Randal Franzen was 53, unemployed and nearly broke when his brother, a tool designer at Boeing, mentioned that pilots for remotely piloted aircraft – more commonly known as drones – were in high demand. 

Franzen, a former professional skier and trucking company owner who had flown planes as a hobby, started calling manufacturers and found three schools that offer bachelor’s degrees for would-be feet-on-the-ground fliers: Kansas State University, the University of North Dakota and the private Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla. 

He landed at Kansas State, where he maintained a 4.0 grade point average for four years and accumulated $60,000 in student loan debt before graduating in 2011. It was a gamble, but one that paid off with an offer “well into the six figures” as a flight operator for a military contractor in Afghanistan.

Franzen, who dreams of one day piloting drones over forest fires in the U.S., believes he is at the forefront of a watershed moment in aviation, one in which manned flight takes a jumpseat to the remote-controlled variety.

Courtesy Randal Franzen

Randal Franzen went from being unemployed to earning a six-figure salary as a drone flight operator in Afghanistan.

While most jobs flying drones currently are military-related, universities and colleges expect that to change by 2015, when the Federal Aviation Administration is due to release regulations for unmanned aircraft in domestic airspace. Once those regulations are in place, the FAA predicts that 10,000 commercial drones will be operating in the U.S. within five years.

Although just three schools currently offer degrees in piloting unmanned aircraft, many others – including community colleges – offer training for remote pilots. And those numbers figure are set to increase, with some aviation industry analysts predicting drones will eventually come to dominate the U.S. skies in terms of jobs.   

At the moment, 358 public institutions – including 14 universities and colleges – have permits from the FAA to fly unmanned aircraft. Those permits became public last summer after the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

The government issues the permits mainly for research and border security. Police departments that have requested them to survey dense, high crime areas have been rejected.

Some of the schools that have permits have been flying unmanned aircrafts for decades; others, like Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, received theirs recently to start programs to train future drone pilots.

Alex Mirot, an assistant professor at Embry-Riddle who oversees the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Science program there, said this generation of students will pioneer how unmanned aircraft are used domestically, as the use of drones shifts from almost purely military to other applications.

“We make it clear from the beginning that we are civilian-focused,” said Mirot, a former Air Force pilot who remotely piloted Predator and Reaper drones used to target suspected terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere for four years from a base in Nevada.

“We want them to think about how to apply this military hardware to civilian applications.”

Among the possible applications: Monitoring livestock and oil pipelines, spotting animal poachers, tracking down criminals fleeing crime scenes and delivering packages for UPS and FedEx.

With U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan winding down, drone manufacturers also are eager to find new markets. AeroVironment, a California company that specializes in small, unmanned aircrafts for the military, recently unveiled the Qube, a drone designed for law enforcement surveillance.

The FAA hasn’t allowed police agencies to fly drones over populated areas – because of concerns about airspace safety, as drones have crashed or collided with one another abroad. But that hasn’t stopped some agencies from buying them in anticipation of their eventual approval. The Seattle Police Department, for example, has two small aircraft, which two officers occasionally fly around a warehouse for practice. For now, a police spokesman said, federal rules are too restrictive to use them outside. 

The domestic market is so nascent that there isn’t even agreement on what to call unmanned aircraft – “remotely piloted aircraft,” “unmanned aerial vehicles” – UAVs – or by the most mainstream term, “drones.” The latter makes many advocates bristle; they say the term confuses their aircraft with the dummy planes used for target practice – or with the controversial planes used to kill suspected terrorists abroad.

Industry attracting engineers and pilots
Students at Embry-Riddle train on flight simulators that closely resemble the Predator, an armed military drone with a 48-foot wingspan, because the FAA will not issue a drone license to a private institution.

Without guidance from the FAA, Embry-Riddle has struggled with how to create a robust program that will turn out employable graduates.

“As of now there aren’t rules on what an (unmanned aircraft) pilot qualification will be,” Mirot said. “You have to go to employer X and ask them, ‘What are you requiring?’ And that becomes the standard.”

