Don’t Fear the Drone!
By: Faa Safety Briefing
Tags: Faasteam, Safety, General Aviation, Drones, Public Safety

Share the Road

Notwithstanding these dire predictions, Uber now drives (ahem) a wide range of valuable services to the public. It provides options and greater access to transportation, reduces the number of household vehicles on the road, adds mobility for persons with disabilities, and supports the traditional taxi network with beneficial services such as food delivery, pet transport, and sober rides that help keep drunk drivers off the road. Uber and similar ride-sharing companies serve as a supplement to existing transportation services, creating new, free-market gig economy driver jobs and countless small business opportunities that are profitable and sustainable, adding growth to the U.S. economy. Ride-sharing companies are here for good, and for our good, delivering value to everyday lives. As lawmakers work towards consistency in regulations for taxi and ride-sharing services, the objective is to safely integrate both operations to share the road safely.

Rise of the Drones

When it comes to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), commonly referred to as drones, we’re in a familiar place with familiar rhetoric. Drones bring significant commercial value to our lives by revolutionizing activities like package delivery, pipeline inspection, and emergency response. By 2024, we could have as many as 800,000 registered commercial drones. That’s twice the number of commercial drones we had last year. But if we’re going to realize the vision of expanded drone operations, just like traditional aviation, this industry must show that it can be safely integrated into the National Airspace System (NAS).

Traditional pilots of manned aircraft have expressed concerns about the potential safety risks posed by these new entrants to the skies. Not unlike the case for the taxi drivers, drones are perceived as more of a nuisance than an aircraft. There are reports of drones flying where they shouldn’t be, around aircraft, on runways, and potentially interfering with safe airport operations.

To address these concerns, the FAA created the part 107 small UAS rule to increase safety and minimize operating risks. New regulations were created for recreational drone users, including the requirement to pass The Recreational UAS Safety Test (TRUST), to demonstrate their understanding of aeronautical safety knowledge and rules before takeoff. The agency also published the Remote ID rule, requiring drones to provide identification, altitude, and location information (a digital license plate) to support the finalization of other rules for expanded drone operations such as package delivery, operations over people, and night operations. But to do this safely, the FAA is working with industry to research detect and avoid capability either onboard the UAS, with ground-based systems, or from a third-party provider, to enable the safe integration of more complex drone operations with traditional, manned flights.

Air Support Tools

As we safely integrate, not segregate, these new entrants into the NAS, we can seize the benefits that drones provide as useful air support tools to not only perform jobs more safely and efficiently, but to increase situational awareness in dangerous conditions where we wouldn’t want to send a manned aircraft. We currently use drones to help and even save lives in a variety of situations such as public safety, law enforcement, search and rescue, damage assessments after weather events, crop monitoring, and disaster response.

Drones are making the public and first responders safer. They’re plunging into active hurricanes to measure wind speed and capturing the after-effects of forest fires and tornadoes. In 2018, State Farm Insurance operated over people and beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) to conduct damage assessments following hurricanes Florence and Michael. As part of the FAA’s UAS Integration Pilot Program (IPP), a three-year effort to advance more complex drone operations, the Chula Vista Police Department started using drones to enhance the safety of its officers and the community by providing a pre-arrival assessment of the situation when they respond to 911 calls. For the first 1,000 missions, average on-scene response time was reduced from about six minutes to 2.2 minutes for priority calls. The drones also provided information for dispatchers to determine the number of units to deploy, pinpoint the location of a suspect’s discarded firearms, and follow vehicles under pursuit throughout the city.