A protester outside Boeing Co.’s 2013 annual shareholder meeting in May
Ashley Lapin/MEDILL
The Federal Aviation Administration came out with its first plan for allowing drones in domestic airspace – called the Integration of Civil Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the National Airspace System Roadmap — in early November to better inform the public on its integration plan.
There has been open criticism of the FAA for not being transparent enough with its plan for testing out UAS. The FAA has since attempted to share more information with the public through online public forums and now the Roadmap.
What do those in the UAS industry think of the plan?
Phil Finnegan, director of corporate analysis at Teal Group Corp., a company of aerospace and defense industry analysts, said that the Roadmap is a viable plan, but it showed “integrating UAVs into the national airspace is going to be a long, complicated process.”
The Roadmap has done a lot to address transparency concerns, Finnegan said, but others disagree.
Amie Stepanovich, director of the Domestic Surveillance Project at the public interest research group Electronic Privacy Information Center, still has concerns about how drones will affect Americans’privacy rights.
When asked whether she felt that the pros of allowing widespread use of UAS in domestic airspace outweigh the cons, Stephanovich replied, “Never.” While she said that technology can be used for surveillance in positive ways, she underlined that it is imperative that all negative ramifications be brought to light and thoroughly analyzed before UAS are integrated into U.S. airspace.
In the Roadmap, the FAA “did some really good things and there are things they could have done better” to protect privacy rights, she said. In February 2012, EPIC petitioned the FAA to ensure privacy policies and the FAA recently responded with draft privacy rules for test sites, which it will use to evaluate transparency and privacy matters for the nationwide rollout.
Mario Mairena, government relations manager of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization representing the UAS industry and devoted to advancing the unmanned systems and robotics communities, said that privacy is not necessarily the FAA’s responsibility.
“The FAA’s mandate is ‘safety and do no harm.’ Privacy – that debate belongs to the courts and the states,” Mairena said.
Another big question is whether the FAA can fully follow and complete the Roadmap on schedule as far as testing UAS and then moving on to a full UAS integration into the NAS.
Finnegan projected that full integration of small and large-system UAS will take at least a decade. Mairena said that AUVSI is optimistic that the FAA will be able to keep its schedule for successful integration of UAS into the NAS.
So what is next for UAS? Will Amazon be employing UAS domestically to deliver packages in the near future, as founder Jeff Bezos vowed?
“It’s not going to happen anytime soon,” said Finnegan. “For one thing, the FAA has ruled out autonomous systems – that would be an autonomous system. If they were to do this, Amazon’s a smart company, they would want to make sure it’s cost-effective. Compared to traditional means of delivery, is it going to be cost-effective? Highly unlikely. Is it an eventuality? Maybe many many years from now, but not in the near term or the medium term.”
