By Dan Gettinger and Arthur Holland Michel,

cofounders of the Center for the Study of the Drone

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When drones
and manned aircraft
compete for airspace,
no one wins

y the time it was contained in early

July 2015, the Lake Fire had burned
for 10 days straight, destroying
over 31,000 acres of Californias
San Bernardino National Forest. As in
all major wildfires, the firefighting effort
depended on a fleet of airtankers and
helicopters used to drop retardant over
the fire. At 5:45 p.m. on June 24, a drone
flew between the two lead firefighting
aircraft as they prepared to make a pass
over the fast-paced fire. Minutes later, as
the aircraft returned for a second attempt,
another drone flew within 500 feet of one
of the planes, forcing the pilots to make
a hard right to avoid contact. All aerial
operations were grounded for two and a
half hours.
The Lake Fire wasnt the only time that
drones interfered with firefighting efforts.
In testimony before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on
Oct. 7, James Hubbard, the deputy chief
of the U.S. Forest Service, said that there
were 21 drone incursions into the airspace
surrounding wildfires in 2015, up from
two incidents the previous year.
As commercial drones have become
more accessible and affordable to the
everyday consumer, they have also been
getting in the way of manned aircraft
with greater frequency. On June 27, as the

Lake Fire was raging in California, a pilot

in New Jersey reported coming within 50
feet of a drone near Teterboro Airport. In
that month alone, there were over 130 incidents involving drones in the National
Airspace System.
In a press release on Aug. 12, 2015,
the Federal Aviation Administration
Continue on page 50

March/April 2016

47

Drones interferred with firefighting

efforts in Southern California last
summer, causing damaging and
costly delays.
KENNETH SONG/THE NEWS-PRESS/AP;
LEAD SPREAD IMAGINECHINA/AP

March/April 2016

49

The Solo drone from 3DR is installed with the AirMap app to indicate to operators if the drone is being operated within restricted airspace.
3D ROBOTICS

Continued from page 47

announced that there had been over 650

close calls so far that year, a massive increase over the 238 incidents in all of 2014.
In a bid to help the public, stakeholders, and lawmakers better understand
the issue and more effectively pursue
solutions to address it, the Center for the
Study of the Drone published an in-depth
analysis of over 900 potentially dangerous
incidents involving manned aircraft and
drones. Our goal was to shed a little datadriven light on an issue that has taken
pretty much everybody by surprise, in the
hopes that we might facilitate solutions
that work.

BY THE NUMBERS

Because manned aircraft fly at low altitudes, sometimes for several miles, while on final
approach and during takeoff, the FAA prohibits the use of unmanned aircraft within five miles
of any airport in the U.S. without permission from air traffic control.
DREAMSTIME.COM

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With millions of drones in U.S. skies,

most never come into close proximity to
a manned aircraft. In fact, since 1981, the
FAA has a specific set of guidelines for
making sure that model aircraft hobbyists
dont interfere with manned aircraft and,
in recent years, it has applied those guidelines to drone users. What we found is
that incidents tend to only happen when
users break the rules.
Judging from the data, the FAAs
guidelines for drone users are far from arbitrary. One such guideline calls for drone
operators to always maintain a distance of
at least five miles from the nearest airport.

We found that about 60 percent of incidents involved a drone flying in violation

of this rule. The FAA also asks that drone
users never fly above 400 feet. Nine out of
10 incidents analyzed occurred above 400
feet. And the average altitude of incidents
was in fact about 3,300 feet: much, much
higher than the FAAs drone ceiling.
Indeed, there were only a handful of
incidents that did not involve a drone
flying either above 400 feet or within five
miles of an airport. The average altitude
of incidents within five miles of an airport
was much lower than the average altitude of incidents beyond five miles of an
airport.
Prior to the meteoric rise in popularity
of consumer multirotor models and commercial drones, most of the unmanned
aircraft in the airspace were flown by a
dedicated community of model aviation
hobbyists who held themselves to a strict
set of self-imposed rules. Members of the
Academy of Model Aeronautics observe
an extensive set of rules and regulations,
established by the organization, which
has shielded the hobbyists from overarching federal regulation.
Over the past decade, however, as
the size and cost of components like
gyroscopes, autopilot systems, and cameras dropped, advanced model aircraft
equipped with high-definition video
cameras and capable of semi-autonomous
and autonomous flight became cheaper
to buy or build and easier and more
desirable to fly. This means that drone
enthusiasts could gain access to the sky
for less money, time, and effort than it
would have taken a model aircraft hobbyist in the past. And unlike members of the
hobby community, they can get airborne
without needing to know the rules of the
sky.
Given that different drones have different characteristics, we were interested in
finding out exactly what kind of drones
have been involved in these incidents.
Often pilots reporting drones in their
vicinity tried to describe what they had
seen. Many of these encounters probably
last only a couple of seconds or less, and
so sometimes, these efforts yielded hilariously vague results there are reports
that liken the drones to crabs, dishwashers, and trash cans but in hundreds of
cases these descriptions were accurate
enough for us to determine the type of
drone that was causing trouble.
For recreational drone users, multirotors are a more appealing option since
they are easier to fly and maintain than
fixed-wing drones, which is part of the

