The Greeks called the license to speak candidly parrhēsia: the cultural boldness to criticize leaders and norms without immediate fear of state reprisal. One of the pillars of the Western ideal is a free press. An objective press is one of the few mechanisms that can expose mistakes, corruption, and abuse before the damage is irreversible. In this industry, that mechanism is nearly gone.
This series gathers the argument into four parts: why the press mattered; how policy is shrinking the flight envelope; how advocacy and C-UAS theater failed the public trust; and why the work continues.
Without an independent voice, the community is left with parroted copy, VIP lounges, and a shrinking piece of the pie.
Dispatch 1 of 4
For those who missed the unceremonious deplatforming: imagine a reprisal born of fear, anti-American convenience, and the downstream cheer squad that prefers the story stay tidy. The Egan schtick has not changed since the RCAPA Reporter days twenty-some-odd years ago. The shills know who they are, and every shill has his day.
The RCAPA Reporter was the world’s first commercial drone news site. It existed to keep the community apprised of the sUAS ARC preceding’s and the FAA in check as they tried to shut the commercial and hobby operators out of their airspace. That ethos carried into sUAS News. Cages were rattled and the FAA tried to shun the outlet. In the early days the focus was always small business — even when industry “experts,” “advocates,” and “visionaries” insisted there would never be a regulated commercial drone industry. Without regulation, you will never get insurance, and without insurance, no business. One of the RCAPA achievements was third-party commercial liability insurance made possible because of the Associations guidelines.
If you don’t lick boots or sell out, people get uncomfortable. They start calling you dangerous.
RCAPA motivations were grassroots, and never for personal gain. That made the association an outlier as everyone else was trying to cash in. The FAA tried to buy silence. When that failed, blackball: managers told people in the United States and abroad to have nothing to do with this work, or the FAA would have nothing to do with them. Asking questions about waste and dysfunction gets one barred from the airspace-integration effort. The agency was not used to pushback, even in the form of simple questions. Anything that questions certain actions, or inaction is not tolerated. I did get the offer to do whatever I liked with sUAS as they had confidence that I knew what I was doing and would be safe. I asked if it was for everyone or just me. Just me I was told. I said, if it is not for everyone I could not in good conscience accept that generous offer as it is unfair. I also knew that if it the private deal wasn’t in writing it was worthless.
Questioning the World’s largest Unmanned advocacy group was just as bad. AUVSI enlisted AirWare toadies to take over a Silicon Valley chapter after “dangerous questions” such as, why can’t the chapter presidents see the books? A job at a large OEM vanished after the suggestion that the company was trying to craft policy around its own product line. At the time it was DoD contractors, but now everyone does it while acting they care about the industry our country. Repeatedly going after the world’s largest drone maker for bad business practices ended in deplatforming.
Captain Willard had it right: never get out of the boat — unless you are going all the way. The boat set sail in February 2007, when the FAA policy clarification took livelihoods overnight. At that point there was nothing left to lose. You go after a man’s millstone and all bets are off.
Over those twenty years, the Drone Judases cashed in thirty pieces of silver. Adjusted for inflation, call it about $21,000 a year over at CDA, or $12,000 at AUVSI — a hell of a deal for access to the VIP lounge and a Costco cheese sampler. Sorry: no snacks at some of those events.
In the last couple of years, knucking under, kowtowing, and courting the downstream ecosystem produced news sites that parrot one another and now scrape each other’s AI slop into absurdity. Does anyone else argue with the various LLM’s? In some instances, I was there in person and Claud tries to tell me I am wrong.
A few stories sneak through. By and large they do not step on toes. Once in a blue moon someone has a hot, cranky day and calls out a shill on social media. Folks are scared they will be out of the selfie-drone story game. The lacky performance looks pathetic.
There is a Jumoke somewhere thinking: who cares? I make $25 an hour doing drone jobs and at least my wife is not beating me up for spending thousands of dollars on airframes, yet. Fair enough. The charge is no longer just a carve-out for the small businessperson. It is even dawning on the normies who now understand that U.S. economic and national security are on the table — and so are the Western tagalong countries that followed the FAA’s fiefdom follies and now sit on the precarious brink Readiness 2030.
Governments, corporations, lobbyists, grifters, “advocacy” groups, and other powerful institutions have strong incentives to hide mistakes. A free press is a foundational pillar of democratic societies. Without independent media, citizens lack the information required to govern themselves. In this instance, the subject is a technology that converges across land, air, sea, space, and cyber. The mission must and will continue.