Why are regulations for remotely piloted aircraft — known commonly as drones — taking so long? The FAA tries to answer that question in a recent blog post at ReadWrite.com
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It might be that the FAA is still waiting for input. For instance, has anuone addressed regulations to increase the visibility of UAVs bright colors, anticollision strobes, etc.)? The mills ob bureaucracy grind slowly.
C’mon guys. The FAA can’t make a simple decision such as how to get rid of the 3rd Class medical. How can you expect them to make a decision about the UAV’s. I keep telling them, you wanna learn how to make a decision just look over her , I’ll show ya how it’s done. Blue skys and tailwinds to all.
The FAA, like many Federal agencies, is a bureaucracy with too many desk jockeys and lawyers. It is way past time for Congress to completely overhaul this monstrosity. We are not being governed by elected officials anymore, but instead by self-important unelected bureaucrats.
The FAA is taking forever to address RPAs because their operating concept for integration of UAVs into the national and global airspace system is completely wrong, and won’t effectively, economically, and safely work now, or ever.
Since typical UAVs have a slower velocity distribution than other manned vehicles, FAA’s idea of “Detect Sense and Avoid” for Drones does not work and cannot work, ever, except for a group of nearly the same velocity vehicles. That’s why bugs and birds splat on your windshield (even after they detect you, sense you, and pull 12 g’s trying to avoid you). The birds “Sully’s A320” hit in the “Miracle on the Hudson” found that out,… entirely too late. It’s a basic law of physics the faster vehicles ultimately controls the dynamics of a collision, or of avoiding a collision, to the first order. It’s just that FAA hasn’t figured that out yet. So FAA has been foolishly pursuing an entirely illogical course of “commercial vs. Non-Commercial”,… “54 pound versus 56 pound”, and “Day versus night”, and restricted areas, for UAVs, all which are virtually irrelevant to usefully eventually sharing airspace between drones and all other air-vehicles.
Instead, the answer lies in properly defining and using C-N-S for RPAs, as in defining dynamic RNP based trajectories (or RNP volumetric surfaces), together with “state vector” exchange of relevant “Past, next, next+1” data among vehicles (via appropriate COM links), backed up by using inexpensive ADS-A, -B, or -C (but not FAA’s present ridiculous over-specified horrendously expensive and unnecessarily complex 91.227/DO-260 based ADS-B). By going down this alternate CNS path, UAVs could be safely integrated into the NAS right now, anywhere needed, whether commercial or not, whether day or night, whether IMC or VMC, whether IFR or VFR, and regardless of weight. Further, but for the FAA’s lack of the appropriate NextGen vision, lack of understanding of the physics and economics of what actually constitutes safety in the NAS, lack of regulatory wisdom, and lack of insight into how to actually implement modern cost effective separation processes, it could be done today, without ONE SINGLE UAV related RULE CHANGE or UAV RULE ADDITION.
That’s why it’s taking FAA so long, and why the present FAA UAV NPRM is already so fouled up.