The prices for drones and drone tech has dropped substantially in the last couple of years,
boosting the number of consumer UAS flying in the NAS to unprecedented levels.
DREAMSTIME.COM

reason they make up the majority of small

drones being used in the U.S. today. And
to be sure, multirotors are much more
common in the reports than fixed-wing
models in fact, three times more common. A small number of troublemaking
drones, around a dozen, were single rotor
helicopter models.

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
OF THE DRONE KIND

There has been particularly stiff

disagreement over the extent to which
drones do indeed pose a threat to manned
aviation some claim that the threat is
of nightmarish proportions, while others
contend that the problem is overstated
and overhyped. Richard Hanson, the
director of government and regulatory
affairs at the Academy of Model Aeronautics, has criticized the FAA and the media
for misrepresenting the data. Exaggerating and mischaracterizing the data makes
it impossible to assess the magnitude of
the situation and appropriately address
the risks involved, Hanson argued in
written testimony submitted to the House
Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Aviation on
Oct. 7, 2015.
To try and lay to rest some of these
disagreements, we divided the incidents
we studied into what we call Close
Encounters, incidents in which there was
a heightened possibility of a collision,
and Sightings, incidents where drones
interfered with manned aircraft flight
paths, but in such a way that a crash was

unlikely. Sightings are more common

than close encounters. With hundreds of
thousands of drones entering the airspace
each year, it is inevitable that pilots will
sometimes spot drones flying nearby.
Around two-thirds of the incidents
about 600 were sightings and around
one-third of all incidents about 320
presented some risk of a collision.
While the FAA has not yet published a
definition of what constitutes a near miss
between a drone and a manned aircraft,
when manned aircraft come too close to
other manned aircraft, the FAA calls such
incidents near mid-air collisions, NMACs
for short. NMACs are defined as encounters in which two aircraft come within 500
feet of each other. This is a pretty useful
standard against which to measure incidents involving drones. About 75 percent
of the close encounters we studied met
the FAAs criteria for an NMAC (in 50
cases, the drone and the aircraft came
within 50 feet of each other).
The other quarter of close encounter
reports did not include a specific droneto-aircraft proximity, but the reporting
pilot used language that indicated that
the encounter had been a close one by
using phrases such as came really close.
In the demanding environment of a cockpit, judging the exact distance between
yourself and the drone that you are trying
to avoid can be challenging, and yet if
a pilot believes that a drone is too close
for comfort, we felt the incident qualifies
as something a little more serious than a
mere sighting.
March/April 2016

51

According to tests by the Virginia Tech CRASH Lab, a jet engine that ingests a drone could suffer from operational stability issues, at minimum, to catastrophic failure, at worst.
ISTOCK.COM/MSTROZ; INSET/VIRGINIA TECH CRASH LAB

CRASHING THE PARTY

The controversy and disagreements

around the true gravity of the situation
extend to one very important question
that the data we extracted from these
close call reports cannot answer: What
would happen if, instead of a mere close
encounter, one of these drones were
actually to hit an airplane? For decades,
aviation authorities have required that
aircraft manufacturers test their wares
against bird strikes YouTube is full of
strange videos of frozen chickens being
hurled into turbofan engines but since
large-scale drone use is a very new phenomenon, there have been no equivalent
live tests using drones.
There is some talk of the FAA preparing drone-strike test requirements for aircraft engine makers sometime in the near
future, but until that happens, the best we
can do is guess. The most sophisticated
guesswork to date has been developed by
a team at Virginia Techs Crashworthiness
for Aerospace Structures and Hybrids
Laboratory (yes, CRASH for short). Using
advanced computer simulations, they
have been able to generate hypothetical
scenarios ranging from drone impacts on
aircraft fuselages, flight decks, wings, and
engines.
The results are not pretty. The CRASH
Lab teams tests indicate that if even
a small drone weighing three to nine
pounds were to hit an aircrafts flight
deck or fuselage, it could damage critical
structural components. This seems
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plausible, as birds in this same weight

