The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is accelerating its review of industry requests to fly small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in the nation’s airspace, an FAA official said April 28.
The number of applications approved under Section 333 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 was initially just a handful but has mushroomed to almost 250 since September, said Robert Pappas, special rules coordinator for the FAA’s UAS Integration Office.
“A little more than a month ago, we reviewed the lessons learned to streamline the exemption process,” Pappas said at a UAS event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “As a result, the FAA is issuing dozens of additional exemptions on a weekly basis.”
For instance, the FAA announced April 9 that it had used a new “summary grant” process to approve 30 UAS applications the previous week. The agency said it “can issue a summary grant when it finds it has already granted a previous exemption similar to the new request.”
The FAA has approved small UAS for a wide range of commercial uses, including aerial mapping, filmmaking, infrastructure inspections and real estate marketing, Pappas noted.
For a longer-term solution, the FAA has proposed regulations that would allow small UAS, or those under 55 pounds, to fly in the national airspace for commercial purposes under certain conditions, such as flights limited to daylight and visual-line-of-sight operations. The proposal generated more than 4,400 public comments by the April 24 deadline, and the agency is now reviewing them. The FAA hopes to finalize the rule in 2016, an agency spokesman said.
Brian Wynne, president and CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), said the proposed rule is a good first step but should go further by allowing beyond-line-of-sight operations in certain situations, such as on large farms, where the risk to people would be low and the learning opportunity for industry would be significant.
UAS firms are developing a variety of safety measures for beyond-light-of-sight operations, and “we think the sooner we can fly and get more people in the air, the more data we can collect and the more we can prove that safety,” Wynne said at CSIS.