<div style="border: 1px solid silver; padding: 10px;"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/event/ignition-2014" target="_blank"></a> Hear from digital visionaries Chris Anderson, Dave Karp, Jeff Bezos and more at <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/

event/ignition-2014" target="_blank">IGNITION</a>. <a href="http://businessinsider.ticketleap.com/ignition-2014/" target="_blank">Reserve your seat now »</a></div>
 <div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>Drone entrepreneur and author Chris Anderson has led an interesting and varied career.
He's worked as editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, authored three books, and founded two drone-related projects: DIYDrones, a drone enthusiast website, and 3DRobotics, a drone manufacturing company that sells pre-assembled drones; he currently serves as CEO for that company. 
Anderson recently talked with Business Insider about his first experiences with drones, the popularity of GoPro cameras, and what he's most excited about for the future.
Business Insider: What does someone need to know before buying their first drone?
Chris Anderson: There's a lot of different kinds of drones, including helicopters and airplanes. Airplanes are beautiful and can fly for hours, but you need a little bit more room - you have to land them. Helicopters are very good for stationary views.
One of the first things you have to ask is 'copter or plane'? Most people choose copters because they're easier to control. If you want to learn how to fly, there's plenty of RC toys on Amazon so I'd recommend you start there.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>BI: How do the drones you use work?
CA: Drones are autonomous. You can't fly them, but that's the point. Typically they're connected to your phone or laptop, or in our case even the Pebble watch. You give them instructions, such as "Go there" or "Follow me" or "Map that building." It doesn't require a pilot, that's what makes them drones.
Most people just want to get the pictures rather than fly the vehicle. Drones use their intelligence to make flight easier.
BI: You first learned about drones when flying a remote-controlled airplane with your kids. Tell me about that experience.
I'm a terrible pilot and I flew the plane into a tree. So I thought, what if the robot could fly? I literally googled "flying robot" and got to "drone," and googled "drone" to get to "auto pilot."
[After ordering some parts], my kids and I sat at the dining table and looked at these parts, and it was pretty clear that something in the world had changed. By the end of the evening we had created the elements of an autopilot.
It should not be possible for a guy and his kid to google 'flying robot' and end up building advanced technology on the dining room table. I got chills. Something had changed to enable that. I wasn't sure what it was, so I started DIYDrones to explore this question.
BI: Did you ever find an answer to that question?
CA: The answer was smartphones. All the components in the Lego drone were essentially smartphone parts.
BI: Tell me about your drone company, <a href="http://3drobotics.com/">3D Robotics</a>. How are your customers using the drones they buy?
CA: Today most customers are people with GoPros. As go GoPros, so goes drones. GoPros have really revolutionized the experience of telling your life. But the one thing it can't do is put a camera on a crane, like a film director, that's where our drones come in. YouTube created the GoPro boom, and GoPro created the drone boom.
We hear new applications every day. The creative ones are the most thrilling, the places they've taken them. The tops of mountains or spotting rhino poachers over rain forests. The stuff that's always the most prized for me is the industrial applications, where I'd never think to use them.
<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div> 
BI: Will "drone pilot" be a common occupation down the road?
CA: We actually don't use that word. We sometimes use "drone operator" or just "camera operator." Our drones are just a camera in the sky. When you take a picture with your phone, you don't call yourself a "phone operator."
In a perfect world, you don't even care how the camera gets in the sky; all you care about is the shot. The better we do our job, the less you think about the drone. You think about the shot, you think about the angle. 
BI: What do you think of the new GoPro cameras, since you mentioned GoPros and drones go hand-in-hand now? 
CA: I have a small collection of GoPros. That <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTcNtgA6gHs">announcement video</a> was jaw-dropping. 
The most interesting thing was how many of those shots were taken from drones. It's clear that once you have cameras of that quality, you want to get the angle, you want to get the perspective, it's not enough. If you want to tell your story with Hollywood-level tech, you want Hollywood-level angles.
BI: What are you excited about for the future of drones?
CA: This is the first minute of the day for this industry. We're just starting to see what happens once we take complexity out of the equation.
Putting powerful technology in the hands of powerful people is sort of the story of Silicon Valley. How do we make it easier? How do we take piloting out of the technology? How do we reinvent photography for an aerial age? That's what's most exciting.
Then what people do with it, watching people build on our platform is what excites me the most.
Chris Anderson will be speaking at Business Insider's IGNITION conference.

