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Drone technology is at the core of the fourth industrial revolution. Blueflite

The use of cargo drones is taking off across the World. Drones are delivering equipment to rural farms in Asia and transporting blood in Sub-Saharan Africa. And all this is happening while America’s drones seem to remain somewhat on the ground.

It’s time for a change. America’s aviation industry is historically the world leader; America is, after all, the only country to put a man on the moon. Drone technology is at the core of the fourth industrial revolution. So how come that drones are not whizzing across American skies?

This may come down to the authorities having been slow to understand the drone market, but America’s trailing drone performance isn’t solely their doing. Rather, public suspicion and innovative complacency could be the factors why the US is behind in the latest tech race.

Other parts of the World understood the direction of travel years ago. For example, Chinese company DJI is the global leader in drone technology. Today, more than 80% of all commercial drones in the world are made there.

In Africa, drones have had a transformative impact on health and the environment. The Rwandan government, for example, uses drones to deliver blood bags to remote hospitals. Drones are being used to bypass poor road infrastructure in the country’s rural settings to deliver food, medical supplies, and materials.

So why are the skies not filled with them? In reality, American drone companies are thriving, just not in America. Just as the drones in Australia are from Google’s parent company, those delivering blood to patients in Rwanda are from Silicon Valley company Zipline. Earlier this year, the same company helped deliver vaccines to people in rural regions of Ghana.

Part of the reason for America’s hesitant drone uptake is down to regulation. For years, the FAA’s regulation on drones was a mesh of policies, and state laws, with many key links missing. Earlier this year, FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson himself admitted that the current rules are not fit for large-scale commercial drone deployments.

Yet regulation mirrors public sentiment; drones are heavily-regulated because, to some extent, the public wants them to be. Americans are understandably sensitive about privacy, and this has filtered down to the public perception of drones. A 2017 Pew Research poll revealed that just over half of Americans think that drones should not be allowed to fly near private homes. In fact, a 2014 Pew Research poll showed that Americans think that drones are creepier than Google Glasses.

I can understand this; the mental image of a buzzing camera snooping through your window is a potent one. Yet we must remember that the FAA’s regulations, aware of the public’s concerns, make the use of private drones for surveillance purposes virtually impossible. Curiously, many of these drone privacy concerns are shared on social media, which are incidentally the most pervasive surveillance tools created to date.

The collective caution of drones causes American businesses to leave billions of dollars on the table. A recent study found that the introduction of drones into trial cities can have a huge impact on restaurants and stores, with an estimated sales growth of up to 250%. Especially following the pandemic, consumers have a hunger for socially-distanced home delivery that the right drones can easily satisfy.

On agriculture, too, drones are a game-changer. Advanced mapping methods can identify the spread of disease before it can destroy entire harvests. Unsurprisingly, DJI has identified such uses and applied them to their customers. Indeed, its agricultural drones are used across East Asia for killing pests, mapping fields and even scaring away vermin.

Drones can act as an economic catalyst while also slashing our CO2 footprint. The same urban study found that in a single metropolitan area, drones can cut out up to 114,000 tons of carbon dioxide from cities, as deliveries take to the skies, therefore freeing up the roads and avoiding accidents.

It is time to act now and integrate commercial drones into modern life. Otherwise, American innovators will continue to move abroad and neglect fertile ground at home. Consumers should foster a more open mind towards drone technology.

Drones won’t just deliver your Amazon parcels, they’ll deliver COVID vaccines to your isolating grandparents. They‘ll clean the air around your children’s schools and reduce road accidents in your neighborhood. The enduring drone skepticism could mean that these worthy ambitions could go unrealized.

America understood that air travel was the future, and launched the first commercial airline. America understood that space travel was the future, and put the first man on the moon. Today, it is clear that the world of tomorrow will be built by drones, yet this fact has passed America by.

But it is not too late. During the space race, the public, regulators, government agencies, and investors all shared the same ambition to dominate the sky. It’s time to rekindle that same shared vision for drone technology.

About the author:

Frank Noppel is the CEO and founder of Blueflite, a business designing and manufacturing unmanned aerial delivery robots.