Small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) can be a valuable tool for local law enforcers, increase job safety and enhance commerce but the aircraft also pose a number of safety and security threats, several experts warned a House panel on Wednesday.
“The fact that these devices are so readily available to the public is concerning,” Paul Beary, police chief at the Univ. of Central Florida and president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency. “The average citizen that is purchasing these devices generally has no aviation experience, and therefore does not think twice about operating them in controlled airspaces, over the public or on a crowded beach. Nor do they think twice about launching a UAS to ascertain what the police or fire department is working on up the street. This is the real danger to the public, public safety and others regarding these aircraft. The average citizen simply does not know what they are doing wrong and the potential damaging effects these devices can have if not operated properly.”
In addition to recreational drone operators that may accidentally pose safety issues, there will be those that intentionally violate rules for various reasons, said Frederick Roggero, a former Air Force general and the president and CEO of the safety and risk management consulting firm Resilient Solutions, Ltd.
“Perhaps they feel the need to test out the new technology to see how high, fast or far it can go, or to obtain video from perspectives not allowed, usually for good reason,” Roggero said. “It is operators from this class that will most likely cause the first collision between an aircraft and a drone in the United States.”
Regarding security threats, Roggero said that for less than $1,000 an operator could purchase a commercially available UAS to do “traditional ‘air force’ missions, at limited, but still effective levels of success.” These missions include in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and attack, he said, adding that “these actions could be directed at national critical infrastructure points, factories, VIPs, military bases, prisons, large public gatherings, the borders, or simply a neighborhood.”
Dealing with the mal-adventurous operators requires regulation and enforcement but the potential security threats require more investment and use of technology is in order, Roggero said. To help cope with security threats, he suggested building on work that NATO and others in Europe have already done in counter-UAS defenses, mentioning a system developed by Britain’s Royal Air Force and Selex ES that was used do defend London’s Olympic stadium in 2012 and then enhanced to protect world leaders during the 2013 G8 Summit in Scotland and the 2014 NATO Summit in Wales.
Todd Humphreys, an assistant professor of engineering at the Univ. of Texas at Austin, said that the consumer UAS can be “rigged to carry out potent attacks against which our defense will either be only weakly effective or so militarized that the defenses themselves will pose a threat to bystanders and the surrounding civil infrastructure.” He said a “fixed-wing power glider with an explosive few-pound payload” could be used in a “kamikaze-style attack.”
Still, Gregory McNeal, a law professor at Pepperdine Univ., warned Congress against allowing the federal government to rush to “worst case scenario-based planning. Such an approach to risk management can justify enormous expenditures, no matter how unlikely the prospects are that the dire event will take place.”
McNeal said that even though the small UAS are commercially available, the threats materials such as “lightweight explosives and weapons of mass destruction are not.” Moreover, he said, even if terrorists had these materials a small UAS “would be one of the least effective means of carrying out an attack.”
To reduce the potential for accidental and other safety hazards associated with small UAS systems, Humphreys said simple measures such as geo-fencing capabilities in their auto-pilot systems voluntarily imposed by the aircraft manufacturers would help avoid intrusions into restricted airspace as would the use of electro-optic sensors for detecting and tracking UAS near critical sites.
“The output of such a detection and tracking system could be fed to an always ready squadron of interceptor UAVs whose job would be to catch the intruder in a net and expel it, or as a last resort, to collide with it and force it down,” Humphreys said. He said drastic countermeasures should wait until “the threat of UAVs proves to be more of a menace than recent incidents, which, while alarming, were ultimately harmless”
Humphreys testified before the subcommittee in 2012, telling the panel then of his research team that successfully spoofed the GPS signals of a UAS used by law enforcement to take control of the aircraft. On Wednesday he said that commercially-available UAS systems still can’t resist a spoofing attack.
In February the Federal Aviation Administration issued proposed rules for small UAS operations in the United States, limiting aircraft to 55 pounds or less, flight operations to line-of-sight of the operator and below 400-feet of altitude.
Subcommittee Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said in his opening remarks that the he Department of Homeland Security, which declined to send anyone to testify at the hearing, needs to develop a “cohesive strategy” to address counter-measures for rouge UAS.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the full committee, said in his prepared remarks that the DHS Science and Technology Directorate and the Secret Service are doing testing to identify ways to address potential UAS threats.
“It is less clear whether there is a department-wide strategy being developed to address the issue,” Thompson said.