Gretchen West, Senior Advisor Hogan Lovells, Co-Executive Director, Commercial Drone Alliance and MC of the show, opened the 3rd Annual Drone World Expo with a review of the main events in the past year.
In this period, the FAA has given 1280 waivers including 7 BVLoS and 5 over people. A quick show of hands amongst the operators in the audience (80% of the room) showed that nearly all of them need approval to fly BVLoS and over people.*
She warned the room to expect FAA rulemaking to be a lengthy process, but that the Commercial Drone Alliance was working with them to true to accelerate the process. Martin Gomez of Facebook reminded the audience that whilst the FAA’s caution may be frustrating the growth of the industry, we all want FAA to err on side of safety. Most people in the room flew in on commercial aircraft and airlines that all work to stringent standards that have taken years to develop. We should some understanding for the process and accept the right amount of regulation.
Lisa Ellman, Partner at Hogan Lovells LLP and Co Executive Director of the Commercial Drone Alliance, joined Gretchen onstage to introduce the Commercial Drone Alliance Innovation Awards. In the category ‘End-user Innovator of the Year’ the award went to Mark Bathrick, Director, Office of Aviation Services (OAS) U.S. Department of the Interior Unfortunately Mark was unable to attend this year, so his award was collected by a colleague.
* in the panel session, Laura Ponto of Google X explained that they have been testing in Australia with hundreds of commercial operations achieved. This was partly achievable because ‘Flying over People’ in the US means ‘where people might be’, whereas in Australia, the approach is more pragmatic
At the conclusion of the panel session, the consensus as that more testing needed but panel expects to see incremental introduction of BVLoS UTM late 2018 early 2019.