Risk From Small Drones Overblown, Research Shows

Risk From Small Drones Overblown, Research Shows

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The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been pushing for strong regulations to be put in place to protect commercial and private aeroplanes from collisions with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with many national aviation bodies following suit. Under new FAA guidance, drones weighing more than 250 grammes will have to be registered with the Administration, and restrictions will be enforced on where they can be flown.

The FAA and its counterparts claim that small UAVs will endanger aircraft in two ways. First, drones could get sucked into the engines of aeroplanes. A new study published by George Mason University’s Mercatus Centre uses data from bird (and bat) strikes to model potential collisions with UAVs. Based on this data, the paper projects one damaging collision for every 1.87 million hours of UAV flight time. Incidents that cause injury or death should be far less frequent, occurring only 0.2 percent of all collisions. “Contrary to sensational media headlines, the skies are crowded not by drones, but by fowl,” wrote the researchers, intimating that as throughout the history of flight, the greatest risk to planes comes from the dinosaurs’ avian relatives.

The other fear is driven by accounts from pilots who have claimed they were involved in near-miss incidents with small UAVs. Assessments of these incidents by the FAA have been much discussed in the professional press, however, here too, it seems reports are greatly exaggerated. Last year, the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) investigated the data and found that only 27 of the 764 recorded incidents were actually near-misses. That comes to a grand total of 3.5 percent. The rest of the incidents were sightings, and frequently they were sightings in which drone operators were following FAA’s rules. What’s more, in some of the recorded incidents the pilots explicitly said there was no near-miss or even that the flying object was not identified.

It’s not clear why the FAA is hell-bent on vilifying drones, but what is becoming clear, is that drone operators pose little risk to modern aircraft.