The bachelor’s degree program also includes 13 credits in engineering, so students understand the plane’s whole system, Mirot said.

Embry-Riddle recently graduated its first student with a bachelor’s degree, but those who graduated earlier with minors in unmanned aircraft systems have fared well, Mirot said.

“I had a kid who deployed right away and he was making $140,000,” Mirot said. “That’s more than I ever made. Yeah, he’s going into Afghanistan, but he had no previous military experience or security clearance.”

Mirot said many of his students aspire to be airline pilots. But with salaries for commercial airline pilots starting as low as $17,000 in the first year, they plan to start in unmanned systems to pay off their loans, then maybe apply for an airline job, he said.

The University of North Dakota, which launched its unmanned aircraft systems operations major in 2009, has similar success stories. Professor Alan Palmer, a retired brigadier general of the North Dakota National Guard, said 15 of the program’s 23 graduates now work for General Atomics in San Diego, which makes the Predator and Reaper drones used in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Engineering and computer science students, too, are in demand by the drone industry. At least 50 universities in the U.S. have centers, academic programs or clubs for drone engineering or flying. Many of the engineering students work on projects making the drones “smarter” – that is building more sensitive sensors – and studying how the robots interact with humans.

George Huang, a professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, who builds drones the size of hummingbirds, said nearly all his 20 students work as researchers for the Air Force. This means they’re earning between $60,000 and $80,000 a year while still enrolled, instead of the $15,000 stipend that graduate students typically receive from their schools.

At the University of Colorado in Boulder, doctoral candidate Sibylle Walter said unmanned systems appeal to her because the results are immediate. In the past, she said, aerospace students typically ended up at Boeing or another big company and spent years working on one element of a project. Instead, she is working with her adviser to build a supersonic drone capable of flying up to 1,000 mph.

“The link between education and application is much more compact,” Walter said of the unmanned aircraft. “That translates to this new boom. You can build them inexpensively – you don’t need $100 million to build one.”

Ethical warfare?
Despite the promise of numerous civilian applications, drones continue to be controversial because of their role as weapons of war.

At Texas A&M University, which has an FAA permit to fly drones, computer science student Brittany Duncan is unusual among her peers: She’s a licensed pilot, a computer scientist and a woman. She probably could land a high-paying job for a military contractor, but she’s intent on staying in academia, studying robot-human relations, specifically how robots should approach victims of a natural disaster without scaring them.

John Brecher / NBC News

Doctoral candidate Brittany Duncan assembles an unmanned aerial vehicle in a lab at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.

On a recent hot, dusty morning, Duncan, 25, pulled a small aircraft from the back of a 4x4 pickup. Wearing black work boots and Dickies, she quickly assembled a remote-controlled aircraft that resembled a flying spider, then launched the aircraft – equipped with sensors and a video camera – over a pile of rubble to practice capturing footage.

At her side was Professor Robin Murphy, her adviser and a veteran of real-world unmanned aircraft operations, having flown over the World Trade Center after 9/11, the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the nuclear reactor in Fukushima, Japan, after the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster there (although she stayed in Tokyo). She believes drones could revolutionize public safety.

“I could show you a photo of firefighters from today, and it could be a photo of firefighters from 1944,” Murphy said. “They haven’t had a lot of boost in technology. [Unmanned aircraft] could be a real game-changer.”

Duncan knows there is resistance from communities where drones have been introduced. In Seattle, for example, the ACLU argued that drones could invade privacy. But as Duncan sees it, this makes her work even more relevant.

“That’s the most important thing to me – that people understand good can come from drones,” Duncan said. “Every technology is scary at first. Cars, when they went only 6 mph, people thought there would be a rash of people getting run over. Well, no, it’s going slow enough for you to get out of the way. And it’ll change your life.”

Duncan said she considers the implications of working on machines that are for now mostly used for war. Despite conflicting reports on civilian casualties in drone strikes, she’s convinced that unmanned aircraft offer a more-ethical battlefield alternative because they take the pilot’s “skin” out of the game. 

