I have always been fascinated by the Drones that the Americans fly, from various bases, and take out terrorists with these unmanned planes. A commercial version, albeit in a very simplified and much smaller form is available, in the form of the Parrot ARDrone and I bought myself one. It is a little helicopter that flies around, up to heights of 50 metres, and while it does so it records video and can take photographs.

The applications that one can think of immediately would be very interesting photographs for estate agents as well as video tours of bigger properties, but apart from that it is just a whole lot of fun. It is quite difficult to control at first with the result that I could read from a number of comments of users that it was likely to break fairly soon, but I did not think that I would break it on only my fifth day of using it! One can imagine sports coaches, even at the schoolboy level, taking some aerial footage of the team’s different manoeuvres for future strategizing.

The ultrasound part of my Drone does not appear to be working anymore and the problem with buying something that is not available for sale in South Africa is that you end up having to return it overseas to have it repaired. It certainly does however give you another glimpse of the future and it cannot be long before more robust versions, at cheaper cost, and which can fly far further, are available and it would allow hobbyists to do a lot of the things that currently require an actual helicopter to do – just for one example, the fly-over television footage they use of golf courses – you will not need to hire a helicopter to do that because you can easily fly the Drone over each hole at the same height taking video footage of the hole.