range have been known to actually
tear holes in airplane wings and break
through cockpit windows.
If the CRASH Labs work is anything
to go by, a drone getting sucked into a
turbofan engine would be messy, too.
In their simulations, when a three-foot
diameter drone met a nine-foot diameter
turbofan engine, three engine blades were
destroyed within a couple of miliseconds
of impact. The chewed-up drone and
the bits of engine blade then proceeded
into the interior of the engine, where the
debris began to spin at 700 mph, exerting
significant stress on the engine casing and
leading to total engine failure.
Jet planes with turbofan engines, 90 of
which were commercial passenger planes,
were involved in about 40 percent of the
close encounter scenarios. Propeller-driven aircraft, most of which were singleprops, accounted for about half, and the
rest involved helicopters (which could be
most at risk in a drone strike, given that
they only have one rotor).
Even though in most cases a jet plane
that ingested a drone into an engine could
probably continue flying with just one
engine long enough to make an emergency landing, its a scenario that would
spell dreadful news for the UAS community. As an intelligence official at a federal
agency told us, it will only take one such
incident to bring about a severe regulatory whiplash that could really hurt the
industry as well as hobby operators.

The great worry is what will happen to the

UAS industry if a small drone accidentally
crashes into one of these.
ISTOCK.COM/SENOHRABEK

There are probably several reasons

why these incidents are happening at a
growing rate: inexperienced drone users
who dont know the rules, lost links and
other malfunctions that send drones beyond their owners control, and perhaps
a small number of daredevils who know
the rules and break them anyway. And so
there probably isnt a single, silver-bullet
solution the FAA can use to solve the
problem.
Enforcement is one option, but the
airspace is large and the FAAs ability to
find errant drone users is limited. Better
education on the part of the government
and the drone industry could help inexperienced drone users better understand
how to fly safely by staying away from
flight paths.

In December, the FAA started requiring all drone users to register any aircraft
that weighed more than half a pound in
the hopes that it would induce greater
accountability among recreational
users. But there has been pushback from
the hobby community, and it is unclear
whether registration would have been
much use in the incidents we studied,
given that law enforcement agencies were
often unable to locate the drones that
pilots reported.
In addition to possible policy remedies, a number of technological solutions
that could help integrate drones into the
airspace are currently being explored.
Geofencing systems such as DJIs
Geospatial Environment Online system, which bars the companys drones
from entering restricted airspaces, could
enforce the rules for those who arent
sure of how to abide by them, as well
as for drones that malfunction and find

themselves in the way of manned aircraft. NASA is working on an air traffic

management system that will track the
flight paths of drones even small ones
and ensure that they stay clear of other
aircraft, but the program only just began,
and is scheduled to remain in testing until
at least 2019.
On 28 occasions in 2014 and 2015,
pilots of manned aircraft had to take evasive action to avoid a collision. In other
instances, pilots who came close to drones
said that they didnt have enough time to
react and change their course. Sense-andavoid technology can help prevent drones
from bumping into other aircraft by enabling them to detect an impending collision and make an autonomous judgment
of how to respond. There are still no compact sense-and-avoid systems that would
be capable of helping a small quadcopter
dodge a jetliner travelling at 300 mph, but
the technology is advancing in leaps and

bounds. Eventually, such systems will be

commonplace and FAA-certified. But this,
too, will take some time.
The takeaway from all this is that it is
extremely difficult to safely have hundreds of thousands if not millions
of drones operating alongside manned
aircraft without significant safeguards,
and the level of incidents that we are
currently seeing is simply a symptom of
those safeguards lagging behind the unmanned aircraft technology. It is unlikely
that a single solution exists that smoothly
integrates drones into the airspace and,
even if there were, none of these potential solutions can be effectively implemented overnight. Instead, ahead of the
anticipated release of the FAAs finalized
drone regulations in June 2016, regulators are likely to aim for a combination
of approaches that respects the right of
both drone users and manned aviators to
access the sky.

TM

March/April 2016
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2016 Kalmbach Publishing Co. This material may not be reproduced in any
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