I feel there is much good that we can do, but it seems like most of what is stopping it from being adopted is social. I suppose if we had a plane that could work in all weather conditions, and at least be controlled from one laptop, with mosaicing running on another, then we might have something - yet our plane is extremely fragile. It can't handle a lot of wind, no rain, and has limited range. I feel like the technology could be better. As a third party observer, if i saw our plane and found it could only work under fair weather conditions my reaction would be “oh, that's nice - but not for real searching.”

On the positive side, we do control and mosaicing now.

So, summed up: we need to convey that our plane actually does WHATEVER it does under realistic conditions. This means realistic weather conditions, for example. I realize that it is unreasonable for the plane to handle ALL conditions, but we can certainly do better than we do now. One possible litmus test for “reality” is to ask “Would a normal search team go out in this weather?” For driving rain and lighting, perhaps the answer is no. For a light rain with wind gusts, the answer is likely a definite yes.

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