In the mid-90s, the U.S. government began The Predator program , which resulted in the MQ-1 Predator, equipped with a Hellfire anti-tank missile on its wings. It paved the way to the MQ-9 Reaper in 2007. The Predator and Reaper drones are what most people today picture when they think of military drones.

Yet when drones first emerged on the market, they were strictly used for military purposes. Let’s take a look into the history and uses of drones since they were first used to get a clearer picture of how the industry expanded to what it is today.

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Not all operations are covered by Part 107. Instead, they require a waiver which people/businesses can apply for. It can take months until the waiver process is complete and waivers and not always approved. Thus, regulation is still a roadblock for advanced commercial operations. Note, there are similar regulations around the world including the UK, EU and Australia.

Since their first use in the mid-1800s, drones have been used for photography, security, safety, and environmental applications. However, warfare is responsible for paving the way for the drone technologies we have today. Military units across the globe were among the first to recognize the benefits drones could provide to wartime strategies and began working to expand the industry.

In modern uses, the word “drone” refers to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In other words, aircraft that don’t require an onboard pilot in order to operate. For our purposes, technologies in the drone sector will be broken down into two categories: drones that require a human operator to guide their missions and autonomous drones, which do not.

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Even as the consumer drone market exploded and reduced the cost of drone technology, enterprises were reluctant to scale their drone programs. The FAA’s long term rules for commercial use and their implications remained uncertain, and the risk of investing was perceived as too high.

In the early 70s, Israel began using drones as decoys in the Yom Kippur War. It was during this same time that the United States officially confirmed that they had been using drones in Vietnam. According to the Armed Forces Journal International in 1982, the U.S. stated that they had flown more than 3,435 drone missions during the war for both decoy and surveillance applications.

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In the early years of the war, the U.S. Air Force began using unmanned aircrafts to cut down on pilot deaths over hostile territory. Investment in drone technology continued after the Soviet Union shot down an American spy plane in 1960.

While the commercial drone space has struggled with regulations over the last ten years, the personal and recreational drone industries have grown under less scrutiny.

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The MQ-9 Reaper is a larger, more powerful version of the U.S. government’s initial MQ-1 Predator drone developed in the 1990s.

The majority of hobby drones, those used by private citizens for non-commercial purposes, are quadcopters, or drones with four propellers. They are considerably cheaper than their commercial counterparts, typically under $2,000 and lacking the sophisticated software and sensors required of their commercial counterparts.

By the time of the first US congressional hearing on the issue in 2015, only 13 permits had been approved in nearly 10 years.

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Informed by military research and development over the previous 150 years, the first use of drones for non-military ventures started in 2006, the same year the Federal Aviation Administration issued its first commercial drone permit.

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Percepto, one of the first companies in line to receive type certification, is a global market leader for autonomous industrial drones and remote autonomous inspection and monitoring solutions. Their systems are autonomous, intelligent and simple.

During World War II both Allied and German forces used drones to train aircraft gunners and aid in missions. After the end of World War II, drone developers began using jet engines in technologies like the Australian GAF Jindivik and the Model 10001, built for the U.S. Navy by Beechcraft.

Agricultural and industrial sites were the first two main markets for commercial drone use. Drones were used to manage crops and carry out inspections. Due to tight margins in the agricultural market, other industries such as utilities, renewable energy, mining, drone deliveries and port and sea terminals have since outpaced it in terms of adoption.

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Today, over three-dozen countries  and multiple terrorist groups and non-state actors have  weaponized drones in their arsenal.

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After World War I, companies worked to push drone technology forward with inventions like the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane and the Kettering bug, an unmanned aerial torpedo. Most efforts during this time were completed by the military up until 1935, when actor and model-airplane enthusiast Reginald Denny became the first civilian to develop a remotely piloted vehicle.

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In 2021, the FAA reports that there are nearly 900,000 drones registered in the US alone. That includes a little over half a million drones registered for recreational use.

Government agencies quickly began testing drone technologies for disaster relief and border surveillance while corporations began using them for commercial applications like pipeline inspections, crop evaluation, and security.

Another market for drones that grown tremendously is the drone inspection market. The value of the inspections for confined spaces (examples include Oil and Gas, Power Generation, Mining, Chemicals, Marine Vessels, and others) was $795.12 million in 2019 and is projected to reach $1,936.32 million by 2027.

In 1915, Nikola Tesla wrote about unmanned aerial combat vehicles. The first attempt at a self-propelled drone as an aerial target was completed in 1916 by A.M. Low. It wasn’t until World War I that the first pilotless torpedo was invented by the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company.

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It wasn’t until 2013, after Amazon announced it would use drones for delivery, that the general public really began to take notice.

This growth has been fostered in part due to the 2021 approval by aviation regulators in the U.S of the first fully automated commercial drone flights. This meant approved companies could have drones operating without anyone controlling or monitoring it onsite.

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In 2018, companies around the world, from the U.S., to China, to Israel, began  investing funds to research drone use for things like taxi services, photography, and indoor applications.

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What do you envision when you hear the word “drone?” Today, drones are used in many ways including delivery of small items, industrial site inspections, infrastructure monitoring, mapping, crop monitoring, emergency response and security surveillance. The use cases seem endless as more and more industries discover ways that drones benefit their business. And of course, as world regulators are beginning to work with industry leaders and stakeholders to allow for more complex operations – as is the case in the US with the new beyond visual line of sight aviation rulemaking committee.

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That all changed in the fall of 2016, when the landmark Part 107 rule clearly defined requirements for commercial operations in the US, effectively making skies open for business.  Soon after, the FAA began issuing thousands of drone permits per year.

Today, when we think of military drones, we tend to think of sleek, advanced planes and quadcopters.  However, the world’s inventors and militaries first developed drone technology as balloons, torpedoes, and aerial targets – feats of invention and innovation at the time.

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Despite these major advancements in technology and regulation, it would be another decade before the commercial drone industry would truly take off.

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Drones have a bright future as they seep their way into more industries and companies discover more value-adding use cases. The future of autonomous drones is particularly bright due to the FAA’s shift towards streamlining approvals for fully autonomous drone flight, mainly with its new type certification (TC) program for drones. With this dramatic change, a reliable drone solution can undergo a series of thorough testing to prove to regulatory bodies that it can operate safely in specific, complex situations. With this roadblock removed, autonomous drones will be implemented at much larger scales across consumer and commercial industries alike, helping bring about a safer, greener and more efficient and productive future.

In 2015, the first legal delivery of medical supplies occurred in the U.S. The market for global medical drones is predicted to reach $947.6 million by 2027.

By the late 1960s, the U.S. government had invested in and used drone technology throughout Vietnam and to aid in naval missions, though most of these missions were classified.

It wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s, that the U.S. military began heavily investing in the technology. The U.S. Department of Defense awarded the AAI Corp and Israel-based Malat contracts in the 90s to develop more advanced drone technology, which resulted in more cost-efficient technologies.