“If you’re flying a UH-60 Blackhawk Helicopter and look down and think someone has a surface-to-air missile, you’re going to shoot first and figure it out later because you’re a pilot and your life is in danger,” she said. But with drones, “(You) can afford to make sure that someone is a combatant before they engage – because you don’t have your life on the line. It takes your emotion out of the equation.”

While that debate continues, the Department of Defense is showing no loss of appetite for drones, despite the drawdown in Afghanistan. This year, it plans to spend $4.2 billion on various versions of the unmanned aircraft, 15 times more than it did in 2000.

For Professors Mirot and Palmer, that is evidence that their programs will stay relevant, no matter how the domestic deployment of drones plays out.

Looking ahead
There is an ironic twist to Randal Franzen’s move to climb aboard the cutting edge of aviation: When he went to Afghanistan, he learned that his assignment was to monitor surveillance video from a tethered balloon near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – a military technology that – minus the cameras – dates to the Civil War.

From the base miles away, he monitored the rural area for Taliban activity, but mostly watched Afghans going about their daily lives. The retrained drone pilot said he found it fascinating.

“I grew up in Montana, swam in irrigation ditches, and they do the exact same thing – they’re just trying to make a living, raise some cattle and kids and do the exact same thing as everyone else,” Franzen said. There were moments that caught him by surprise – such as when he saw a man leading 10 camels through the desert while talking on a cellphone, walking several feet ahead of his wife, who was dressed in a full burqa.

Now home in Colorado, Franzen figures he’ll take at least one more far-flung military assignment as he waits for the domestic drone market to open. This time, though, he’d like to put his newfound remote flying skills to better use. 

“I had three offers yesterday to go back and do the same thing for three different companies,” he said. “I talked to them about flying. I’d rather pilot something. I’d like to go play with something cooler.”

More from Open Channel:

• Fiscal cliff, elections boost spending on lobbying
• Gazing into 'dark pools,' the high-tech tool that enables insider stock trading
• Dermatologists blast tanning industry campaign to play down skin cancer fears

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

When George Zimmerman made his initial court appearance on Thursday charged with second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, he had a new lawyer at his side: Mark O’Mara, described by a longtime friend as a “fearless” lawyer and a “renaissance man.”

The central Florida defense attorney and former prosecutor has nearly 30 years of experience under his belt, representing clients in criminal cases ranging from drunk driving to the death penalty. He also has clocked time in front of the television cameras, serving as a legal analyst for local station WKMG Channel 6, where he commented on high-profile cases, including the Casey Anthony case and even the Martin one – before he was hired to represent Zimmerman.

“He’s a brilliant lawyer,” O’Mara’s longtime friend and civil attorney Joseph Flood told msnbc.com, as well as a “renaissance man” who loves the arts and the Orlando Magic, rides a Harley and is very family-oriented. “I think he’ll be able to manage both the criminal prosecution side, which is going to be a big task, but also just as importantly he’ll be able to manage the media side of it.

“He will come up with the best defense that Mr. Zimmerman is entitled to get.”

From 1982-1984, O’Mara was an assistant state attorney in the Seminole County State Attorney's Office after graduating from Florida State University College of Law, Tallahassee. He has been an active member of the Central Florida Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, according to a former president of the group, Melissa Vickers.

“He’s very well respected. … He’s a great trial attorney,” she told msnbc.com. “They’re in very good hands.”

Flood said O’Mara has handled numerous first-degree murder cases. Questions have been raised about whether he would use the "Stand Your Ground" defense for his new client -- a neighborhood watch volunteer accused of fatally shooting unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in a gated community on Feb. 26.

Under the “Stand Your Ground” law, a citizen doesn’t have to retreat before using deadly force against an attacker.

When asked by reporters after Thursday's hearing how many "Stand Your Ground" cases he has handled, O'Mara said: “Self-defense cases, which is really what you’re speaking of, a number of them. It shows up in a lot of personal crimes."

