A lightning strike captured by Ron Russell’s drone. Submitted photo Maybe 10 years ago, Sun Journal photographer Russ Dillingham and I were trudging up some dark and lonely back road, he with his camera equipment, me with my notebook and pen. We were a still a good half-mile away from the scene of a crash and the small-town cops were refusing to let us get closer.
“What we need,” I said as we continued to hoof our way along, “is a drone.” I said it mainly for laughs — who ever heard of small-time guys like Russ and I running this kind of fancy technology almost exclusively known for military applications? Russ, though, was less flippant about it. He honestly believed that sooner later later, the media would be using drones along with the big boys.
Heck, he told me. Pretty soon, those drones would be in the hands of your regular Joes and Janes, too. I rolled my eyes and accused the photographer of drinking on the job, but the joke was on me — not two years later, Russ was issued a drone operator’s license from the by-God Federal Aviation Administration and soon after that, he was using that flying camera all over the place.
I honestly did not foresee the rise of commercial drones. Of course, I’m the same guy who scoffed loudly back in the mid-1990s when news people started talking about some abstract world wide web that was going to change the media landscape. The fact is, I should have seen it coming.
The FAA, after all, had issued its very first commercial .