During the six hours that elapsed between the time I decided to write this blog and my actually pushing the button to publish it, 16 people were killed in fatal auto accidents in the U.S. None were killed by drones, nor probably even nicked. How do I know about the car wrecks? I don’t. I completely made up that number to make a point. Car wrecks kill so many people—32,719 in 2013—that they’re non-news to the point that we don’t even have an easy means of tracking them on a daily basis. In fact, we’re so blas about the carnage that nine months into 2015, we don’t even know how many fatal car crashes there were last year.
Yet … yet, if a drone is suspected of denting the wing of an Aztec, as happened this week, or an airline pilot spots a quadcopter, we’re on it like white on rice. Why is this? It’s the terror of the third dimension, perhaps proving that our psyches haven’t really adapted to or accepted the fact that man can fly. We’re OK with burning car wrecks, careening trains and shipwrecks, but anything that levitates above the surface embodies blind, howling terror.
Some of this is due to the remorseless effects of gravity, but much of it owes to media hysteria that feeds the fear of flying we all know is so basic to human nature. And to see what that looks like close up, I have only to look in the mirror. Even though here at AVweb, we’re steely-eyed aviation journalists, we picked up the “unconfirmed” airplane/drone collision story for the same reason everyone else did: We’re Google SEO addicts. For as intense as the competition has always been to print a story first, it’s far more intense now. The standards of confirmation have, shall we say, eroded. It’s true of us; it’s true of everyone.
How the story got out there in the first place is confusing, but the pilot involved never suggested he had hit a drone, according to a source I spoke to who was firsthand in the investigation. The pilot merely said he had hit an object. Someone, most likely from the FAA, examined the dent in the wing and de-ice boots and observed small squiggly witness marks that were deemed suggestive of the plastic props on a quadcopter, never mind that no one has any idea of what kind of marks these props would actually leave. No conclusion was officially drawn blaming a drone, but the story took on a life of its own and became a case of guilty until proven innocent. Which, later in the week, the Smithsonian did by examining the de-ice boot and finding bird guts, not traces of lithium ion. So the mysterious object was just another birdstrike, of which there are many hundreds each year. But no drones. (So far, at least.)
The hysteria seems to have evolved to the point that there’s the full expectation that there will be a drone strike and, by golly, this sure looked like pay dirt. But sorry, no brass ring this time. I’m beginning to wonder if some in the FAA are so anxious about drone strikes that they’re desperate to find one just to move their regulatory efforts out of neutral, where they’ve been for years. At this point and despite my own research that suggests the likelihood of a drone collision is small,let me just stipulate that it will happen eventually. It might even cause a fatality or hull loss, albeit probably not a transport category aircraft. If it does happen, what’s the FAA to do? Ban drones of all sizes? Not gonna happen. Eventually, we’ll all have to understand that this drone thing is a new technology and new technologies come at a price that might include accidents. There’s no something for nothing in anything. We eventually accepted this with all forms of transportation and it will have to be no different with drones. I’m thinking of making up a batch of t-shirts with the crown emblem and this: Remain calm and enjoy your general aviation flight.
For the short term, the FAA is on the right track in its Know Before You Fly initiative to educate buyers of consumer drones about flying them responsibly. But it’s not moving nearly aggressively enough. Last May, it announced a smartphone app called B4UFLY designed to give would-be drone operators a heads up on airspace and regulatory issues. Here it is September and it’s still not available. Second, and more concerning to me, is the seemingly burgeoning number of pilot “sightings” of drones that merely gives the news media fodder for scare stories highlighting the fact that something must be done and nobody appears to be doing it. And it’s getting worse by the day.I think the FAA—or somebody—could do us all a solid by following up and verifying these sighting reports to make sense of what risk they represent (if any) and put them into a context that allows realistic risk assessment. I’m betting that most of them are meaningless noise. But it would be nice to know.
When he retired, the former head of the FAA’s drone integration office, Jim Williams, said the job was enough work for three people. So now, as we reported last week in the very same unconfirmed collision story,the FAA has hired two people to replace him. I hope between them, they find the will and resources to validate sightings and risk rank them and toget reasonable regulation on track, which it has not been. No one should underestimate the challenge, but that’s no excuse for the current paralysis.
Meanwhile—and this is the trickiest of all—localities are dealing with drone regulation on the fly, so to speak. As I was writing this, yet another scare story surfaced of a New York teacher crashing a drone into empty seats at the U.S. Open on Thursday night. This sort of stupidity represents more of a threat of Draconian over-regulation than it does actually harming people on the ground. Local cities and towns could enact a patchwork mess of laws and regulations that would turn operators into high-tech scofflaws while also chilling a legitimate industry.
Yet people who do things like that need to be apprehended and, I think, pretty heavily fined and even jailed in the case of injury or death. No one can be entirely dismissive of the citizenry’s legitimate fears of these machines, not to mention concerns about privacy and noise. Just as I’d never walk into a Starbucks with a slung AR-15 just to make a Second Amendment point, so too should consumer drone operators avoid gratuitously scaring the tar out of people at public events or even in their own backyards. Nor should local jurisdictions overreact and try to ban drone operation everywhere, just as some cities attempted to ban automobile operation at the turn of the last century.
There’s a balance in here somewhere and as long as fear drives the media coverage, it will be elusive. But it will have to come because drones as a fundamental technology are here to stay.
