FAA Begins Rulemaking on Small Drones Flying Over People
The Federal Aviation Administration began work on a rulemaking after receiving a committee report recommending creating four small drone categories defined primarily by risk of injury to people who are in the vehicle's flight path and not associated with the operation, said a committee participant. In a Tuesday news release, the FAA said the committee -- comprised of drone makers and users, consensus standards organizations, researchers and academics -- began meeting March 8 and delivered the report last Friday.
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Doug Johnson, CTA vice president-technology policy, who participated in the Micro Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC), said for each of those groupings, the committee recommended assigning a potential risk. The risk of the smallest drones -- less than 250 grams, or 0.55 pounds -- is based on weight, but risk in the other three groupings is based on "impact energy." The report was created with safety in mind "first and foremost." Safety is "the touchstone in which these recommendation are made and followed by FAA's public rulemaking," said Johnson.
Category 2 includes drones weighing more than 250 grams but presenting a 1 percent or less chance of "serious" injury to a person in case of impact, while a Category 3 drone presents a 30 percent or lower chance of an injury to a person, said a Wiley Rein alert Tuesday. A Category 4 includes aircraft having the same risk of serious injury as a Category 3 drone, "but involves sustained flight over people beyond what is permitted in Category 3, specifically flight over crowds and/or dense gatherings of persons," it said.
“In the report, we talk about our recommendations for performance-based standards that address those increased risks and likewise there's a kind of graduated scale of operational restrictions ... and standards to minimize those risks in those higher categories" beyond the first category, said Johnson. The approach is in sync with the FAA's own approach to safety in aviation, he added.
Johnson said the FAA aims to issue the rulemaking notice before the end of the year. "But before they issue that notice, they are very interested in having these industry consensus standards established so they can also reference" them in the NPRM. "In other words, you'll see in our report with recommendations that we talk about consensus standards being applied and those standards have to be developed. Some are out there, but others could be modified but some might have to be developed.”
“It is interesting it is being called a Micro-UAS ARC as the focus of this is not on micro-UAS at all but is actually essential to the entire industry and to safely operating UAS over populated areas which is critical to realizing the full potential of commercial applications and U.S. competitiveness," emailed Small UAV Coalition spokesman Michael Drobac, who is also an Akin Gump lawyer. While the report is an "important step forward," he said the FAA needs to continue work on other standards to authorize operations beyond visual line of sight and highly automated operations and also establish a low altitude unmanned aircraft traffic management system. "Time is of the essence," he added.