Just prior to Phil Boyer leaving AOPA, I expressed concern that it didn't seem the organization was doing much to figure out how to bring pressure on the FAA to integrate UAVs safely into the National Airspace System.
Phil added me to a private mailing list (I was shocked) where he was gathering and working hard on collecting all the press releases and stories of various Public Safety agencies purchasing UAVs for use in the U.S., and building they case for deeper talks with FAA after a few high-profile crashes along the U.S./Mexico border where the deeper story was that the UAVs in uncontrolled Airspace, were completely uncontrolled for extended periods of time.
Boyer left, the e-mails and discussion stopped. Fuller either wasn't made aware of Phil's personal mailing list, his work, or... Well, whatever. It stopped.
Since then we've had easily ten-fold the number of announcements regarding purchases of UAVs by Public Safety agencies and even private individuals building some pretty fancy high-flying ones, the story of the military UAV out of control and headed for places it shouldn't have gone in the Washington D.C. Area...
And almost zero public discussion of this by AOPA or any other alphabet-soup group.
It's going to take a dead pilot and their passengers to get this story out, isn't it? And they'll blame the pilot for not following "see-and-avoid" procedures. No mention of the fact that most UAV pilots couldn't reciprocate if they wanted to. (I'm sure if you include all tools the military UAV drivers have, they're equipped better in this regard.)
I guess once the TV news stations start buying UAVs as camera platforms and start crashing them into one-another over newsworthy events and raining down parts on a crowd... Someone will really start to analyze the risks of having UAVs overhead?
I'm very disappointed in the alphabet groups in this regard, and not being one to complain without a solution... I'm stumped on this one. Many UAV capabilities are classified today, so it's difficult, without a government agency like FAA stepping up to just getting some basic standards for capabilities published, and the rest of us simply having the role of "concerned Citizen" through our various political bodies, to really accomplish anything one could call "useful" here.
It sure looked like Boyer was going to at least try. I miss that guy. Fuller's got connections, and gets some things done too, I'm sure. But if given the choice between "Washington insider" and "Former Press/TV" guys, I sure do prefer the out-in-the-open methods of the latter.
Not meant as a rip on Fuller or AOPA, just relating my personal experience with one of many important topics our representative organizations deal with every year. I feel like serious discussion of how to safely share airspace with UAVs has gone away with Phil's departure from AOPA.
I temper my enthusiasm about all the wonderfully neat high-tech aviation these devices and their creators represent when I know deep-down that we're not integrating them safely into the U.S. Airspace system, nor requiring high standards by law for their operators.
As Steve Tupper says, "The Pilot and the Operator Can Be Friends"... But we really need to hear more about proper integration and how it's done. When I read that Miami-Dade County bought three UAVs from Honeywell this week... I wonder things like, "Who flies them? Are they transponder-equipped? Lighted? What's their fail-safe mode? Are they going to have to close down airspace to protect them from us and vice-versa, and is the benefit to the public high enough to justify that?". Etc.
Let's not even get into my worries that vendors will rape the taxpayers for the long-term support costs and that over time, they may prove as costly as manned aircraft for non-life-threatening missions over non-wartime cities, the digital security implementations of the remote data links necessary to operate them (we all saw where the military wasn't encrypting video downlinks on certain models... Or they wanted someone to think they weren't...), and privacy issues galore...
Let alone if they're weaponized.
What is needed to get the national-level discourse started? This whole Rah-Rah cheerleading for a new technology paradigm which we haven't properly taken the time to integrate to the existing well-known system, seems reckless or at least foolhardy to me. I'd help, but it seems beyond my credentials and reach other than to say, "Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?"
Was there a single word mentioned at this presentation on how they plan to avoid other uncontrolled aircraft, for example? Do we need to be attending these things with this question immediate and foremost on our lips, in front of their potential customers?
