Top 5 Interesting Drone Facts​

Top 5 Fun and Deadly Drone Facts

Also in:

Top 5 DEADLY Facts About Trampolines

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope, it’s a UAV. And your next question should be… what the hell does it do? Welcome to WatchMojo’s Top 5 Facts. In today’s instalment, we’re counting down the top five facts about drones. Drones have become a major topic of debate in our modern society, and love ‘em or hate ‘em, they are set to become an increasingly common sight, both in military operations and in the sky above your very own backyard.

You had a remote control car growing up, or maybe even an RC plane if your parents were really into buying new windows. But chances are, your kids are going to be playing with drones. The estimated value of the drone industry in 2015 was $3.3 billion, but that figure is projected to balloon to $90 billion by 2025. Why? Like most technologies, they’re becoming increasingly cost effective to manufacture and more user-friendly. According to company 3D Robotics, more customers are building and flying their DIY drones than the amount currently operated by the US military. But drones aren’t limited to hobbyists– they’re becoming a versatile tool across a variety of domains. Farmers use them to survey large crop fields, they can be used in search and rescue missions, and they've even become a trendy must-have for wedding photographers.

Speaking of applications for drones back home... How do you feel knowing that your local police force could be watching from above? It might sound like George Orwell’s “1984” come true, but let’s stay optimistic and hope they don’t go all Big Brother on us. There are many ways in which drones could prove to be useful and effective tools in the hands of a responsible force, including better documentation of crime scenes and efficient aerial searches for either missing persons or violent criminals at large. Unfortunately, the exact limits of what police can or cannot do with drones have thus far only been established on a state level, with no federal legislation in place.

Tired of waiting on your pizza delivery guy? Enter the DRU drone, which will be used to deliver pizzas in New Zealand from a single Domino's location. Coupled with a self-driving four-wheeled DRU pizza robot, which drives itself down the sidewalk from the restaurant to your home, pizza delivery boys are starting to look like an endangered species. However, this isn’t the only attempt at employing drones to replace service staff. But after a drone crashed into one customer’s face at a TGI Friday's in NYC, some people are understandably wary. Perhaps the most promising application of drone-based delivery is the Amazon Drone delivery system, which hopes to deliver parcels in 30 minutes or less in urban areas.

Drones can be a lot of fun, and may even be laden with pizza, but the driving force behind them is military applications. Predator drones were first deployed in Afghanistan to locate and perform recon on Osama bin Laden – and found him... So, they armed the drones. Since then, the total number of deaths by drone strike have been highly contested. The White House revealed their tally of deaths and it’s well below the estimates made by NGOs. The American government cites anywhere between 64 and 116 civilian deaths spread across 473 strikes, which killed over 2,000 terrorist combatants. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that the civilian death toll is realistically between 424 and 966, and that’s just in Pakistan.

The history of drones is much longer and richer than their recent popularity might have you believe. In fact, the earliest examples of rudimentary armed drones can be traced back to the 1849, when Austrian forces attached explosives to unmanned hot air balloons in the hopes of flying them over Italy and triggering the bombs via long copper wires. The plan failed, but the concept was established. The Kettering Bug, a “flying torpedo,” was developed for WWI but never deployed. The term “drone” is said to have been coined in 1935, when unmanned target planes were being developed, one of which, was named the “Queen Bee.” By 1964, early versions of the modern drones were being used in Vietnam, and the rest… is history. What application of drones do you find to be the most concerning? What application do you think is the most exciting? For more tech-centric top 10s and scientific Top 5s, be sure to subscribe to WatchMojo.com.