The EFF recently received new information about unmanned aircraft flights in the United States, including extensive details about the specific models some entities are flying, where they fly, how frequently they fly, and how long they stay in the air.The 125 certificates and accompanying documents the FAA released total thousands of pages and were released in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, which has already uncovered the list of all entities licensed to fly domestic UAS .
The 18 entities represented in the files include police departments from Seattle, Washington to North Little Rock, Arkansas; about 10 public colleges and universities; a few federal agencies, including the USDA and the Department of Energy—Idaho National Lab; and other entities like the City of Herrington, Kansas and the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources. For every entity, the files include the actual Certificate of Authorization (COA) application information submitted to the FAA (for each entity, that file is called “COA.xls”), and many other supporting records. The files go back several years and include COAs for every year that the entity has had unmanned aircraft. For some entities this is as early as 2004.
The records below include full details in zipped folders separated by entity:
- City of Herrington, Kansas (.zip)
- Cornell University (.zip)
- Department of Energy Idaho National Laboratory (.zip)
- Eastern Gateway Community College – Steubenville, OH (.zip)
- Miami-Dade Police Department (.zip)
- Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (.zip)
- North Little Rock Police Department, Arkansas (.zip)
- Ogden Police Department, Utah (.zip)
- Ohio University (.zip)
- Seattle Police Department (.zip)
- Texas A&M – Texas Engineering Experiment Station (.zip)
- Texas Department of Public Safety (.zip)
- Texas State University (.zip)
- University of Connecticut (.zip)
- University of Florida (.zip)
- USDA Agricultural Research Service (.zip)
- Utah State University (.zip)
- Virginia Tech (.zip)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation