I can’t speak for every other reporter in the room, but the FAA’s announcement at AUVSI Wednesday that it was partnering up—and my how they love that word—with a major news network, a railroad and a drone company to advance the cause of sUAS operation in the national airspace was just a little hard to parse.
Not that it’s not a good idea. It’s actually a greatidea. It’s just that on UAS operations and regulations, the FAA’s default position has been no for so long, it was disorienting to hear them say yes (sort of) and right from the man himself, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta. Oddly, he didn’t even seem that nervous when talking about it.
But he was clear about one thing: this wasn’t exactly the FAA’s idea. CNN, PrecisionHawk and BNSF came to the agency, not the other way around. I’m not sure of the internal dynamics here of why this moved the FAA off the dime. It doesn’t appear to offer any kind of plausible political cover if things go south, but maybe it was just one more lever added to Google, Amazon, Boeing and a dozen others with friends in Congress relentlessly turning the screw for more agency guidance and clear-cut, expedient regulations. Indeed, Google’s Dave Vos was quoted as saying the FAA has become more cooperative in just the past couple of weeks.
The new program isn’t a proposed regulation or even formal guidance; it’s best thought of as a pilot program to gather data to inform future regulation. Huerta described it as “learn a little, try a little.” It specifically allows CNN to conduct sUAS ops—mostly tethered—anywhere in news gathering; PrecisionHawk will undertake extended line-of-sight operations for agricultural purposes; and BNSF will do limited beyond-line-of-sight for railroad track inspections in remote areas.
In my view, this is a substantial step forward, albeit a small one. Huerta said repeatedly that the FAA is being cautious because it wants to get UAS regulations right. I think the chances of the agency getting it right out of the box are nil. There are too many variables, complexities and unforeseens for that. At Sun ‘n Fun, someone in the air safety business said to me that sooner or later, someone is going to get killed when a drone and airplane collide. I think he’s right. But it’s also true that pilots have had heart attacks, strokes and seizures while flying, including airline pilots. The FAA’s cumbersome and expensive medical screening apparatus has proven statistically incapable of preventing this and I think the same reasoning applies, albeit to a lesser degree, to UAS regulations. Perfection is the enemy of good enough and the FAA needs to be allowed to make mistakes and release guidance than can be improved upon later.
Within an hour of the Pathfinder Project announcement, Huerta strode to the podium and made another stride forward: a smartphone app that allows drone operators a geo-sensitive way to check themselves for safety and legality before flying. This is an iteration of the Know-Before-You-Fly program it rolled out last fall.
It sounds like just a vacuous glad-handing idea with no practical impact. But I think it represents more than that, because the government is never, ever going to be able to regulate the swarm of hobbyist drones that fly literally and figuratively under the radar. The app effort recognizes that the best response to this is to educate the people flying these devices to airspace, airport and traffic considerations. We’ll never stop all the idiots because a certain number of people will always be, well, idiots. But the more who can be educated, the fewer who will stick their drones where they ought not be. And that’s better than trying to bust them all, which will never happen, either.
CNN’s Drones
In a moment of rarified and exemplary alphabet honesty, Matt Zuccaro, president of the Helicopter Association International, told his members earlier this spring that they needed to embrace and understand UAS technology for as certain as the sun rises, it will take some work normally done by helicopters.
He was sure enough right. I got a look today at one of the drones CNN plans to use for its newsgathering operations and they’re quite the piece of work. One model is tethered to 400 feet with a spaghetti-thin cable that feeds power up and data down. I’ll have a video tour of it tomorrow.
Age of Robots
AUVSI’s keynote speaker for Wednesday’s general session was Hugh Herr who has little to do with drones that fly but heads the biomechatronics research group at MIT. He was an apt choice.
You might not know the name, but you probably know the man, since his story and his work have been covered widely. As a teenager, Herr lost both legs below the knee in a climbing exposure accident. Upon being told by his doc that he would never climb again, Herr said the hell with that and he was on the slopes two weeks later.
He has devoted a stunningly productive life—he’s 50—to bioengineering prosthetics and understanding how humans can interact with both machines and machines that become part of their bodies. His early experience and burning intellect have convinced him that in the decades to come, disability in humans can be dramatically reduced if not eliminated entirely. What this has to do with drones is at once everything and nothing.
If AUVSI points to anything at all, it’s to a future where robotics promise to evolve almost faster than humans not deeply immersed in the field can grasp. We’re seeing it in drones that fly, drive, swim and perform menial tasks and, in Herr’s work, biomechanics that don’t just mimic human limbs, but are, in some respects, better. To demonstrate the point, Herr did his entire talk striding across the stage on a pair of prosthetic legs with powered ankles, a joint that Herr explained is responsible for 80 percent of the energy used in walking. The fluid perfection of those legs was mesmerizing to the point that I lost focus on some of what he said.
The part that I did not miss, however, is his concession that this evolving technology will inevitably have an unintended nefarious twist. It’s inevitably true of UAS, robotic boats and cars and even limbs. When asked about this, Herr had no convincing response because, I think, there is no convincing response, nor has there ever been one for any technological advance that appears miraculous even as it is abused in ways inventors never intended.
Should that cause us to draw back and say stop the madness? You know the answer to that. Progress has always been a bumpy ride and robots may make it interesting, but hardly any smoother.
