• Europe at Ease With Eyes in the Sky - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/business/international/europe-at-ease-with-eyes-in-the-sky.html

    La réglementation européenne (ou plutôt des pays européens) concernant les #drones serait moins stricte qu’aux Etats-Unis...

    ... nearly 1,000 unmanned vehicles are currently authorized to fly commercially in and around a dozen European countries. They are led by Britain, France and Germany, which have also provided funding for research and have, as in the case of Austria and Schiebel, made military facilities to companies for flight testing.

    “Five years ago, everybody was convinced that defense was going to be 80 percent or more of the market” for remotely piloted aerial systems, said Chris Day, a top engineer at Schiebel, which will produce about three dozen Camcopter drones this year at a factory in nearby Wiener Neustadt. “I have a fair amount of confidence today that within the next five years, civil will overtake the military in terms of new users.”

    Les défenseurs de la #vie_privée inquiètent un peu...

    Chris Cole, an activist who runs the website Drone Wars UK, said the reliability of even the most mature U.A.V. systems operating in war zones was unacceptably low for use in Europe’s crowded civilian skies. He said Drone Wars had verified more than 100 crashes since 2008 of large combat and reconnaissance drones, like the General Atomics Predator or the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk, from an active military fleet of about 6,000 U.A.V.’s.

    “The smaller ones crash so often it’s even harder to track,” Mr. Cole said.

    European officials also acknowledged that so far there has been little public debate about the effects on privacy and civil liberties of so many new platforms for aerial data and image gathering. But it may still be ahead.

    “It’s vital to gain public support and indeed the support of politicians,” Frank Brenner, the head of Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based agency that coordinates air traffic management across the region, told an industry conference in Cologne, Germany, last month. “I receive letters from the public that make me believe there will be a big wave of public concern ahead of us.”

    ... mais l’étroitesse du marché intérieur donne plus de soucis, en partie balayés par la demande extérieure.

    But the bigger worry might be market demand. He looked out at Schiebel’s gleaming hangar, filled with a half-dozen Camcopters in various stages of completion, all destined for customers abroad.

    Despite the flurry of new European players in the civilian drone market, Mr. Day said he was doubtful there would be sufficient domestic demand in the coming years to sustain them all.

    “We still have to earn our spurs,” Mr. Day said. “But for now, we’ll have to earn them overseas.”

    Les « Démocraties » occidentales vendent ainsi aux dictatures du Moyen-Orient et d’Afrique un moyen supplémentaire de #répression de leurs populations.