As deadline for drone rules nears, FAA issues roadmap for inclusion in the skies
Don't get your hopes up about being a drone ace just yet, though.
Today, the FAA published a "roadmap" for its plans to integrate unmanned aircraft into the nation's airspace by 2015. The 66-page document outlined some basic principles around how military and commercial drones would be allowed to fly over the US. It also spoke to many of the challenges that the FAA still needs to resolve before it can allow wide-scale operation of drones - like making sure drones don't run into other aircraft. Additionally, the roadmap included timetables to test a variety of systems required to overcome those challenges.
When Congress funded the FAA in 2012, provisions were put into the budget bill mandating that the FAA create rules to allow commercial use of drones by 2015 and to clear smaller drones for takeoff by 2014. But the FAA has been struggling to find a way to do that safely, and privacy advocates have expressed concerns about the threats to civil liberties posed by law enforcement and commercial drone operations.
Speaking before the Aerospace Industries Association today, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said "Unmanned aircraft are inherently different from manned aircraft. In moving forward, we recognize that the expanded use of unmanned aircraft presents great opportunities, but it's also true that integrating these aircraft presents significant challenges."
As different as drones are, the FAA plans to put largely the same regulatory structure on them as commercial aircraft. A special committee created in coordination with the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, Inc. (RTCA), a nonprofit organization that acts as an advisory body to the FAA, helped define a set of principles for how drones will operate.
The principles will require pilot and aircrew certification - a process that still needs to be defined by the FAA. And the guidelines also rule out autonomous flight for most drones: "UAS pilots (the pilot-in-command) will always have responsibility for the unmanned aircraft while it is operating," the guidelines in the roadmap state.
Permission to land
The FAA still has to select the six test sites where drones will be initially allowed to fly in the same airspace as commercial aircraft under provisional "certificates of airworthiness." In response to concerns about privacy, the FAA has passed the buck, putting the onus of devising privacy guidelines on the public partnerships that will run the test site. "The FAA plans to require each test site operator to establish a privacy policy that will apply to operations at the test site," the agency's roadmap states. "The test site's privacy policy must be publicly available and informed by Fair Information Practice Principles. In addition, each site operator must establish a mechanism through which the operator can receive and consider comments on its privacy policy."
Further ReadingFAA chief: Don't fear the Reapers (or Predators, Global Hawks, other drones)At the unmanned aircraft expo, FAA administrator promises drone safety, privacy.Whatever those privacy policies are, they won't set the FAA's long-term policy on dealing with privacy and civil liberties considerations. However, the FAA's roadmap indicates that the policies set by the test site operators "will help inform the dialogue among policy makers, privacy advocates, and the industry." In other words, they're a first draft for whatever provisions the FAA will eventually add to its final regulations.
Smaller drones are getting fast-tracked outside of the test site setup, which focuses on drones that will require FAA air traffic control. A separate set of rules for the operation of small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) - such as small helicopter drones and other portable unmanned aircraft - is due by the end of the year. Civil agencies will get the first crack at operating smaller drones, with commercial operations coming later.
The sUAS rules will include training standards for small drone pilots, as well as medical requirements for their "flight physical." The FAA will not require an airworthiness certificate for sUAS to operate, since they don't normally fly out of airports and largely will be restricted from flying in the same airspace as commercial aircraft. But small drones will still have safety reporting requirements, will have to be registered, and will require a pilot certificate to operate. And their operators will have to file flight plans unless they're operating totally within line-of-sight.
Complicating the FAA's job is the issue of coordinating these rules with the needs and regulations of other government agencies and state and local regulations. Texas has already banned most private drone use out of concerns over privacy.
So how soon can you earn your drone wings and get into the exciting unmanned aviation business? Even with small UAS rules due by next year, you may want to find something else to do for a while.
The FAA expects to nail down the initial process to issue "operator certificates" for companies flying larger drones for profit by 2014. Three unmanned aircraft manufacturers have already applied for "Pathfinder" certification for restricted operations in test areas, and the FAA plans to have at least one of these programs in the pipeline for certifying a model of drone for full operation (rather than the case-by case certification the FAA follows now) before the end of December.
The road to getting larger drones integrated into US airspace is going to be a long one, however. That's because the FAA projects initial certification of autonomous "sense and avoid" systems required for operating in the national airspace to be finalized somewhere between 2016 and 2020. The issue of "sense and avoid" scuttled Germany's Euro Hawk drone efforts, because that drone didn't have such a system - meaning that the European Union's air safety agency wouldn't approve it for flight.
The military is developing ground-based sense-and-avoid (GBSAA) systems to allow drones to operate within limited training areas, but the FAA doesn't expect to approve a GBSSA test site until the second half of 2015 - and other organizations won't get a shot at using ground-based systems until 2018.