UAS manufacturers and users need to be patient while the Federal Aviation Administration goes through the steps to get them safely and properly into the air, an aviation official told industry watchers on Tuesday at a meeting organised by the AIAA in Ventura County, California.
Keith Ballenger, an Assistant Division Manager of the Federal Aviation Administration, spoke before an audience of companies that play in one of the nation’s newest technologies — unmanned aircraft systems.
Ballenger’s division handles safety and certifications for the FAA, and that is key to getting unmanned aircraft systems certified and regulated by the federal agency.
Ballenger spoke on the first night of a three-day symposium on UAS and their potential for civilian. The event at the Hyatt Westlake Plaza hotel was organized by Assemblyman Jeff Gorell, R-Camarillo, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
The aviation veteran told the audience what the FAA is up against as it attempts to come up with rules, regulations and ways to evaluate the safety of unmanned aircraft.
“The big quandary within the FAA is: How do we begin to manage that technology?” Ballenger said.
Small unmanned systems, those that weigh less than 50 pounds, are where the FAA will see the bulk of its work, Ballenger said.
Currently, UAS fly because they are “accommodated”, but they are not integrated into the national airspace, he said.
The FAA is undergoing what Ballenger called a “huge paradigm shift” as it tries to integrate unmanned aircraft systems into the airspace over the nation used by most civilian aircraft.
“Ultimately, we will have to change the way we do business and the way we provide oversight,” Ballenger said.
Staff and operating reductions will affect the ability to roll out new types of projects, he said.
Ballenger gave some tips and warnings to those in the audience on how to navigate through the process of authorizing their unmanned aircraft.
Safety management systems must be looked at early in the manufacturing process so safety is assured throughout the life of the systems, he said.
There are 7,000 manned aircraft at any moment flying in the air over the nation, he said, and the FAA is tasked with figuring out how the unmanned aircraft systems are going to safely fly amid them.
“So integrating the UAS into this system is a very, very difficult problem for us to grasp,” Ballenger said.
Drone manufacturers also face the pending development of operations rules the FAA eventually will undertake, Ballenger said.
Those rules will be frustrating and very expensive to follow and will take time to follow, he said.
Another key to getting the process of getting drones into the air will be the six sites that the FAA chooses for testing them, Ballenger said.
There are 50 applications from 37 states, he said. Ventura County is one, and will compete with at least one other site in California.
The main objective of the test sites is to work out the problems that the FAA foresees with unmanned aircraft systems, he said.
Getting UAS approved for flight will entail two components, Ballenger said.
One is the flight standards review, which deals with construction, safety and the operational elements of the systems. Second is the air traffic review, which involves learning how to bring the unmanned systems safely into the air space with piloted aircraft.
Yet perhaps the greatest challenge, Ballenger said, is that each region tasked with approving unmanned aircraft systems has one inspector to help manufacturers with their requests.
“This is an area that’s got to be a huge growth area with the FAA,” he said, to handle those requests and the anticipated growth.
Photo: Keith Ballenger – by Chuck Kirman,Ventura County Star
Source: Ventura Star
The use of the word “DRONE” to describe unmanned aircraft systems implies a negative connotation. “Drone” is something you would shoot down and any organization, manufacturer, and most definately FAA would frown if their organization is being told they supposedly said “Another key to getting the process of getting drones into the air will be the six sites that the FAA chooses for testing them, Ballenger said.”
Please refrain from use the term “drone” to describe unmanned aircraft. In fact if you want to publish an article on that exact topic I am sure you will recieve plenty of feedback to write a lengthy article. All major organizations to include FAA and DOD would agree UAS is the only phrase that should be used to descibe the integration of unmanned aircraft into the National Airspace System.
Thank You
Jim, I totally agree.
I spend hours redacting articles that use the “D” word and replacing it by “UAS”.
The original article was riddled with “D”s, but in this case, since it was a quotation, I left it in…well spotted !
For whatever reason, the FAA has not dedicated the proper resources to make integration happen. UAVs are already integrated at Joint Use airfields in the US. There are multiple manufacturers who are more than willing to participate on Tiger Teams (free of charge) to provide the FAA all the answers they need. In fact, many have offered the FAA their services only to be told, “No thanks. We got this one.”
Fact: the FAA is short on UAS expertise, so in the name of safety, progress stagnates. We all want safe operations, but to make it happen they need the operational and technical inputs of companies such as Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, and Boeing, who collectively have over 100 years of UAS manufacturing and operations experience. But instead, we inch ahead…no, strike that…we millimeter ahead. In 2015, when the deadline has come and gone for integrating UAVs into the NAS, I hope we aren’t left with, “We didn’t have enough resources to make it happen”.