The Washington Post last month published a series of reports on unmanned aircraft, or drones, that could make your hair curl.
Much of the reporting revealed an alarming number of crashes involving large military drones, both on the battlefield in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But the articles said the number of accidents involving civilian drones had climbed, too, along with close calls between commercial aircraft and “small rogue drones near airports.”
So is it time to hit the brakes on civilian drones, which are being sold by the thousands to hobbyists and others intrigued by their potential?
To the contrary. It’s time for the Federal Aviation Administration to create a framework for accountability in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, something the agency notably has failed to do.
Seven years ago, the FAA declared that commercial use of unmanned aircraft fell within its jurisdiction and that such uses were illegal, absent a special waiver. That’s still its position — and yet it has failed to clarify how it intends to integrate civilian drones into the nation’s airspace.
In 2012 Congress decided to prod the agency with the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, ordering it to “safely accelerate” its rulemaking process and setting a September 2015 deadline for release of a plan. Although rule-making for small, unmanned devices could begin before the close of this year, even the inspector general of the Transportation Department has concluded that the FAA “will not meet the September 2015 deadline for safe (drone) integration and it is uncertain when this will be achieved.”
Meanwhile, an agency official reportedly has warned that the entire rulemaking process could take up to a decade.
“The fact that they’re saying that full-blown integration with complete regulations will take another 10 years is kind of frustrating,” says professor Matt Waite, founder of the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
“The sooner we have rules that allow for commercial operations that give people a legal path to use these devices for a business purpose, things can get dramatically safer,” he explains. “A lot of pressure will be relieved and operators will come into the light and follow the rules.”
But without such rules, “cowboy operators” will feel emboldened to deploy their unmanned vehicles without constraint.
“When it comes to what the FAA is going to do in terms of regulation,” Waite says, “we are absolutely flying blind.”
Some rules are predictable, Waite acknowledges, such as licensing of commercial operators, registration of airframes “so the owner can be identified,” and liability insurance. But who can be sure?
The FAA, meanwhile, disputes that it is creeping along. In an information sheet it released this year titled “Busting Myths about the FAA and Unmanned Aircraft,” the agency contends “there are a lot of misconceptions and misinformation” about its record with drones. One myth, the FAA insists, is the idea that the agency “is lagging behind other countries in approving commercial drones.”
“This comparison is flawed,” the FAA says, because “the United States has the busiest, most complex airspace in the world” and developing rules is a “very complex task.”
If you’re going to do a job, you should “get it right the first time.”
If you read the FAA’s full myth-busting answer, however, you’ll notice the agency never explicitly denies that it is lagging behind other countries in approving rules and licenses for the commercial use of unmanned aircraft. And that’s because it can’t. The U.S. clearly has allowed some countries — including Australia, Japan and even Britain — to move ahead in the deployment of this transformational technology while our regulators dither, deliberate and occasionally react to a surge of unauthorized drones flown by everyone from filmmakers, photographers, real estate agents and construction crews to search-and-rescue outfits.
If you own a small drone — defined as 55 pounds or less — you may fly it as a hobbyist under rules for model aircraft issued years ago (“below 400 feet, three miles from an airport, away from populated areas,” in FAA shorthand). Public agencies such as police forces or universities may also be able to secure permission on a case-by-case basis to use a drone. However, the FAA has kept the door almost entirely locked on commercial operations — with the sole exceptions occurring in the Arctic.
But of course with drones so easily available and relatively affordable — “I can find a drone that fits your budget,” Waite assured me — would-be operators are increasingly taking matters into their own hands. And the FAA is responding with what at times appears to be arbitrary enforcement.
A few weeks ago, for example, the Catholic archdiocese of Washington used a drone-mounted camera to film a procession marking the canonizations of popes John Paul II and John the 23rd. Was the filming illegal? Apparently, according to The Washington Post, in part because unmanned aircraft are banned within 15 miles of Reagan National Airport. But the FAA turned a blind eye.
By contrast, the FAA was less forgiving earlier this year with Texas EquuSearch, demanding that it stop using drones in its search missions — one of which succeeded in locating the body of a missing 2-year-old boy.
A few targets of the FAA fight back. When the agency fined a commercial photographer $10,000 for shooting a promotional video over the University of Virginia using a drone with foam wings and weighing less than 5 pounds, he challenged the decision. In March, an administrative law judge concluded the agency had indeed overstepped its authority. The FAA has appealed the ruling.
Meanwhile, a coalition of news organizations, including The New York Times and Washington Post, has filed a brief on the side of the photographer, arguing that the FAA’s “overly broad policy, implemented through a patchwork of regulatory and policy statements and an ad hoc cease-and-desist enforcement process, has an impermissible chilling effect on the First Amendment newsgathering rights of journalists.”
If there is a rationale for when the FAA chooses to crack down, no one outside the agency has figured it out.
“I recognize that the FAA has a really difficult job, and that they are a notoriously conservative safety organization that doesn’t like to move until they’re sure there is absolutely no risk to aviation safety,” Waite says. “But the fact is that they’ve been talking about this for a very long time.”
Waite doesn’t discount the threat of small drones encroaching on an airport’s airspace, but he believes the greater danger is to people on the ground in the event of a crash. As a result, he says, drones should be barred from flying over densely packed crowds.
But of course you wouldn’t have to fly drones over crowds for a number of possible commercial uses, such as agriculture. And yet the FAA hasn’t moved on those fronts, either.
Polls show the public tends to be skeptical of civilian drone use, and probably unaware of their potential — except when someone like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos makes a splash with his wildly ambitious plan to use unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver packages.
Politicians, meanwhile, tend to harp on privacy concerns involving drones, although smart phones and the Internet represent greater risks to privacy than a theoretical drone hovering outside your window. Peeping Tom laws may need to be updated, but that’s not a heavy lift.
A study prepared last year for the Air Force predicts that by 2035 unmanned aircraft operations will “surpass manned aircraft operations, for both military and commercial domains” — with 175,000 drones in the commercial marketplace alone.
The study assumed, naturally, that a host of regulatory and policy obstacles could be overcome in timely fashion. But that may have been the study’s most unlikely assumption of all.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter @vcarrollDP
