Andy Pazstor and Jack Nicas report in the Wall Street Journal:
Amazon said in a statement that it supports an approach based “on safety and performance outcomes” that allows different technologies because “locking into a specific prescribed set of technologies…will quickly become outdated."
Federal regulators are looking for ways to ensure that drones operating beyond sight—such as delivery drones—stay away from manned aircraft, which many experts expect ultimately will harness existing satellite technology.
The preliminary plans call for relying on what is known as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast technology, or ADS-B, a system that manned aircraft use to determine their location via satellites and periodically broadcast that data to air-traffic
controllers. Eventually, the data also will be broadcast directly to other aircraft.
Federal Aviation Administration official Don Walker said at a public meeting earlier this month that drones flying beyond sight of operators ultimately “are likely to have ADS-B receivers.” The receivers would enable drones to sense manned aircraft and automatically avoid them. The receivers wouldn’t broadcast the drones’ location, which could confound air-traffic controllers’ view of the airspace.
Mr. Walker said ADS-B likely wouldn’t be used for drones within sight of the operator, which include virtually all drones flying today, because that would overwhelm the system’s capacity.
Mr. Walker made the comments to an industrywide standards-setting group RTCA Inc., which advises the FAA on technical standards. Mr. Walker, who is an FAA representative to the group, has been heavily involved in sketching out potential approaches to integrating drones into U.S. airspace.
On Tuesday, an FAA official said Mr. Walker wasn’t expressing agency policy, because the FAA “has not taken a position regarding” the issue and isn’t currently drafting any regulations mandating any particular technology or approach.
Nonetheless, the concept Mr. Walker sketched out also is under consideration by various RTCA and industry advisory groups.
The deliberations are still at an early stage. Reaching industry and government consensus on a detailed regulatory framework is expected to take at least several years, and finalizing regulations could stretch years beyond that.
But the principles outlined by Mr. Walker—and discussed by other participants at the RTCA meeting earlier this month—underscore efforts to pave the way for automated drone flights that would unlock a series of new commercial applications, including deliveries, pipeline inspections and large-scale crop monitoring.
Amazon.com Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc. and other companies want to use drones to quickly deliver small packages. But delivery drones still face big technical and regulatory hurdles in the U.S.
Issues such as short battery life and unreliable location data could limit delivery drones’ range and require central drop-off points, rather than deliveries straight to customers’ doorsteps. And proposed FAA rules, expected to be finalized next year, would prohibit drones from carrying external loads, flying over bystanders or—at least for several years—beyond the sight of their operators. The rules also would require one operator per drone, something that wouldn’t work for vast fleets of delivery drones.
Jim Williams, who retired in June as the FAA’s top drone official, said companies could seek exemptions from the proposed FAA restrictions, which also would likely require FAA certification of their aircraft.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and companies such as Alphabet and Amazon have been working on more sophisticated systems to keep drones separated from manned aircraft and fromeach other.
Alphabet has proposed using a system that is similar to ADS-B but is less costly to broadcast and receive aircraft locations. Amazon has suggested segregating the airspaces between manned aircraft, high-end commercial drones and more basic recreational drones. They all support a NASA plan for an automated system that keeps drones separated by calculating their flight paths based on weather, obstacles and other aircraft paths.
Some in the drone industry reject an FAA approach that specifically would require ADS-B technology. Amazon said in a statement that it supports an approach based “on safety and performance outcomes” that allows different technologies because “locking into a specific prescribed set of technologies…will quickly become outdated.”
Michael Drobac, head of drone trade group the Small UAV Coalition, said an ADS-B mandate is too rigid of a regulatory approach. “ADS-B is one technology, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be other technologies that could be as efficient or as effective,” he said.
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