The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate currently only sees brief delays to its schedule this year to begin an air domain awareness demonstration on the northern border of the U.S. to assess technologies that can detect, track and identify different size aircraft, including manned and unmanned, a department official said this month.
S&T, which is teaming with the Federal Aviation Administration and Defense Department, hopes to begin “dry runs” in June of the detection technologies at the North Dakota National Guard’s Camp Grafton Training Center, a month later than planned due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Tim Bennett, S&T’s program manager for Air Domain Awareness, said on April 21 during a drone security webinar hosted by HSR sister publication Defense Daily.
Following the release of a Request for Information last fall for the demonstrations, S&T has selected 15 companies to bring their technologies to the test sites for evaluations in various conditions, he said.
The demonstrations will take place in four different environments, plains, mountains, maritime and urban.
Once the dry runs are complete, next will be actual evaluations of technologies beginning in either the July and August timeframe or possibly in August or September in the plains. These will be followed late this fall in the maritime and urban environments around Detroit. Then in late spring 2021, once the snows melt in the mountains, the demonstrations will move to Montana, Bennett said.
The purpose of the demonstrations is essentially to know how the technologies work in real-world environments, Bennett said. The Defense Department evaluates drone security and mitigation technologies on “clean” ranges but for use in various scenarios in the national airspace these technologies need to be evaluated in “real environments,” he said.
The demonstrations will be done in the day and at night at beyond visual line of sight to detect aircraft at different altitudes, different angles of approach, and varying launch locations, according to one of Bennett’s slides.
This way the government will know “what works in an acoustical or electronic noisy environment, what’s going to work in a very urban canyon or a real canyon such as Glacier National Park.” The evaluations will allow S&T and its partners to create a “dictionary” that can be shared across the government so “then when we need to find technologies, we know that we’ve test this in an environment…We know in a place with a lot of buildings and traffic, if I put this system in there it will work. If I put this other system in there, it won’t work. So, they can make smart decisions up front so when we do these covered assets, we don’t have to spend a lot of time researching each one. We can go get the correct technology and buy it and put it in place.”
The hope is for the demonstration project to become an ongoing program so that as technologies advance new data can be compared with old data and also to see how well technologies work at different times of the year, Bennett said.
Congress in 2018 gave DHS and the Department of Justice limited authorities to detect, track, identify and mitigate potential drone threats around certain facilities and covered assets.
DHS, DoJ, FAA Interests
The Air Domain Awareness Demonstration Project will evaluate systems and sensors against small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), which weigh under 55-pounds, larger UAS, which the FAA is interested in as they become integrated into flight operations around airports, ultralight manned aircraft, and small fixed and rotary wing aircraft.
DHS and DoJ are interested in being able to detect small UAS, which are typically used to smuggle drugs, weapons and contraband over the border or into prisons. Ultralight planes are also being used to bring people, drugs and other contraband over the border, Bennett said.
Airports are particularly interested in these technologies, and in some cases have been evaluating detection, tracking and identification technologies on their own, due to unauthorized drones being operated near their facilities and disrupting flight traffic. These disruptions represent safety hazards and also can impact the local economy if flights are halted.
Despite keen awareness of the threats posed by drones, airports and other large facilities are currently reluctant to purchase counter-drone security systems due to a lack of clarity about regulation, responsibility, authority and effectiveness of technologies.
The Federal Aviation Administration is well aware of the security risks posed by drones as their use continues to proliferate, with the agency expecting $9 billion in drone sales by 2024.
“As the FAA has been looking at this, we’ve been trying to not completely eliminate risk; if we were to do that, we would not maximize use of the airspace,” Leesa Papier, acting director of the agency’s Office of National Security Programs and Incident Response, said during the webinar. She described efforts to mitigate risk that include education deterrence through law enforcement, as well as the agency’s upcoming drone remote identification rule.
But as events like the December 2018 disruption of service at London’s Gatwick Airport have shown, education and deterrence are not enough — and a single clueless or nefarious drone operator can have an outsized impact.
