Paul Goble
Staunton, April 7 – The rise of drone technology has encouraged many Russian officials and businessmen, especially in Siberia and the Far East, that such aircraft can help their country to compensate for the lack of other kinds of transportation infrastructure in that region. But while optimism remains, problems of doing so are mounting.
While drones have proven successful in fighting fires and identifying problems in roads and railways, they have yet to expand much beyond that to deliver cargo to distant population sites; and officials involved concede that drone technology is not nearly as cost-effective as originally thought (eastrussia.ru/material/bespilote-iz-budushchego/).
While the costs of per-hour travel of drones are much lower than the costs of airplanes, that benefit, much trumpeted by some, disappears given the need to develop a network of stations to allow the drones to operate effectively and of a large number of operators who can control them and especially insurance rates that remain astronomically high.
The image of one drone operator controlling dozens of drone flights is still something out of science fiction and is likely to remain there for some time to come, Russian analysts concede; and thus there is going to have to be a large commitment to building ground support for drones before they will become effective in the air.
Until those bottlenecks can be overcome, the age of the drone in Russia east of the Urals that some Russian writers have projected is not going to arrive, although eventually all of these problems could be addressed when veterans of Russian drone warfare against Ukraine return home and start looking for work.
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