The FAA has said that the collisions between drones and airplanes is now a real concern. According to the FAA, there have been 25 incidents involving unmanned miniature aircrafts so far.
All of these incidents occurred since June 25th.
The FAA said that airline pilots have almost no chance of noticing these tiny drones, and that it might attempt to improve drone education to prevent more collisions in the future.
The head of the FAA, Michael Huerta, said that there are already regulations in place that prevent small aircrafts from colliding with airplanes. He said that what needs to be improved is drone safety education, it is essential in order to ensure that airways are safe.
Michael Huerta told reporters:
“We’ve enforced hundreds of these cases where we have seen someone operating one of these things carelessly and recklessly and posing the danger to aircraft, and that can’t happen.”
Drones are not allowed to fly above 400 feet, yet pilots have said that they’ve seen the small devices flying as high as 2,000 feet.
Huerta said that most consumers are not aware of the dangers of sending drones to these high altitudes.
The FAA is firstly going to tell drone pilots not to fly their devices near airports.
A complete list of regulations is set to be enforced before September 2015, according to an Federal Aviation Administration announcement in 2012.
It is going to be a difficult task for the FAA to properly enforce rules to balance the difficulties of flying drones and the threats that they pose to aircrafts.
“(A) big part of what we’re doing is educating people,”
“These are very high performance aircraft, and they are difficult to see and this is one of the big challenges, and so that’s why the rules require that people stay away from airports.”
“We have been working with the Model Aeronautics Association, with the model community and clubs so we can educate people because these are not your typical pilots that may be flying one of these for the first time and they may be unfamiliar with the rules,” he added.
“Yes, there are proponents of unmanned aircraft and they really see huge potential with this technology and for them, we can’t move fast enough,”
“What they would like to see is free and open use of unmanned aircraft as soon as we can get there.”
“On the other side, you have pilots, commercial pilots, general aviation pilots, who are very concerned that these are difficult to see, they don’t really have a good understanding of how they interact with other aircraft, and bedrock principle of aviation is a principle called see and avoid. The pilots take action to avoid one another. So it’s for that reason that we have a plan for a staged and thoughtful integration of unmanned aircraft where we look at lower risk uses first, and then gradually work to others.”
He concluded:
“I can’t say what is going to be in it but broadly speaking, what we are looking at are all the questions relating to how we certify the aircraft and what are the qualifications of the operator as well as what uses they can be put to,”