Congress told U.S. lags other nations on drones

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 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. And 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.

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.

“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?” said the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Frank LoBiondo, R-N.J.

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 to colleagues in some other countries, said Nicholas Roy, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has worked with Google on drone technology.

Even testing of drones in remote, unpopulated areas entails complying with onerous regulations in the U.S., while countries like the United Kingdom and Australia make allowances for flights in lightly populated areas, he said.

While U.S. researchers into unmanned aircraft haven’t yet fallen behind, “there are issues and constraints that may allow other countries to overtake the U.S. both in developing the next generation of technology and in training the next generation of engineers,” Roy said.

Earlier this week, Amazon, which wants to deploy drones to deliver small packages, said FAA testing restrictions were so burdensome that the company is looking to do its research in other countries.