FAA, AMA, Airline Industry Represented On The Panel

The House Transportation subcommittee on Aviation held a hearing Wednesday focused on "Ensuring Aviation Safety in the Era of Unmanned Aircraft Systems". The FAA, AMA, Airline industry, and Forest Service firefighters were all represented on the panel.

"While still a new industry, UAS are already contributing to our economy and changing how companies do business," subcommittee chair Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ) said during his opening statement. "Across the country, we already see UAS used for a myriad of operations, from surveying, photography and safety inspections, to medical delivery and search and rescue.  With each new use, businesses and commercial users can save time, money, and even lives.
 
"But like any other new technology, UAS bring new challenges as well.  In the past year, pilots have been reporting sightings of UAS near airports at an accelerating rate.  In 2014, the FAA received 238 reports of drone sightings.  In 2015, the number has already exceeded 600. 
 
"Safety is paramount in aviation and the increased number of suspected sightings raises serious questions.  Some of these reports involved airliners and occurred at low altitudes near the nation’s busiest airports.  Other reports involve pilots of general aviation aircraft in less busy airspace.  The real possibility of a mid-air collision must be taken seriously in order to prevent tragic consequences."

Those tragic consequences were predicted by ALPA president Capt. Tim Canoll, who said in his opening remarks that non-commercial and recreational users seem to be the source of a majority of the close encounters being reported by pilots. "The FAA must have the ability to ensure the safety of the NAS regardless of the types of unmanned operations being conducted." he said. Later, responding to Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR), Canoll said that a collision between an UAV and an airliner is inevitable. "When it hits a transport category aircraft ... WHEN it hits one ... there's going to be a significant event," he said. "Whether it hits the windscreen, some piece of the flight control system, or is ingested into the engine, this is going to be a significant event."

In his opening remarks, Richard Hanson Director of Government And Regulatory Affairs, the Academy of Model Aeronautics, said he disagreed with the FAA's close encounter report data. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-AZ) asked Hanson to justify his disagreement. "We use the FAA's list of pilot reported and individually reported sightings of unmanned aircraft. And I think it is important to note that the didn't classify all of those as what is being termed as "near misses" or "near mid-air collisions," Hanson said. "They were termed, a very subjective term, as "close calls". To my knowledge, the FAA does not currently have a definitive definition of a near miss of a manned aircraft with an unmanned aircraft.

"So what we did in our analysis is go directly to the sighting itself, and when we looked at those ones that where the person reporting the sighting, in their determination, called it either a near miss or indicated they had to take some kind of evasive action, quite honestly there's a large number of sightings in there that couldn't even be termed a near encounter of any kind, because it wasn't even identified clearly as being an aircraft."

Capt. Canoll responded to a question from Rep. Randolph Farenthold (R-TX) about UAV registration that all such aircraft should be registered with the FAA, even a widely-available $50 model. "Is there some kind of a size limit, a cutoff point. where you ought to be able to have a toy drone without having to turn your identity over to the federal government?" Ferenhold asked.

Canoll said that it depends on the altitude, range and speed characteristics of the vehicle. Even if a UAV's range is limited to 165 feet from its controller, he said the danger lies "following loss-link at full throttle, could it continue to climb to two or three thousand feet."

The hearing was focused on what regulations might be necessary, and former subcommittee chairman John Mica (R-FL) pressed FAA Deputy Administrator Michael Whitaker on when the agency might have the rules mandated in congress to be in place. Whitaker could be no more specific than sometime "next year." Congress had mandated that small UAV rules be in place by September 30, 2015.

(Images from hearing video)

FMI: http://transporation.house.gov