The Eye in the Sky

The remotely piloted MQ-9 Predator B Ikhana aircraft successfully flew over California on Tuesday, according to NASA. It was the first time it had completed a flight in commercial airspace without a chase plane. NASA has hailed the move as bringing the US “one step closer to normalizing unmanned aircraft operations used by commercial and private pilots,” with the agency stating that such a practice could prove beneficial from everything to monitoring forest fires to conducting search and rescue operations. However, what NASA’s Integrated Aviation Systems Program Director Ed Waggoner calls a “major milestone” is seen as a worrying trend by some who fear that the normalization of unmanned drones buzzing across the sky is a slippery slope – particularly if such drones become armed. The debate surrounding US drones isn’t new, but continues to intensify with every so-called “milestone” that’s reached. One of those came in March 2017, when US President Donald Trump gave the CIA power to order drone strikes without Pentagon approval. Physician Tomasz Pierscionek summed up the thoughts of many in an op-ed for RT, writing that “a future where a globalized battlefield becomes the norm and individuals deemed a threat to the US, or any other power with the means, can be eliminated without due process or trial is a dark one indeed.” (Read more)

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