Chris Anderson Q&A: Drone Entrepreneur Talks About His New Company, GoPros, And The Future Of Drones

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table center"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div>Germanwings flight 9525 flying from Barcelona, Spain to Düsseldorf, Germany, crashed in the Alps on Tuesday morning near the town of Seyne-les-Alps, France. All 150 passengers and crew on board the airliner were killed. French authorities point to the apparently intentional downing of the flight by its 28 year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz as the most likely cause of the crash.Here's everything we know about the crash of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/prosecutor-germanwings-flight-descent-could-only-have-happened-voluntarily-2015-3" target="_blank">Germanwings flight 9525</a>:<ul><li>Founded in 2002, Germanwings is a low-cost subsidiary of Germany's Lufthansa.</li><li>The Airbus A320 - registration number D-AIPX - was delivered to Lufthansa on June 2, 1991.</li><li>D-AIPX joined the Germanwings fleet in 2014</li><li>According to a statement from Airbus, the Germanwings jet had accumulated 58,300 flight hours on 46,700 flights and was powered by a pair of General Electric/SNECMA CFM-56 5A1 turbofan engines. </li><li>The Airbus had received maintenance attention in Düsseldorf the day before the crash.</li><li>According to the airline, the jet took off with a clean bill of health.</li></ul><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div><ul><li>Weather conditions during the flight were clear.</li><li>The plane dropped to a cruising altitude of just 5,000 feet from 38,000 feet in about 8 minutes.</li><li>Contact between the airplane and French radar and flight controllers was lost at 10:53 a.m. local time at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. </li><li>A witness nearby told the Associated Press, "The noise I heard was long - like 8 seconds - as if the plane was going more slowly than a military plane speed. There was another long noise after about 30 seconds."</li></ul><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div><ul><li>150 passengers and crew were killed in the crash; 72 onboard were from Germany and between 35-49 from Spain.</li><li>This includes 16 students and two teachers from a small town in Germany.</li><li>Three Americans were also on the ill-fated flight - including a mother and her adult daughter from Virginia.</li><li>The Airbus' cockpit voice recorder, one of the two "black boxes" on board the jet has been recovered.</li><li>Although damaged, investigators were able to retrieve data from the recorder.</li><li>Only the outer casing of the Airbus' second "black box," - the flight data recorder - has been found.</li><li>The memory card containing the recorded information from the FDR became separated from its casing by the crash and was still missing.</li></ul><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div><ul><li>According to the lead prosecutor in the investigation, about 30 minutes into the flight, co-pilot Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit after the captain left the flight deck.</li><li>Lubitz then put the jet into a steep, unapproved dive by instructing the Airbus' autopilot system to descend to just 100 feet. </li><li>The captain reportedly made numerous attempts to regain entry but, according to investigators, the co-pilot made no attempt to answer the requests.</li><li>The captain even, reportedly, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/captain-of-germanwings-plane-tried-to-break-into-cockpit-with-axe-2015-3" target="_blank">used an ax to try to break down </a>the door. </li></ul><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div><ul><li>Prosecutors said Lubitz did not make any distress calls during the 8-minute-long descent, nor did he answer any of the distress calls made be air traffic control.</li><li>During the descent, the co-pilot's breathing remained normal.</li><li>Lubitz joined <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-we-know-about-the-co-pilot-who-crashed-germanwings-flight-9525-2015-3" target="_blank">Germanwings in September, 2013</a> after graduating from Lufthansa's flight training school. He had just 630 hours of experience at the time of the crash.</li><li>According to Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, Lubitz took a months-long leave of absence from training at one point. Due to Germany's medical privacy laws, the reason for the hiatus is unknown.</li><li>A source familiar with the investigation told the <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/andreas-lubitz-was-reportedly-treated-for-depression-2015-3" target="_blank">Wall Street Journal</a> that Lubitz was in treatment for depression, but hid the treatment from his employers at Lufthansa.</li></ul><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"></div></div></div><ul><li>The source also told the Journal that there is no evidence to suggest the co-pilot was taking any "mind-altering medications" at the time of the incident.</li><li>Earlier on Friday, prosecutors said a <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/germanwings-co-pilot-andreas-lubitz-hid-illness-from-employers-2015-3" target="_blank">doctor's note stating that Lubitz was unfit to fly </a>on the day of the crash was found at the co-pilot's residence in Düsseldorf, Germany.</li><li>According to the Wall Street Journal, that note is reportedly from the pilot's psychiatrist.</li><li>A second note was also found in pieces at the residence, but its contents are unclear.</li><li>In a statement, Germanwings said Lubitz had not submitted any of the notes to the airline.</li><li>Lubitz apparently ignored his doctor's advice and reported for duty as scheduled.</li></ul> <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-world-war-two-era-basement-inside-grand-central-trains-nazis-2015-3">We went inside a secret basement under Grand Central that was one of the biggest World War II targets</a></h3> <div> <div> <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="RtaTN5czph8JWBuLRWgPH0bveNBLU3oi" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div> </div> </div> </div>

