a<\/em>, a container ship, in 2009, they worked around the clock for five days straight. Small wonder that a 2011 study by the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine found nearly half the operators of spy drones suffering from high levels of stress.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\u201cThere were times you saw things that you did not really want to, including people dying,\u201d says Mr Lohmar. \u201cOther times brought home the fact that the people on the other end of the lens were human beings too, such as seeing a \u2018bad guy\u2019 playing with his kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
A new collective-bargaining organisation, the Association of Unmanned Operation (AUO), aims to represent civilian drone operators. (Military ones are barred from joining unions.) Sam Trevino, the AUO\u2019s president, frets about long hours and falling pay. Newly-qualified drone pilots used to make well over $100,000 a year, but as America\u2019s wars wind down and the sequester bites, wages have slipped and discontent among operators has grown. Mr Trevino says the AUO is poised to win recognition at one large drone contractor, and hopes to organise workers at others soon.<\/p>\n
Drones are not used to spy on Americans in America, says Mr Trevino. If they ever were, he says, his organisation could \u201cstand together\u201d and protest. The world has grown accustomed to drone strikes; a drone operators\u2019 strike would be something new.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The stressful lives of drone pilots The Economist click here for original article BEHIND every aerial drone is a human operator. Thousands are civilians, working for contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Civilians may not fire missiles, but they fly spy planes and fix them when they break down. Andrew Lohmar, for example, piloted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1833,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/imgres.jpeg?fit=118%2C173&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1832"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1835,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1832\/revisions\/1835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}