Designers of the US Federal Aviation Administration’s futuristic, new air traffic control system did a whoops. Despite explicit instructions from Congress to take drones into account, they failed to include them in the plans for the $US5 billion NextGen system. And it’s definitely too late to start over.
This isn’t good. It’s become increasingly clear in recent years that drones aren’t just going to become a presence in America’s skies; they’re going to become a fixture. The FAA itself just gave Hollywood permission to use drones for filming TV shows and movies, and there’s a long line of other folks, like Amazon and Google, that can hardly wait for commercial drones to go mainstream. And that’s not even taking the hobbyists or the military into account.
Of course, it’s tempting to cut the FAA’s airspace designers a break, since Congress ordered the new system way back in 2003. “We didn’t understand the magnitude to which (drones) would be an oncoming tidal wave, something that must be dealt with, and quickly,” said Ed Bolton, the agency’s assistant administrator for NextGen. But — and this is a big “but” — Congress specifically ordered the FAA to take drones into account.
Now, the hardware and software has been installed for several key systems, but there’s no support for drone traffic. The NextGen roadmap for the next five years also does not include plans for managing that traffic, and experts fear the FAA already too far along in the process to make such a radical shift. While the fact that most drones fly below 120m at present, they will fly as high as commercial airlines in the not too distant future. Airspace design is already complicated enough without throwing a bunch of pilotless — or at least remotely piloted — aircraft into the mix.
But heck, what did we expect? The FAA’s had a hard enough time figuring out simply how to regulate drones in America’s air space. It’s no huge surprise to learn that they’re not exactly forward-thinking about how everything will work once those (still mysterious) regulations kick in. [AP]
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