Here's everything we know about the the crash of Germanwings flight 9525

<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image">(AP/Lai Seng Sin)A crew member of a Royal Malaysian Air Force CN-235 aircraft looks out the window during a search and rescue operation for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane over the Straits of Malacca, Thursday, March 13, 2014.</div></div>KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - An investigation into the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jetliner is focusing more on a suspicion of foul play, as evidence suggests it was diverted hundreds of miles off course, sources familiar with the Malaysian probe said.
In a far more detailed description of military radar plotting than has been publicly revealed, two sources told Reuters an unidentified aircraft that investigators suspect was missing Flight MH370 appeared to be following a commonly used navigational route when it was last spotted early on Saturday, northwest of Malaysia.
That course - headed into the Andaman Sea and towards the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean - could only have been set deliberately, either by flying the Boeing 777-200ER jet manually or by programming the auto-pilot.
A third investigative source said inquiries were focusing more on the theory that someone who knew how to fly a plane deliberately diverted the flight hundreds of miles off its scheduled course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
"What we can say is we are looking at sabotage, with hijack still on the cards," said the source, a senior Malaysian police official.
One of the most baffling mysteries in the history of modern aviation remains unsolved after nearly a week.
The latest radar evidence is consistent with the expansion of the search for the aircraft to the west of Malaysia, possibly as far as the Indian Ocean.
There has been no trace of the plane nor any sign of wreckage as the navies and military aircraft of more than a dozen countries scour the seas across Southeast Asia.
Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said he could not confirm the last heading of the plane or if investigators were focusing on sabotage.
"A normal investigation becomes narrower with time ... as new information focuses the search, but this is not a normal investigation," he told a news conference. "In this case, the information has forced us to look further and further afield."
Investigators were still looking at "four or five" possibilities, including a diversion that was intentional or under duress, or an explosion, he said. Police would search the pilot's home if necessary and were still investigating all 239 passengers and crew on the plane, he added.
<h3>INDIAN OCEAN "BIGGEST CHALLENGE"</h3>
If the jetliner did stray into the Indian Ocean, a vast expanse with depths of more than 7,000 meters (23,000 feet), the task faced by searchers would become dramatically more difficult. Winds and currents could shift any surface debris tens of nautical miles within hours, dramatically widening the search area with each passing day.
"Ships alone are not going to get you that coverage, helicopters are barely going to make a dent in it and only a few countries fly P-3s (long-range search aircraft)," William Marks, spokesman for the U.S. Seventh Fleet, told Reuters.
"So this massive expanse of water space will be the biggest challenge."
The U.S. Navy was sending an advanced P-8A Poseidon plane to help search the Strait of Malacca, a busy sealane separating the Malay Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. It had already deployed a NavyP-3 Orion aircraft to those waters.
U.S. defense officials told Reuters that the U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer, USS Kidd, was heading to the Strait of Malacca, answering a request from the Malaysian government. The Kidd had been searching the areas south of the Gulf of Thailand, along with the destroyer USS Pinckney.
"It's my understanding that based on some new information that's not necessarily conclusive - but new information - an additional search area may be opened in the Indian Ocean," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters in Washington.
Carney did not specify the nature of the new information.
Satellites picked up faint electronic pulses from the aircraft after it went missing on Saturday, but the signals gave no immediate information about where the jet was heading and little else about its fate, two sources close to the investigation said on Thursday.
U.S. experts are still examining the data to see if any information about its last location could be extracted, a source close to the investigation told Reuters. Malaysia's civil aviation chief confirmed on Friday the government was working with U.S. investigators to establish if there was any satellite information that could help locate the airliner.
LAST RADAR SIGHTING
The last sighting of the aircraft on civilian radar screens came shortly before 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, less than an hour after take-off. It was flying as scheduled across the mouth of the Gulf of Thailand on the eastern side of peninsular Malaysia, heading towards Beijing.
However, Malaysia's air force chief said on Wednesday that an aircraft that could have been the missing plane was plotted on military radar at 2:15 a.m., 200 miles northwest of Penang Island off Malaysia's west coast.
This position marks the limit of Malaysia's military radar in that part of the country, a fourth source familiar with the investigation told Reuters.
Malaysia says it has asked neighboring countries for their radar data, but has not confirmed receiving the information. Indonesian and Thai authorities said on Friday they had not received an official request for such data from Malaysia.
The fact that the plane - if it was MH370 - had lost contact with air traffic control and was invisible to civilian radar suggested someone on board had turned off its communication systems, the first two sources said.
They also gave new details on the direction in which the unidentified aircraft was heading - following aviation corridors identified on maps used by pilots as N571 and P628 - routes taken by commercial planes flying from Southeast Asia to the Middle East or Europe.
Hishammuddin said it remained unclear if that aircraft was MH370. "We need to get verification and we are working very closely with the experts," he said.
MILITARY DEPLOYMENT GROWS
Ships and aircraft are now combing a vast area that had already been widened to cover both sides of the Malay Peninsula and the Andaman Sea.
An already difficult search task has been complicated in some areas by a choking haze caused by burning forest and farmland that has enveloped much of Malaysia and spilled into the Strait of Malacca. The haze, exacerbated by a prolonged dry spell, has reached hazardous levels in several spots.
"The haze will affect the search and rescue operations for sure. The visibility at the ground level has dropped to less than 3 km (1.9 miles)," Amirzudi Hashim, a senior meteorologist at the National Weather Center, told Reuters.
India had deployed ships, planes and helicopters from the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands, at the juncture of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, an Indian military spokesman, Harmeet Singh, said on Friday.
Two Dornier aircraft were searching the land mass of the Andaman and Nicobar islands, a total area of 720 km by 52 km, Singh said.
China, which had more than 150 citizens on board the missing plane, has deployed four warships, four coastguard vessels, eight aircraft and trained 10 satellites on a wide search area. Chinese media have described the ship deployment as the largest Chinese rescue fleet ever assembled.
The Boeing 777 has one of the best safety records of any commercial aircraft in service. Its only previous fatal crash came on July 6 last year when Asiana Airlines Flight 214 struck a seawall with its undercarriage on landing in San Francisco. Three people died.
(Additional reporting by Anshuman Daga, Yantoultra Ngui and Al-Zaquan Amer Hamzah in Kuala Lumpur, Tim Hepher in Paris, Mark Hosenball, Andrea Shalal, Will Dunham, Phil Stewart and Roberta Rampton in Washington; Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Amy Sawitta Lefevre in Bangkok; Writing by Stuart Grudgings and Alex Richardson; Editing by Nick Macfie)

