Key Drone Rules Loom, as FAA Shifts Focus to Beyond-Line-of-Sight Flights
Key FAA drone rules on remote ID and operations over people are still on schedule to be published in December as the agency refocuses on beyond-line-of-sight rules, said Jay Merkle, executive director of the FAA Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Office, at a virtual Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference Wednesday. “They are currently in interagency review … the last step before we go to a final rule,” he said. Other speakers said public perception of drones is critical to adoption and how regulators view them and was helped by increased use during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
Challenges remain for the FAA, Merkle said. The agency now needs to be "very much focused on beyond visual line of sight,” he said. The rules have to be “truly scalable” and “truly repeatable,” he said. FAA needs to ensure “we can safely accommodate the economic models that make it viable,” he said. Expect announcements soon, he said.
“Even with the best regulation in the world,” the rules won’t work without “the cultural change within the FAA … to be innovative and to take the purposeful safe risks” with drones, Merkle said. “You’re not flying a Boeing aircraft with several hundred people on board,” he said: “You’re flying 400 feet, maybe,” and an aircraft that might weigh less than 25 pounds, he said. That’s “very different in terms of how you manage the safety there,” he said. “I’m asked to be an innovator in a very large and cautious bureaucracy.”
The FAA adapted its work to the pandemic, Merkle said. “I could have stuck with kind of the existing work streams I was on, and I would have missed all those opportunities that presented themselves,” he said. Companies ready to operate to deliver packages or medical supplies “could quickly adapt, and we could adapt with them,” he said. Proposals from companies “trying to figure it out in the middle of a pandemic” proved “really, really hard,” he said.
“Public perception is a huge issue when it comes to unmanned technology in general” and especially drones, said Grant Guillot, drone lawyer at Adams and Reese. A lot of people focus on regulation, he said. “What we are finding and seeing, and what we are hearing from government decision-makers time and time again, is that the regulatory environment and the status of public perception of drones go hand in hand,” he said: “The more favorable the public perception of drones, the more likely it is” for regulators to respond favorably.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a “huge opportunity” for drones, said Wiley Rein’s Sara Baxenberg: “Things need to be contactless. A lot of people are stuck inside. Companies are looking for cost savings.” Baxenberg said she hopes the pandemic will mean more public support. Even now, “we’re seeing use cases come up that may not help so much with building that public trust,” she said. Drones used to tell people to socially distance or to identify if someone is wearing a mask “present concerns” and don’t “necessarily help in building that trust,” she said. Debates about drone policy continue, she said.
Companies and decision-makers are learning more about drones and “what they can really do” due to the pandemic, said Michael Blades, Frost & Sullivan vice president-Americas, aerospace, defense and security. There’s a lot more interest now in the use of drones for inspections, security and surveillance, he said. “Public perception is turning positive,” he said. For companies, adoption is increasing “based on what’s happened with the COVID response,” he said.
People are becoming more aware of the good things drones can do, said Luke Fox, CEO of WhiteFox, an airspace security firm. COVID-19 “has expanded the public embrace for drones,” but at the same time, “we have seen a huge uptick in the amount of reckless drone [use], the clueless and the careless pilots that are flying around infrastructure,” he said. That’s likely because more people are stuck at home and flying drones “in what appear to be risky ways,” he said.
The FAA has kept promises to speed approval of different uses of drones since the pandemic started, Guillot said. More companies are asking about how they can use drones, he said: “It definitely has been great to see corporate America embrace drones to a greater degree, directly as a result of COVID-19.”