Foldable drone aircraft may aid crime fighters

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is planning to test an unmanned, remote-controlled surveillance plane that could be used to get a bird's-eye view of a standoff or search for lost children or hikers.

The drone — much lighter and smaller than the military drones flown over Iraq and Afghanistan, and only a fraction of the cost — would send real-time color video to a portable computer system manned by an officer 250 feet below.

Officials with the nation's largest sheriff's department said it is believed to be the first field test of drones by local police in a major U.S. urban area.

Depending on the outcome of the tests, the department could eventually put as many as 20 of the aircraft into service, expanding their use to searching for suspects on the run and monitoring hostage situations, among other things.

The drones would be used in addition to the sheriff's fleet of 18 helicopters.

The Sheriff's Department has teamed with Octatron of La Verne, Calif., to develop the SkySeer, a 5-pound aircraft powered by a replaceable battery that lasts about 70 minutes.

The aircraft has aluminum and nylon fabric wings atop a Kevlar fuselage. At about 6 ½ feet wide and almost 3 feet long, it can be folded easily into a tube small enough to fit in the back seat of a squad car.

Where authorities see a novel law-enforcement tool, others worry about intrusive government surveillance.

If a plane is used to gain evidence that police would otherwise need a search warrant to collect, that could infringe on privacy rights, said law professor Charles Whitebread of the University of Southern California.