Why Investigators Are Now Focusing On Foul Play Behind Missing Malaysia Plane

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="http://ardrone2.parrot.com/photos/photo-album/">Parrot</a></div></div></div>
"All operations conducted in civil airspace must meet minimum levels of safety. [...] Presently, the [we are] drafting a rule to address small [drones]." -<a href="http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/uas_faq/">the Federal Aviation Administration</a> 
Forget for a moment the dramatic news clips you've seen of Predator <keyword id="94769" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="drones">drones</keyword> taking off to bomb battlefields. Yes, they are drones - unmanned vehicles that can fly without human assistance - but they only represent a narrow slice of what drones are all about. There is a huge potential for how private, commercial drone use can change our lives. 
When we're talking about commercial drones, we're generally talking about a small, GPS-enabled remote control airplanes or helicopters with really advanced autopilot that can handle all aspects of a flight, from takeoff to landing. For such a straightforward idea, it has huge implications that could shake up a number of industries. But American regulators obviously want to make sure that drones can be employed safely.
Consider this quick thought experiment.
It's some indeterminate amount of time in the future and seeing a commercial drone is as commonplace as seeing a UPS truck today. Farmers use them to more quickly and efficiently dust their crops. Search and rescue missions rely on them to get to vantage points that an unaided human never could. The pizza delivery man is a trained and licensed professional drone pilot who works from home. And all of this happens with the government's blessing.
In this hypothetical world, it's no longer unusual to look up to the sky and see it riddled with unmanned aircraft going about their business. In fact, a sky full of drones is the new normal. What would that world be like, practically?
Amazon got the general population interested in drones with the announcement that it has been experimenting with "octocopters," unmanned drones that will supposedly be able to deliver an item to your house within 30 minutes of ordering it. "Amazon Prime Air," as it's being called, won't be deployed for customers anytime soon. But people seem to love the idea. Here's the 60 Minutes video that got everyone's attention.

