Dutch designer, Ruben Pater, has created a Drone Survival Guide which shows the different shapes and sizes of drones based on their silhouettes. With drones becoming more and more common everyday, it makes sense that someone would create a guide to identify the unmanned flying machines much like a bird watching chart.
The guide created by Pater offers details of how the drones look and tips on how to hide from them. Most of the drones included in the chart are from countries that are members of NATO such as US, UK, France, Germany and Canada. This is mainly because these countries are more open about their drones and have revealed certain amounts of information (such as wingspan) to the public. Other countries that have drones featured in the chart include India, Israel, China, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
The guide also features a scale to identify different drones by their wingspan, since the drones on the guide vary greatly in size from the Global Hawk with a wingspan of 130 feet to the minuscule Parrot AC quadcopter with a size of 23 inches. Icons are used to state the primary use of a drone, with the skull icon representing a drone used for attack and an eye icon indicating a surveillance drone. It was difficult for Mr. Pater to categorize the drones by military and domestic use because some models were used in both fields.
Although the guide was intended as art, it includes detailed tips from the guide produced by Al Qaeda for countering drones which was published in 2013. These tips include hiding under a dense canopy of trees, using space blankets to hide heat signatures and placing pieces of glass on car roofs to reflect light. Pater said that the guide was printed on aluminium paper making it “a useful tool to interfere with a drone’s sensors”.
The inspiration for the guide came to Pater while he was in Gaza where people recorded drones on video when they flew over in order to identify them as whether the machine was a threat or not. Drones are becoming increasingly commonplace, with the United States’ Federal Aviation Administration predicting that there will be over 30,000 drones flying over America alone by the year 2032. This piece of art could just prove to be a necessity to people around the world in the very near future.