The Federal Aviation Administration indicated Wednesday that it is investigating whether a video of an upstate New York congressman’s wedding last month violated the agency’s ban on drone flights for commercial purposes.
The agency’s carefully worded statement doesn’t mention Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat, by name, but said it was looking into “a report of an unmanned aircraft operation in Cold Spring, New York, on June 21 to determine if there was any violation of federal regulations or airspace restrictions.”
Although we hope that the photographer doesn’t get hit, on balance we find this situation to be rather amusing. The FAA is being forced by its own misguided rhetoric to investigate an event that was paid for by a member of Congress whose responsibilities include FAA oversight.
Pretty much everyone on the planet has by now seen the YouTube video of a fireworks display that was shot from a drone. A report is now circulating that the FAA is investigating the legality of that flight:
According to Forbes, the FAA is now actively looking into whether drones that fly into fireworks displays is a “violation of federal regulations or airspace restrictions.”
Responding to an auditor’s report critical of its progress toward integrating unmanned aircraft into national airspace, the FAA says it expects to complete a plan by the end of August for a phased implementation approach over five years.
That is good news. However, the article contains this nugget of denial from the FAA regarding the timing of its plan as required by Section 332 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012. In response to the Inspector General’s conclusion that the FAA will miss its September 30, 2015 deadline to safely and fully integrate UAS into the national airspace, the FAA responds: “The Act requires safe – not full – integration of UAS into the NAS by September 2015.”
We suppose this depends on what the meaning of “integration” is. Section 332(a)(1) of the Act required the FAA to have a plan in place for the integration of UAS within 270 days of the Act’s date of enactment. The required contents of that plan included provisions for:
(C) a phased-in approach to the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system;
(D) a timeline for the phased-in approach described under subparagraph (C)….
The plan scheduled for release at the end of August would apparently comply with those requirements in substance, but it’s coming about a year too late.
In the meantime, Section 332(a)(3) of the Act clearly states:
The plan required under paragraph (1) shall provide for the safe integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system as soon as practicable, but not later than September 30, 2015.
The FAA now claims that this language requires some level of safe integration, but not complete integration, by that deadline. This might be a defensible position, given Congress’ omission of the word “all” from the sentence. But given the FAA’s history of foot-dragging, it strikes us as more of a post hoc rationale than a good-faith interpretation of Congressional intent.
Aviation safety expert John Goglia takes the FAA to task for its, um, creative approach to enforcing non-existent laws and regulations. Discussing the many questionable cease and desist letters that have been issued to operators around the country, he notes:
The impact on many operators–especially those holding airmen certificates–has been to cause them to cease operations and lose whatever business they may have been engaged in. The problem is those FAA letters weren’t issued legally and were, in fact, issued contrary to the federal aviation regulations, which authorize only FAA attorneys to issue orders and require any such orders to state specifically how the order can be appealed….
This issue is not going to just go away. The FAA needs to be repeatedly challenged in court, wherever possible.
The Associated Press ran an article yesterday on the IG’s report, which we suppose means that the FAA’s epic fail on developing a regulatory framework for integrating UAS (drones) into the national airspace is poised to become a big story in the mainstream press:
Despite years of research, the Federal Aviation Administration hasn’t figured out what kind of technology unmanned aircraft should use to avoid crashing into other planes, or how to prevent lost links with ground control stations, Matthew Hampton, the Transportation Department’s assistant inspector general for aviation, said in a report.
The FAA also hasn’t set standards for certifying the safety of drone designs and manufacture like those that exist for manned aircraft, the report said. Nor has the agency developed standard procedures for air traffic controllers to guide drones, partly because the FAA’s air traffic control equipment wasn’t developed with unmanned aircraft in mind. There is no adequate program for training controllers how to manage drones. And criteria for training “pilots” who remotely control drones from the ground have yet to be developed.
The story includes this laughable excuse:
FAA officials, defending the agency’s record, said in a statement that the FAA “has made significant progress” toward giving drones wider access to U.S. skies “even as it dealt with disruptions” due to automatic, government-wide spending cuts and a three-week partial government shutdown.
That story might hold water if the partial government shutdown had lasted substantially longer than three weeks. Of course, no agency was given more leeway by Congress during the shutdown, and the notion that the sequester had any material impact on the FAA’s ability to develop UAS regulations over a period of years seems like plain nonsense.
Regardless of budget constraints, the FAA has wasted significant resources prosecuting small operators like Raphael Pirker while harassing countless others. It has also found the time and resources to go around lying to the public that it has effectively banned “all” commercial drone activity. These lawless actions amount to nothing more than an effort at distracting the public and the media from the FAA’s failure to do what Congress has mandated.
As we noted yesterday, President Obama needs to start firing people.
