Researchers say FAA is overblowing risk posed by small drones

There&#x27;s no downside to the FAA for overblowing risks -- just like they&#x27;ve overblown the risk of cell phone use for years.<p>Even if there&#x27;s one chance in a million of a cell phone affecting avionics or a small drone damaging a plane, the FAA&#x27;s job is to minimize that risk. They aren&#x27;t responsible for cost or inconvenience to anyone outside of the aviation industry.<p>They wouldn&#x27;t mandate that Boeing install expensive and complicated parachutes in every plane due to the huge cost to the industry and dubious benefit, but there&#x27;s really no drawback to the FAA for imposing a drone ban.

This article seems too statistics-y and not practical:<p>* Drones have interfered with firefighting activities in California before<p>* There&#x27;s a difference between a jet sucking in a drone at cruise altitude (somebody got a cheaper model up 11000 feet last week, so not out of the question one of these days) and a jet at critical speeds (landing or taking off) sucking in a drone. Also, a drone into a windshield could cause panic in a pilot, a cause similar to the 2014 derailment (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;2015_Philadelphia_train_derailment#Investigation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;2015_Philadelphia_train_derail...</a>). A drone could probably do a number on a radome or pitot tube as well, which wouldn&#x27;t cause a terrible situation but an expensive fix.<p>* My friend who is a drone hobbiest has told me several stories of his drone &quot;falling out of the sky&quot; due to improper battery management. While newer drones address this with autoland, a sudden power failure still means a heavy piece of metal and plastic barreling out of the sky.<p>* People have a poor comprehension of 3d space from the ground. As drones get faster, operators could experience more tunnel vision trying to avoid an immediate collision and face a collision in their &quot;blind spot&quot;<p>I think FAA trying to make _some_ regulations for this is okay, just like I think the FCC regulating radio communications is okay (so you can&#x27;t hear some 15 year olds radio chatter when you watch TV-highly illegal but technically possible if you built your own transmitter before TV went digital). A drone into an engine is not very likely to happen, but that&#x27;s not the only bad thing a flying toy that can go up to 55mph can do.

This &quot;research&quot; has a glaring statistical error, principally that the researchers assumed that UAV locations are either uniformly distributed or follow the same distributions as birds. The problem, especially for small aircraft, is that the sites which attract concentrations of small aircraft - like Golden Gate Bridge, Hudson River, etc, are the same places which attract UAV operators.<p>Also, they seem to neglect the growth in populations of UAV. UAVs are exploding in popularity and capabilities. These numbers are going to get worse and the FAA is taking its usual caution-first approach.

I&#x27;m not sure they&#x27;ve demonstrated adequate support that a bird strike can be equated to a drone collision. Drones are plastic and metal, versus the very light and porous structure of avian bones and musculature.<p>Additionally, you can&#x27;t just do this sort of probability calculation when the human operator is an integral part of the equation. Birds don&#x27;t fly in an area limited by their operator. And birds aren&#x27;t (as far as we know) going to try to fly their drone over an airport (for one example) to get some unique footage that has market value.<p>This really seems like a vast oversimplification of the issue at hand. I&#x27;d much rather see them firing a drone out of a canon at high velocity into an aircraft cockpit (a la MythBusters chicken gun) to show what the actual damage of a comparable drone strike would be rather than just assuming &quot;drone == small bird&quot; based purely on a mass of 2kg.

The FAA is a famously risk-adverse organization. But there&#x27;s a huge cost to that conservatism; the FAA&#x27;s foot-dragging has stalled the unmanned aircraft industry in the United States. There&#x27;s a lot of commercial value in drones for things like agricultural surveys. FAA did finally take one baby step towards legitimizing commercial drone use but it&#x27;s not nearly enough.

The Miracle on the Hudson airliner took four 14 lb geese into the engines which was clearly too much. But it would have been able to land at an airport if the damage had been restricted to one engine.<p>FAA standards require airliners be able to safely withstand a 4 lb bird strike.<p>By comparison, a DJI Phantom drone weighs around 2 lbs and is unlike to be flying in dense enough flocks to damage both engines.

I don&#x27;t know what the new proposed regulations are, but, for recreational use, I think the current set are fair and appropriate:<p>Don&#x27;t fly outside your unaided line of sight.<p>Don&#x27;t intentionally fly over people.<p>Stay away from sensitive areas (Stadiums, etc...)<p>Don&#x27;t fly near an airport without contacting the airport.<p>Stay under 400ft<p>Register it and label it, so that if it does fall and hit someone on the head, they can find you and let our legal system handle the repercussions.<p>Given the lack of inspection, that most of these rolled off an assembly line in China, have Lipo batteries that are prone to instantly shutting off if malfunctioning or overloaded(to prevent runaway thermal effect) meaning that these likely might fall out of the sky at any time, the restriction on flying within line of sight and not over people seems reasonable, along with the sensitive area restriction.<p>I can&#x27;t think of a major recreational use for flying over 400ft AGL, besides wanting to snap a picture of your neighborhood from the air.<p>The most heavy handed one I can think of (and this one is enforced in DJI firmware) is the airport restriction. The official line is &#x27;Don&#x27;t fly within 5 miles of an airport without contacting the airport&#x27; -- There are enough airports that this covers a good bit of area, and, if a plane is below 500ft more than a mile or so from the airport, drones are probably not going to put it at any more risk.<p>A DJI drone will not leave the ground if it detects it&#x27;s within a couple miles of an airport&#x27;s radius, and there is no way to override it, even with the airport&#x27;s consent.<p>The commercial regulations, as I understand them, are a bit more ridiculous. I haven&#x27;t found the relevent text in the CFR, but I&#x27;m told that to fly a drone commercially(say, for a photographer to take pictures at a wedding) actually requires a full blown pilot&#x27;s license, at least a &#x27;sport pilots license&#x27;[1]. This seems a bit ridiculous for a photographer flying a drone 10ft above the ground. I hope some changes to this portion are coming.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uavcoach.com&#x2F;drone-certification&#x2F;#pilot" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uavcoach.com&#x2F;drone-certification&#x2F;#pilot</a>

