The Impact of Drones On Aviation Safety

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UAS. Unmanned Aircraft Systems. Drones. The damn things are everywhere. Even the guy who wrote the FAA rule to regulate them got a drone for his birthday. The 195-page NPRM is out, https://www.faa.gov/uas/nprm/ but until it is finalized later this year, FAA is cranking out 100+ exemptions every week for hobby/recreation use, which is perhaps both the good news and the bad news. There are a lot of people who are willing to play by the rules, or in this case, the lack of rules, but there are exponentially more morons who couldn’t care less about your damn rules, and will go out of their way to thumb their nose at regulating their shiny new toys that trifle with death.

Clearly they are a safety threat. Commercial airliners and GA pilots have been reporting increasingly more near misses at significantly less than 500’ with a UAS on short final. Imagine a full passenger aircraft sucking one into its engine at full power on takeoff over a populated area.

But for purposes of this forum, are they a security threat? You bet they are. Consider a swarm of 5-6 pre-programmed drones coming across the airport fence simultaneously from all directions, all of them weaponized... what’s your airport response? Yeah, it’s against the law, and every one of the operators may be a known terrorist. But you can bet the rent they’ve already thought about the same nasty possibilities that I did, and more, and won’t be posting their flight schedule tonight on Twitter.

Boeing has proposed a laser solution for large military drones, but that’s not for an urban or airport environment, and for such a small, essentially invisible target. Among other problems, radar can’t see a 1-pixel echo, and lasers decay ballistically somewhat, i.e. drop toward the ground, so you’re more likely to have unintended consequences on an office building, residential complex or a commercial aircraft somewhere behind the target.

The airport has little or no security capability to deal with them, except to mop up afterwards. It’s an FAA airspace regulatory problem for now, along with DHS and FBI; which makes any TSA involvement redundant at best. Pending legislation would require drone guidance systems to have built-in “geo-fencing” to prevent drones from entering air space surrounding airports, although lete’s remember that drones fly everywhere else, too. Recently, a firmware upgrade caused a drone to launch within Class B airspace. When airborne, it “realized” it wasn’t supposed to be there, and the engines stopped, dropping it into a fortunately non-fatal situation.

There is technology under development intended to take command and control of a rogue drone (even one flying preprogrammed/autonomously), where law enforcement could disable the aircraft and trace it to its origin without crashing it... if it can find it. University of California at San Diego has unexplainably developed a Teflon cloaking material which would make it a stealth device with no electronic or infrared signature, to avoid radar. So I must return to the basic aviation security ground truth: responsible regulations, reliable screening protocols and effective new technologies are increasingly necessary to meet the common and rapidly changing threats, but the bad guys don’t play by your rules. Increase the marketing and use controls to deal with them when they buy their toys, not after they fly them into a fully loaded airplane.