Zookal, an Australian company that sells textbooks, recently partnered with Flirtey, a drone company, to facilitate speedy delivery of textbooks to customers who order them. Zookal CEO Ahmed Haider told us that the Amazon drones behaving as demonstrated in the video is only "an eventuality, however with the current legislation in America its just a matter of when rather than if."
"Our technology is a little bit more advanced than Amazon in that we don't actually lower the drone it hovers above the smartphone of the customer and lowers the parcel to the customer to collect so the drone is never touching the ground," he said.
Package delivery is already a big business. The United States Postal Service delivered 3.5 billion packages in 2012, <a href="http://about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-facts/#H1">netting $11.6 billion</a>. In the same year, UPS delivered 4,107,000 packages. If they were to implement delivery-by-drone, they could do more delivery with the same number of employees - drones don't need overtime pay. But by no means will unmanned aerial vehicles put the postman out of a job. There are some limitations to the weight a drone can carry. Amazon's drones can schlep around five pounds. Flirtey's drones can carry some textbooks.
But if you're buying a fridge or a TV, you're still going to need someone to drive it to your house.
Drones are more like bicycle messengers, only in the sky. Commercial drones can carry lightweight parcels quickly and easily over short distances. Booming metropolitan areas like New York City may very well find that drones are easier and cheaper than a human speed demon on two wheels.
When commercial drone use is commonplace, we'll see a brand new field of employment open up. People will need to program, monitor, and pilot business drones. "Drone pilot school" may very well become a new type of technical school, akin to job training programs offered by places like DeVry University and ITT Technical Institute.
Amazon says that 84% of its orders are under five pounds, and are therefore deliverable by drone. Let's do some exploratory math and estimate that 75% of UPS deliveries meet the same criteria. That means that 3,080,250 packages could be delivered by drone, greatly reducing the workload on humans. This is huge. If commercial drone delivery is properly implemented, it means fewer cars and trucks on the road and increased convenience for customers and employees alike. But it won't be easy - there are a lot of deliveries to be made.
While it's the most obvious and immediate application, drones will absolutely expand beyond deliveries. They have already proven invaluable for cinematographers seeking impressive camera shots, real estate agents filming sweeping tour videos of homes, and farmers analyzing their crops and dusting them with pesticides.
Haider even brings up the compelling idea of drones as tour guides - "I think an area that has not yet been explored and would be interesting is navigation with drones of a smaller size. [For example,] a drone the size of a baseball [could show] people around new environments like universities or guide tours in museums."
This is already a reality. MIT has drones <a href="http://senseable.mit.edu/skycall/">designed to show people around its complex campus</a>. Check it out:

Drone proponents have two major hurdles to overcome before we can see our unmanned flying friends in action for commercial purposes. There are obviously safety concerns - they need to avoid birds, planes, people. Then there's the legal stuff that needs to be addressed. If you wanted fly a commercial drone in the United States, the framework doesn't yet exist to do so legally.
Australia's regulators are quite receptive to commercial drones. Haider told us that "there are already multiple [Australian] companies registered that are using drones for commercial use for everything from fighting bush fires to amateur photography at sporting events. Flirtey will be the first company to allow delivery as a service." And on the matter of safety, Haider is optimistic: "[Our drones] have fail safe mechanisms, shielded guides, and we're working on some new proprietary safety mechanisms."
What began as military controversy has now become more of a conversation about making our lives easier at home. It will take a while for the FAA to draw up rules for this, but all signs point to commercial drones as an inevitability.
The future will be autonomous and airborne.

You Searched For "autopilot for helicopter" and got 6 results

Chris Anderson Q&A: Drone Entrepreneur Talks About His New Company, GoPros, And The Future Of Drones

Steven Tweedie

Here's everything we know about the the crash of Germanwings flight 9525

Benjamin Zhang,Pamela Engel

Why Investigators Are Now Focusing On Foul Play Behind Missing Malaysia Plane

Niluksi Koswanage and Siva Go…

A Look At Our Inevitable Drone-Filled Future

Dylan Love

I Asked Jeff Bezos The Tough Questions - No Profits, The Book Controversies, The Phone Flop - And He Showed Why Amazon Is Such A Huge Success

Henry Blodget

When I Asked Jeff Bezos The Tough Questions - No Profits, The Book Controversies, The Phone Flop - He Proved Why He's A Genius CEO

Henry Blodget