"I have not had one to a jury since the 'Stand Your Ground' statute, but I’ve had a couple that have utilized that as … sort of an impact on it,” he added.

One local high-profile case he handled was that of radio personality Shannon Burke, who shot his wife’s dog in a fit of anger. The bullet also grazed his wife’s head. Flood said O’Mara managed to get a nominal sentence for Burke, who received six months after pleading guilty to animal cruelty and opening fire in a building.

“He’s fearless. I mean, he doesn’t mind taking on those kinds of cases … cases that have media scrutiny where people are looking over your shoulder and every word that you say is being posted on YouTube … every single thing you do is being called into question by 17 supposed experts,” said Flood.

“He believes in the process enough that he thinks they deserve a defense, too,” he said of high-profile defendants like Zimmerman, who has become a lightning rod in the debate over race relations. “The character that I admire in him about that is his willingness to put his skills on the line when not just a client and maybe a judge are watching, but when the whole city and, in this case, the whole world is watching.”

In mid-March, long before he took on Zimmerman as a client, O’Mara, 56,  said on WKMG that Zimmerman’s shooting of the 17-year-old teen in a gated community in Sanford, Fla. – which he has claimed was in self-defense – could be legally justified under the “Stand Your Ground” law.

"People call it the license-to-murder statute because it doesn't require actions to avoid the confrontation," said O'Mara. "If you can present evidence or at least your own testimony that (you) felt in fear that he was going to commit great bodily injury or death, that is what kicks in the statutory protection that you're allowed to respond with deadly force."

The “Stand Your Ground” law also can let a judge, in an evidentiary hearing before a jury trial, determine that a defendant can’t be prosecuted due to the self-defense argument.

Martin's mom: Killing was an 'accident'

On Tuesday night, after Zimmerman’s former attorneys said they were no longer representing him, O’Mara said on WKMG that he was “surprised that two attorneys who were no longer counsel talked for an hour about a case that they’re no longer involved in.

AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack

Mark O'Mara, addresses reporters outside his offices in Orlando, Fla., on Wednesday, April 11, 2012.

“I think that was a little problematic. You’re not supposed to talk about a client’s case, for the most part at all, and yet they answered dozens of questions,” he said in remarks reported by the Orlando Sentinel.

When asked by an anchor if that could be detrimental to the case put forward by Zimmerman’s eventual lawyer, he responded: “Very potentially. If George Zimmerman came to me tomorrow and said, ‘I want you to represent me,’ I would look at the press conference and say, ‘Mr. Uhrig identified a potential defense. He outlined the facts of what happened, and he cemented what George Zimmerman can now say.’ And that’s problematic if other evidence comes out that conflicts with it.”

Second-degree murder charge surprises legal experts

O’Mara, a former president of the Seminole County Bar Association, said Zimmerman’s family contacted him about representing him and then he spoke with his new client, according to cfnews13.com.

Flood said he spoke with O’Mara on Wednesday while he was deciding whether to take the case. Flood said he thought the case was a good fit.

“I told him I think he should take the case, that I thought he’d be the perfect lawyer for it,” he said.

On Rock Center with Brian Williams on Wednesday night, O’Mara said: ‘Certainly self-defense seems to have presented itself as part of the one facet of the defense, and yes, the hold your ground statute, which sort of … authorizes or codifies the standard of self-defense in Florida is going to be one of the things that we’re going to look into.”

“We have to look at what the statute says that is presently the law in Florida, it may be up for review because of this case,” he said. “But presently, that statute basically says if a person is in reasonable fear of … great bodily injury or death they can react to it. We need to see what the facts say to support which way it happened.”

More content from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• Trayvon Martin's mom: Killing was an 'accident'
• NJ flood victims: Where did federal aid millions go?
• Connecticut lawmakers vote to repeal death penalty
• Alleged Oakland shooter says he is 'deeply sorry'
• Mom drops son at day care, returns to find 3 dead

Follow US News on msnbc.com on Twitter and Facebook