Airports, the FAA and other partners need to become “more comfortable” with drone security technologies in the airport environment, said Justin Barkowski, vice president of Regulator Affairs at the American Association of Airport Executives, highlighting that there are no detection standards for this. It’s “very difficult” for airports to vet vendors and standards development is in the early phases, he said.
Barkowski also said airports are “losing money fast” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which means fewer resources to put toward evaluating drone security systems.
The FAA is working with industry to help develop these standards, Papier said.
The FAA’s main approach to drone security is preventing operators of small UAS from interfering with flights through education and outreach, and airspace authorization. Deterrence is the next step in the agency’s UAS security risk mitigation strategy followed by detection and lastly law enforcement response and mitigation.
Requiring small drones to broadcast their location along with detection technologies are part of the detection portion of the risk mitigation strategy.
At Gatwick Airport, drone sightings shut down the runway. That incident resulted in a loss of $25 million-$60 million in revenue for airports and airlines, Barkowski said, and 160,000 passengers missed flights. Investigators never determined who was responsible for the threat.
Currently, there are more than 530 counter-drone systems on the market, according to a count by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, with detection methods including radar, radio frequency (RF), electro-optical and infrared imaging and acoustics. Interdiction methods are various as well, but there is very little clarity among industry, government agencies and even the military what systems are most effective for various circumstances.
FAA’s Take
The FAA is also authorized to conduct testing and analysis of commercial counter-UAS solutions to develop industry standards for use by airports and other potential purchasers. Those activities, which Papier did not give a timeline for on the FAA side, have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’re really anxious to see how we can support the development of efficient technologies that identify and detect UAS that are disruptive,” Papier said. “But at this point in time — other than the testing that we have moving forward — we really don’t have any way of seeing what that positive or perfect solution is going to be.”
“There is no one size fits all solution,” added Lisa Ellman, executive director of the Commercial Drone Alliance, underscoring the difficulty involved in standards formation. “Different technologies may be appropriate for different environments.”
Beyond finding the right solutions, there are issues of responsibility and authority that are in the early stages of being solved. FAA controls the airspace, but airports are privately-owned enterprises; whose responsibility is it to purchase and operate counter-UAS systems — and who has the authority to act on an identified threat?
“As airports, we have very limited capability. We don’t have the legal authority to mitigate or take down a drone. That’s limited to four different federal agencies,” Barkowski said, referring to DHS, DoE, DoJ and DoD.
There has been progress, Barkowski said, driven by “tabletop exercises” conducted by many airports with government participation.
“As a result, in the event that there is a persistent drone threat at an airport, there is a process now in place to elicit and obtain the assistance and support from those agencies to come and deal with the threat,” he said. However, even that condition — a “persistent drone threat” — isn’t clearly defined.
Airports also don’t have access to drone registration information or low-altitude authorizations that have been granted to drone operators in their airspace to understand if identified drones are “friend” or “foe,” Barkowski said. Neither do local law enforcement authorities, who are often the first responders to reported drone threats and also do not have authority to take action.
“Yes, absolutely, that’s a gap,” said Ellman of local law enforcement capabilities. “There’s been a lot of talk about pilot programs enabling local law enforcement to test how this would work. Currently, only those four federal agencies currently have authority to use counter-drone mitigation technology. Under the law, there can be data and information-sharing with state and local law enforcement, but there’s no deputization or ability for them to use that technology themselves.”
“I think that’s something where we’ll see some action,” said Ellman, who is also the Global UAS Practice Chair at the law firm Hogan Lovells. “It is definitely a big issue that would need a statutory solution.”
FAA’s Papier agreed that determining responsibility and authorization for airspace protection around airports is a “wicked problem” that will require joint effort by government and industry.
“Airports are not owned by FAA, so airports will have to come up with what they’re willing to accept as well, so it becomes a holistic effort on how we address this growing problem,” Papier said.