The people in charge of keeping us all safe in the air when we fly are now worried about what a million American's will be giving their children – or the overgrown boys you call husbands – for Christmas this year: surface-to-air missiles capable of taking down airliners.
Well, that’s a bit of an overstatement. But not by much.
Rich Swayze, the Federal Aviation Administration’s honcho in charge of policy, international affairs and environmental matters, warned this week that a million Americans will find unmanned aerial vehicles – drones – under their trees on Dec. 25. And the FAA sees that as a big problem.
Apparently they think it’s only a matter of time until one of those fun little toys – weighing only a few pounds and costing between $19.99 and $274.95 on Walmart.com – takes down a $100 million passenger jet carrying 200 people. Perhaps a more likely scenario would be a more advanced and, at prices as high as $5,000-plus, more capable drone built and marketed for commercial users inadvertently causing a problem for certain types of aircraft – though probably not jetliners packed with passengers. But earlier this week, Swayze speaking at an airline industry gathering in Washington, D.C., specifically addressed his concerns about what are meant to be – and in fact are – toys.
The FAA, he said, is launching an education effort aimed at the manufacturers of drones and at retailers like Walmart and others who see them as this year’s hot Christmas gift items. The agency, for example, will be sending a representative to an upcoming sales staff meeting at Walmart to emphasize the importance of sales people providing sufficient warnings and operational advice to consumers buying drones.
That’s probably a good idea. No doubt we’ll soon be seeing an increase in news reports about yokels flying their GoPro camera-toting Christmas drones into lots of places they should not be: my yard, your business, her bedroom window, the competitor’s office building and, yes, maybe even the grounds of a nearby airport. So drone buyers need to have the same concerns as, say, those who buy bicycles or skate boards for their children. Are the kids mature and coordinated enough to operate them in a way that won’t cause significant damage to themselves, to others or to property? Do they need to be instructed on where their new toys can and cannot be properly used? Are there basic rules of the road and best practices that need to followed? And are you prepared to take the toy away if you discover that Little Johnny has been using it to peep into the neighbors’ windows?
But the FAA, despite its good intentions, appears to be trying out for the role of Chicken Little. The sky will not fall – nor will airliners – as a result of all the toy remote control aircraft that will be unwrapped around American Christmas trees this year. The kind of drones being sold by retailers like Walmart, and even the more upscale models found on Amazon and other websites lack the size, range and technical capabilities to be a serious danger to aircraft – of any size – capable of carrying people.
True, a 2.5-pound drone flying at a height of 300 feet could do damage to a very low flying Cessna 150, or perhaps a helicopter, flying at 60 to 125 miles per hour. But hundreds of veteran pilots have commented online this week that toy drones are no match for even small private airplanes and helicopters. The two worst-case scenarios thrown out so far – a drone smashing into the Plexiglas windscreen of a helicopter and one slamming into the propeller of a small single-engine plane – would be quite disturbing for those aboard the airplanes. Butsuch incidents would be both extremely unlikely and very survivable.
And should such a drone ever get near a commercial aircraft it would have to be below 300 feet, which means the drone would have to flying through the approach or departure path of a plane at a commercial airport. In that case the solution is not regulating the drone, which already has an extremely limited flight range and altitude, but doing a better job of keeping the operator off airport property. To have a drone be in such a position the operator would have to be within a couple hundred yards of an active runway.
To be sure, more sophisticated and capable drones designed for the commercial and governmental markets could, in theory, cause significant problems for aircraft, even jetliners. Such drones already are being marketed to farmers as a way to check on their crops, their livestock and their herds; to utilities as a way of checking on transmission lines and communications towers; to police departments as tactical aids for chasing down fleeing crooks or monitoring suspects’ movements, and so on. Such users need to understand very well just what their machines are capable of doing and how to keep them from interfering with manned aviation. Should licensing be a requirement? Perhaps, depending on the level of each machine’s capabilities. And given the possibility that such a drone could be used by some bad actor – a criminal, a psycho or a terrorist – to intentionally attack a passenger-carrying aircraft at relatively low levels of flights (when they’re most vulnerable), the idea of registering and tracking the ownership of commercial and governmental class drones should be considered.
But that’s not what Swayze said he and the FAA are worried about. They’re fretting about toys that, while not entirely harmless, do not pose a threat serious enough to warrant spending much of the agency’s expensive time, or our tax dollars on. That the FAA apparently is doing so is a bit of a problem, probably a bigger one than the toy drones themselves.
Swayze is near the top of a bureaucratic and technocratic empire funded mostly by taxes paid by airline passengers and operators of private planes. And while they do a world-class job when it comes to keeping planes from slamming into the ground, or into one another, the folks at the FAA aren’t exactly known for operating efficiently or adapting to rapidly changing technology with aplomb.
The FAA is more than half way through 22-year, $40 billion program to create a new and better air traffic management system called NextGen. Yet there’s very little to show for it. NextGen is way over budget and way behind schedule. It’s original 2025 target date already has been pushed to 2032 and they don’t even mention total budget numbers anymore. It’s one of the great government boondoggles of this era, though most people are barely even aware of the program’s existence.
The industry, though is very aware of it, and disgruntled. Officially, airlines tread carefully when discussing the NextGen program lest they suffer some form of retribution from the FAA. But be assured, the airline and aviation industries are overloaded with many private – and a few very vocal – critics of the NextGen program who believe it either will never come close to achieving its goals or, that it eventually will be rolled quietly into some future, bigger, greater, grander technology upgrade program.
Indeed, that’s why so many in the aviation industry, and a growing number in Congress, are hopeful that the Air Traffic Operation of the FAA will be spun off from the federal agency and made a private enterprise. Doing that would relieve the ATO, as it’s known, from the FAA’s bureaucratic handcuffs and, more importantly, the uncertainty and counterproductive restraints of being captive to the federal budget and funding rules. Their real hope is that by doing so the NextGen program will either be put back on some sort of sensible path, or scrapped in favor of a better approach.
None of this it to say that the FAA shouldn’t be concerned about drone manufacturing and operation, even that of toy drones. Some low-level, common sense operating practices ought to be fostered by the agency in partnership with manufacturers and retailers. And actual rules may, in fact, be necessary regarding the operation of more capable drones meant for commercial and government use, or even for very serious hobbyist use.
But one would hope that a $16 billion-a-year federal agency known as much for its staggering inefficiency and bureaucracy as for its excellent guardianship over U.S. air safety would have bigger things to worry about than this year’s hot Christmas gift item.
