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from the they-always-want-to-be-watching-you dept.
Patrolling the skies these days is hard. There's so many options to choose from: traditional helicopters, new wide-angle surveillance planes, and even the more cutting-edge drones.
Each of these options has its drawbacks. Beyond the initial purchase price, well-tested helicopters typically cost at least hundreds of dollars per hour to send up. One-off surveillance planes are also not cheap, coming in at around $ 1,000 per hour. Drones, while very cheap, are problematic. Law enforcement needs a blanket Certificates of Authorization (COA) from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and possibly a specific Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) each time a drone is used above 400 feet.
Enter a small Florida company now attempting to make snooping from the air both cheap and administratively easy. The Drone Aviation Holding Corporation (DAHC) recently announced that it had sold its second-ever "Blimp in a Box" ( http://www.droneaviationcorp.com/bib.html ) for local law enforcement purposes.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday August 05 2014, @09:51PM
Thank God nobody has whipped out the handy-dandy, "Oh the Humanity!" line. Drives me nuts. Zeppelins make a lot of sense in a lot of applications, and that one stupid line has prevented it all. At the same time, hundreds of 747s crash but nobody runs around with their knickers in a twist, wailing, "Oh the Humanity!"
Personally I would love to see fleets of zeppelins take over point-to-point cargo transportation and double as travelling wifi hotspots to end-run governments and companies cough *Comcast* cough that try to cripple the Internet. Think, instead of cargo containers that you have to transfer from semi to train to semi to ship and back again to get from point A to point B, you load the suckers onto one zeppelin and go directly where you need to, no runway required.
Also, surveillance and scientific study would benefit because you can dwell so long with minimum energy expenditure and without stuff like Somali pirates or marine fouling happening to your ship.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 06 2014, @12:25AM
Seems like a blimp would be pretty easy to shoot down.