FAA UAS Symposium 2018 trip

This third FAA UAS Symposium was larger than either of the last two and better attended than anticipated by the organizers. There were in excess of 1000 attendees with a healthy mix of enterprise industry, regulators, original equipment manufacturers and service providers all present. Expanded agenda to include more enterprise level activity including the High Altitude Pseudo Satellite (HAPS) and Urban Air Mobility concepts.

The FAA was “open for business” and encouraging industry to come in for a meeting onsite for help and to collaborate on projects that can move the needle for both the FAA and the industry. Note that I characterize that invitation as projects that are mutually beneficial. I say this from the perspective of someone who has had many positive and collaborative interactions with the FAA--The FAA still needs a great deal of help from industry to overcome their own culture and give them the internal justification to migrate from a prescriptive approach to regulation to a risk based approach that enables unmanned system operations a more rapid, durable and most of all positive expectation of success.

One theme I saw across multiple presentations was “waivers exemptions and deviations”. I won’t go into the nuances of the differences between all those here because that is a treatise that stands on its own. The FAA’s current approach to manage regulatory approvals outside of anything not covered by Part 107 through a waiver and exemption “process” is a necessary evil. Everyone will be forced to apply for a waiver, exemption or deviation until there are enough clusters of approved activity or economic gravitas to compel the FAA to make more rule sets that address the most common concepts of operation (CONOPS) . Creating a rule set simply will not happen speculatively in a risk adverse culture. This fact forces industry to swim in the still murky waters of seeking approvals that are both lacking defined process and temporary in nature.

There is a Catch 22 aspect to the issue of seeking waivers for industry. Industry needs a reliable, predictable path to an approval that promises a reasonable look at the issue with a reasonable expectation of approval without defaulting to artificially high standards where applicable i.e. if the only thing that a drone is overwhelmingly likely to hit in the course of conducting it’s automated mission is a tree and the tree wins the day, who cares?? Industry will be reluctant to spend significant time and money or build out fleets of hardware if it is forced to work in a framework of temporal waivers and exemptions. The same concept is true in the context of the experimental nature of many spectrum approvals.

It’s not all bad news--two new systems that enable faster access to airspace and the FAA are promising steps in the systemization of sUAS flight operations: Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) and the FAA’s Drone Zone. These two access points will enable operations that were previously only by acception if for no other reason is there is a place to route a request! In the case of LAANC it appears that there has been solid collaboration between the FAA and several players from industry, most notably AirMap (https://www.airmap.com/) to create access closer to towered airfeilds within the obstacle clearance airspace.

Other areas of interest are common among many use cases and ever closer to resolution but still not revealed; beyond visual line of sight operations beg for autonomous or at least semiautonomous detect and avoid solutions. Approved and reasonably reliable command and control spectrum solutions are naturally at the forefront of most use cases as well. As the technology evolves it will force the FAA to look more carefully at proposed operations that involve approaching risk in ways that the unimaginative and risk adverse will not be comfortable with.

Of the sessions that I attended I was most entertained and educated by the panel that Mr. Gary Miller sat on. Gary Manages the System Operations Support Center (SOSC) that creates and approves TFRs. I had the great pleasure to deal with Gary last summer during the hurricane and wildfire seasons. Gary and his staff were among the busiest people on the planet during that season and the results of their work was amazing! Many firsts came from those days and THE example of how to work UAS into disaster response airspace was set. I wish him and his crew the best of luck going forward this year! One of the most salient points to come out of that panel was, “Have a detailed plan before you even propose being part of the solution.” Otherwise you are likely to be part of the problem, and as such, not welcome to the operation…

All in all the Symposium was a great networking opportunity. Its great to see both industry and the FAA evolve and change, for the better!

Will edit to add the link to the presentations when they are posted on the FAA website.