I&#x27;m a big drone enthousiast. I&#x27;m all for some form of regulation in the form of registration or a license, provided that the cost won&#x27;t prohibit getting into the hobby too much.<p>However, I&#x27;m afraid it&#x27;s not going to work. The people that do crazy stupid things with their drones are the same people that buy their RTF drone at Walmart, thinking it&#x27;s just a toy. Or import it from China. You can&#x27;t regulate that. There have been adequate rules for decades, for instance that you can&#x27;t fly near airfields with your RC plane.<p>Until a couple of years ago, flying RC planes was both rather expensive to get into, but there was also a steep learning curve. Nowadays you can buy a drone for under 200 bucks and it will practically fly itself. Anyone with half a brain can fly it. I&#x27;m torn about this. I love the fact that the entry point for getting into the hobby is lowered so more people can enjoy flying. OTOH, the entry point is now so low that there is a large group of people who are hurting the hobby with their thoughtless behaviour.<p>A couple of months ago I saw an ad for the Lily drone, I&#x27;m sure you saw it too. In the ad they launch and land BY HAND. If you value your fingers I wouldn&#x27;t recommend this, it&#x27;s really dangerous.<p>It&#x27;s a bit like gun control in a fictional state where you can buy guns without a permit. You can regulate and registrate all you want, but that won&#x27;t stop loonies from doing stupid things.

I&#x27;m a bit torn about this. I almost always come down on the side of &#x27;less red tape&#x27; but I strongly suspect that putting in place a lightweight licensing framework for drone pilots is the best way to ensure the greatest amount of freedom for hobbyists going forward.<p>The other alternative is no regulation at all, and wait for the inevitable idiot to cause an incident and then the whole enterprise gets shut down as a knee-jerk reaction.

The FAA isn&#x27;t looking at the current level of risk - they&#x27;re looking at the trajectory of that risk. The number of drones is rising rapidly and they&#x27;re trying to get ahead of the problem before there&#x27;s a serious incident. Can you imagine the headlines if they ignored the problem and even a single seater light aircraft was brought down?<p>The results of a study by the &quot;Academy of Model Aeronautics&quot; is probably fairly predictable, likely to have some bias (in the same way that a study by the FAA is likely to have bias the other way).<p>The FAA is aware that drones are not the same as birds. I remember recently reading that the FAA has commissioned a study into the effect of drone strikes and how the damage might be mitigated, but I now can&#x27;t find the reference.

When will actual testing be conducted on this?<p>My understanding is that bird strike tests are conducted against jet engines. Am I missing something that prevents us from conducting a few tests with these everyday &quot;drones&quot;?<p>I have seen some experts speculating that apart from hitting the windscreen, a collision would not lead to complete catastrophe [1].<p>Regardless, I personally support these regulations, but would really like to see the outcome of a few empirical tests.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;automaton&#x2F;robotics&#x2F;drones&#x2F;what-might-happen-if-airliner-hit-small-drone" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;spectrum.ieee.org&#x2F;automaton&#x2F;robotics&#x2F;drones&#x2F;what-migh...</a>

I&#x27;m all for the advancement of drone technology, and I think that the FAA was perhaps a little too conservative with the way they handled the usage of cell phones on flights for quite sometime, but I can&#x27;t blame them for their stance on small drones as they don&#x27;t want to bear any responsibility for the loss of life due to some miniscule probability of a phone causing a problem in-flight. It&#x27;s worth looking at a the cause of the Flight 1549 incident:<p>&quot;the bird encounter occurred at 3:27:11, when the airplane was at an altitude of 2,818 feet (859 m) above ground level (agl) and a distance of about 4.5 miles (7.2 km) north-northwest of the approach end of Runway 22 at LGA.&quot; [0]<p>This could&#x27;ve easily been a drone which caused the incident. Now, it&#x27;s possible that the FAA can put limits on drones(e.g. 400ft AGL or whatever it is now), but there may be people who attempt to circumvent this. The fact that people will shine laser beams into flight decks from the ground doesn&#x27;t inspire confidence that people will respect their usage in high traffic areas.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;US_Airways_Flight_1549" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;US_Airways_Flight_1549</a>

The low probability of an incident is outweighed by the potential damage caused by an incident (large loss of life).

Better than they underestimate it

I for one am shocked, <i>shocked</i>, that a government agency would misinterpret the data to create arbitrary rules and law enforcement opportunities.