University of Minnesota UAV lab flight test day …
UAV? Really? Do these toys carry a person? No. So, how can they be Unmanned when no person can fit in the model and fly it? How can it be un-manned when there is still a person operating it from the ground via radio control? I wish people understood the difference between what is piloted and what is pilotless, not what is manned and what is not. Pilotless is the correct term to use for any aircrafts. The word ‘unmanned’ is used for some land vehicles, e.g. cannons, whether they will be manned or not in the next battle attack because ‘…there aren’t enough ammunition’. But no, it seems everything is unmanned even though there is always a person manning the vehicle, plane, or radio assisted models. Is it a Quadcopter taking this photo? And who did that? Of course it was a man, you. So, is it really un-manned? LOL.
@Mick_Carson - but first we need to set people straight on the whole driving on parkways and parking on driveways thing…
Hi Mick, I am an FAA certificated part 107 [remote] pilot. Language and naming is tricky. I have always called the person flying the plane: pilot, even when their feet are on the ground. I have been an RC pilot since 13 years old. Now when the computer flies the plane (95-100% of the time in our specific case) it is the auto…ummm…pilot doing the honors. The autopilot was snapping the shutter at regular ground spacing to achieve a preset overlap. Unmanned is not very descriptive and could be a 747 with an all female crew. 
Is a language the words people use to communicate? Or is a language something that we try to define it to be? I think I could argue the airplane had two pilots. The autopilot on board doing 99% of the work, and a remote pilot on the ground supervising and giving higher level commands. Actually we had a crew … the person launching the plane needs to get some credit, and one other guy ran the ground station for a while. The most perfectly descriptive acronyms are also the clunkiest. These days I’ve [sadly and grudgingly] started using the drone word sometimes just so people know what I’m talking about. Also, not a quad … an airplane.
@clolsonus
Yes, the part of saying unmanned aerial vehicle is not a correct term these days because in aircrafts it has always been ‘pilot’, which means it can be both male and female. Just like in films, the correct term for a female is actress, not actor. But since the ignorant imbeciles have lost track with the use of the correct words in the English language, they then blindly decided to uses the word ‘actor’ for females. So it goes like this… one day I was in a group conversation at an Art Festival and decided to use the ‘actor’ word and see what the response would be. In fact I got an embarrassing response when I said to one of the listeners, "My friend is an actor…’. The listener was somewhat interested and asked me who is he, so that he might recognise him. But I surprisingly told him that my friend is a she, not a he. Guess what the listener told me? He said, “then why didn’t you simple say your friend was an actress?” See? To listen to stupid sheep that ‘actors’ are now male and female instead of male = actors and female = actresses, I ended up making a fool of myself in front of highly educated people for calling my female friend an actor. I blamed myself for that mistake and for following the illiterate sheep who call actresses actors.
As for pilots being male and female, to call aircrafts that are controlled by radio, GPS and waypoints - UAVs, in other words unmanned, goes to show how backward people are, because for an aircraft to fly without a pilot on board the correct term is pilotless, not unmanned for reasons that the aircrafts are also flown by women. And to say unmanned is discriminating the women. Or should we make a new word ‘unwomanned’ to help fix the confusion? I would say no.
The word ‘unmanned’ is and has always been used for land vehicles of all sorts, e.g. tanks, cannons and vehicles that require ‘men only’ work, to guide, drive, work on, push, load, etc., stuff that women do not do, unless they have balls like us. An example is, ‘Were the cannons manned?’ ‘No Sir, the cannons were unmanned during this suprised air attack due to the men relieving themselves.’
The other thing about saying ‘unmanned’ is if war aircrafts were lined on the ground and the enemy aircrafts swoops on them, like the film Pearl Harbor, where pilots tried to get into the planes to take off. That can be said as ‘unmanned’ because the aircrafts were already without pilots. A different situation here than a situation where the hobby groups call these small radio controlled model Quadcopters and planes UAVs, as if a pilot can fit, sit in and fly them. They are just sophisticated toys and doesn’t mean they are piloted by a person on board. However, a pilot can be the same person who flies a model from the ground, or a large pilotless aircraft such as those spy crafts called Predators (but now they’re called bullshit drones) used in the Middle East missions, flown long range by a group of personnel in a room or a mobile unit. Those are also pilots.
I used to fly line guided planes when I was 15 and still fly 4 models helis, including one old Kavan Bell Jet Ranger, 1 Yuneec Typhoon, a couple of gliders and 5 power boats. So, I believe you.
So anyway, the title of this photo is “UAV lab flight test day” (because the official name of the lab is UAV lab, christened probably 10 years ago, and we are out flight testing.) I believe the official meaning of UAV as it pertains to the name of the lab is “Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle”. The picture was taken by one of those swoopy flying thingies, with one of those clicky snappy thingies, and a mix of genders were involved in making it happen. Also some combination of luck and skill (hard to say the precise proportions.) The purpose of the photo is to evaluate how much detail we can see at some altitude using a particular camera and lens.
Can you point to an inhabited aerial vehicle? If there was an island that people only visited for a few hours at a time, I would still call it uninhabited.
Also, wouldn’t the opposite of inhabited be habited? 
The more accurate the terminology, the more awkward it is to say. Tilt’s the needle towards “drone” even though it’s a completely useless word.
@clolsonus
Let’s be men with brains rather than men with ignorance. 10 years ago this drone bullshit didn’t exist in mist sentences or conversations because back then we used to speak and write like real men, not like pantsy boys with toys. It was those crazed trigger happy couboys, the Yankee military that started to call some of those pilotless aircrafts (below) drones when these aircrafts were already named Predators. But the trigger happy buffoons weren’t happy with the name Predator because it seemed that the aircrafts didn’t inflict enough terror to those poor souls in the Middle East by their presence, so they made the aircrafts more deadly and scarier by adding more technology into them. However, that wasn’t enough. So to make these deadly air pests more scarier, they must have dropped the name Predator and changed it to Drone, even though the word ‘drone’ means ‘drum’ noise. But the stupid idiots who have no knowledge on where the word originated and what it really means, think drone is a name or a machine, let alone a radio controlled model. It clearly shows the language has been goung to the dogs in the last 20 years. And that is all thanks to Oxford and other Universities, especially Oxford, whose online dictionaries are full of bullshit that drone is this or that. And they have recently added Quadcopters and Multirotors in the list of bullshit done when all the word means is a continuous loud sound. There are also so many mistakes inctheir dictionaries, it makes an intelligent and highly educated person want to ask how is it possible that these college graduated University guys who call themselves professors of literacy regard 4-6-8 rotor radio controlled models in their online page as drones when they are giving the word a definition of a continuous low humming sound and ‘in the far distance a machine droned’? First of all, what distance are they talking about, and how can a human hear a low humming sound at such distance when we know that a low humming sound is made by insects, e.g. bees and can only be heard about 200-300 metres. But how can you hear a droning machine if the definition of drone is a continuous low humming sound? The definition of distance is usually ‘as far as the eye can see’, and ‘far’ is further out. Can you hear a low humming sound at least as far as the eye can see (or about a mile). Confusing, eh?
The pilotless aircraft, below, were called Predators during the Desert Storm and other wars in the Middle East.
missing/deleted image from Google+
Mick, if you can convince the rest of the world to use “pilotless” instead of “unmanned”, then I’m in.