Congress is told US lags on drones

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Commercial drone flights are taking off in other countries while the U.S. lags behind in developing safety regulations that would permit unmanned aircraft operations by a wide array of industries, witnesses told a House panel Wednesday.

The Federal Aviation Administration bars all commercial use of drones except for 13 companies that have been granted permits for limited operations.

Permits for four of those companies were announced Wednesday, an hour before a hearing of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s aviation subcommittee.

The four companies plan to use drones for aerial surveillance, construction-site monitoring and oil-rig flare-stack inspections. The agency has received 167 requests for exemptions from commercial operators.

Several European countries have granted commercial permits to more than a 1,000 drone operators for safety inspections of infrastructure, such as railroad tracks, or to support commercial agriculture, Gerald Dillingham of the Government Accountability Office testified. Australia has issued more than 180 permits to businesses engaged in aerial surveying, photography and other work, but limits the permits to drones weighing less than 5 pounds. Small, unmanned helicopters have been used to monitor and spray crops in Japan for more than a decade.

Canada has had regulations governing the use of unmanned aircraft since 1996 and, as of September, had issued more than 1,000 permits this year alone, Dillingham said. Canada recently revised its regulations to grant blanket permission for flights of drones weighing less than 5 pounds. It also cleared the way for flights by drones weighing between about 5 pounds and 55 pounds as long as operators abide by certain restrictions.

The FAA has been working for years on developing safety rules to give small drones broader access to U.S. skies, and agency officials have said they expect to propose regulations before the end of this month. But it could be at least two or three years before regulations become final, Dillingham said.

“It ... concerns me that road builders in Germany and farmers in France today are enjoying economic benefits from [drones] because safety regulators there have found ways to permit such flights,” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J. “I can’t help but wonder if the Germans, French and Canadians can do some of these things today, then why can’t we also be doing them?”

The U.S. has led the world in the development of drones, but FAA regulations are so restrictive that researchers trying to resolve key technology gaps in order to make commercial unmanned aircraft safer are at a disadvantage compared with colleagues in some other countries, said Nicholas Roy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has worked with Google on drone technology.