Within a few hours of putting up a SciTechStory:Spun post on drones, another story appeared: University of North Dakota (USA) First to Offer a Four Year Course in UAV Piloting. UAV is the acronym used by the military for Unassisted Aerial Vehicles (a.k.a. drones). Although UND is a public school, there’s no doubt that the first students will be bound for intelligence or military duty. However, one day the technology will spread beyond the military – crop dusters come to mind for North Dakota – and such courses will be even more popular.

Already people are calling the advent of ‘drone warfare’ a new chapter in the history of military tactics and technology. Certainly guided-robotic type military weapons are only at the beginning – with college courses being one symptom of the impact of this technology.

I particularly liked this quote from the Popular Science article on the University of North Dakota course:

A decade ago, there were about 50 UAVs in service; today there are more than 2,400. Civil and commercial applications include weather monitoring, private security, border monitoring, search and rescue and perhaps someday even cargo delivery and other service-oriented tasks.

A tech-savvy generation of students is stepping up to fill a pilot shortage in the field, and if things continue on their current course, in four years time the program’s first graduates should find themselves quite employable. That is, at least until the drones become autonomous.

[Source: Popular Science]