One of the realities of modern life is the amount of time we spend waiting – for the telephone technician to come; for the traffic jam ahead of you to clear; for the part you ordered from overseas to arrive, and, particularly taxing for me, the amount of time we spend in various customer lines or waiting-rooms. One saving grace in the latter category can be the amount of reading matter thoughtfully provided for us so that, just recently, I was fascinated by a magazine feature on the drone technology that is now surging around us, full speed ahead.
As waiting-room magazines usually are, this one was old – June 2014 – but for a non-techno like me the article was a revelation. Just from skimming the Popular Mechanics article, I learned that these frail-looking devices can actually lift considerable weight – as in the quite heavy cameras used in making movies – but can also be small enough to land in the palm of your hand, and that even after a midair rotor loss they can stay aloft for several minutes and remain stable. The drones’ ability to keep a camera steady as it manoeuvres up or down, forward or back, is remarkable, and the list of applications for the device is constantly being expanded.
