The FAA’s recent ruling on small drones and remote control aircraft got me thinking about the pair of R/C helicopters I have down in my basement. Overly ambitious gifts for my two sons (aged 5 and 8) from their grandmother, the helos carry age 14+ labels, so I regretfully planned to store them away for a couple of years. Yet, that .55 pound weight limit for required registration began to gnaw at me. Would they someday be flying their helicopters in the park and have an FAA policy enforcement team descend on them, confiscate the toy choppers and haul them away? According to the agency’s website, “The FAA may assess civil penalties up to $27,500. Criminal penalties include fines of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment for up to three years.” Wishing to avoid that fate, I decided to unpack one of them, weigh it and if necessary complete the registration process. According to our company postage scale, the helicopter weighed in at 8.1 ounces, beefier than I thought, and a scant four one-hundredths of a pound under the proscribed limit for registration. In a way I was a little disappointed that I did not have to register my very own aircraft and get my very own N-number.
There has been much negativity regarding the FAA’s announced plan, but it is clear the agency has found itself way behind the curve regarding the drone invasion and is desperately trying to catch up. Numbers vary as to how many of these things of varying size and capabilities will find themselves under Christmas trees across the country this year, ranging conservatively from several hundred thousand to more than a million, and many feel it is only a matter of time before one of them gets sucked up into a jet engine, or crashes through a cockpit windshield.
A recently released report by Texas-based aviation firm Aero Kinetics estimated that bird strikes cost nearly $1 billion in aircraft damage each year in the U.S. The company went on to detail the differences between a relatively soft bird and a hard “toy”: “In a drone strike, the relatively low modulus of elasticity of a toy drone results in higher impact forces with greater impulse at a given velocity than in a bird strike of equivalent mass.” The company noted that pound for pound the inorganic materials that make up a drone such as the lithium batteries, metals and carbon fiber would certainly wreak more havoc on aircraft structures and systems than a bird and suggests that windshield and engine ingestion testing along the lines of the infamous “Rooster Booster” bird cannon should be done, substituting drones for frozen fowl.
The stories are out there: the drone that crashed into the Arthur Ashe tennis stadium in Queens, N.Y. during a U.S. Open match, the father and son who were tracked down by police for flying their drone over the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and pilots on approach into N.Y.-area airports have reported encountering drones at unsafe altitudes and distances. At Heli-Expo this year, in a session detailing the FAA’s UAV regulatory and public awareness efforts, one helicopter operator described his midair encounter with a drone to Jim Williams, manager of the FAA’s unmanned systems integration program. He reported that the drone passed uncomfortably close to his hovering helicopter, so he followed it back to its owner (whom he reported). For his efforts, he received a notice for unsafe operation of an aircraft from the FAA.
Last year, before the holiday gift season, the agency prepared a “Know Before You Fly” video for its website, aimed at would-be drone pilots. That video quickly became the most watched in the agency’s history. At the same time many of the leading drone makers agreed to include educational materials in the instructions and owner’s manuals on proper and safe operations of these devices.
But back to the registration, how will the FAA enforce the regulation? I have a mental picture of some poor field agent running around with a pair of binoculars and lugging a scale to weigh suspected illegally operated toys/drones. I think the agency is painting with an overly broad brush, preferring to err on the side of caution, and hoping that the threat of “we know who you are” will keep people from doing something stupid such as fly one of these things near an airport or an emergency scene where it could become a hazard. Will stores and online retailers be responsible for keeping tabs on who buys a registration-mandated toy/drone and reporting if they registered it? Will registration eventually become a point-of-sale function? What happens if and when one of these devices causes a tragedy and the owner says, “It wasn’t mine anymore. I lost it, sold it, gave it away, had it stolen, etc.” Will the FAA have it dusted for finger prints?
The underlying problem, as the agency has discovered in the case of laser pointers, is you can’t regulate stupidity. It seems not a week goes by where you don’t hear of a report of a laser targeting an aircraft somewhere in the country. When those devices were rare and costly, it was not an issue, but as prices came down to the cost of a cup of designer coffee, people began viewing them as toys (so many times have I seen children playing with them, naively shining them in each other’s eyes), and any respect for the possible damage they might cause was lost.
While that particular genie is out of the bottle, the FAA should be lauded for attempting to be proactive in what will likely prove an unsuccessful attempt to shove the cork back in the R/C bottle. I strongly doubt our toy helicopters will ever reach altitudes or be flown in areas where they can cause trouble, but despite the regulations there will be the eventual knucklehead who will do something with one of their more powerful brethren to cast a national spotlight on the use of these devices. Hopefully it will have at least been registered so they can trace it back to its owner.