It's a quiet morning in San Francisco, with soft sunlight illuminating patches of thick fog billowing over the Golden Gate Bridge. A solitary unmanned aircraft—a 4-pound, battery-powered wedge of impact-resistant foam with a 54-inch wingspan, a single pusher-propeller in the rear, and a GoPro video camera attached to its body—quietly approaches the landmark.
Raphael "Trappy" Pirker controls the aircraft from a nearby hill. The bridge is within sight, but the 29-year-old enjoys the scenery through virtual-reality goggles strapped to his head. The drone's-eye view is broadcast to the goggles, giving Pirker a streaming image of the bridge that grows larger as he guides the radio-controlled aircraft closer.
Pirker, a multilingual Austrian and a master's student at the University of Zurich, is a cofounder of a group of radio-control-aircraft enthusiasts and parts salesmen called Team BlackSheep. This California flight is the last stop of the international group's U.S. tour. Highlights included flights over the Hoover Dam, in Monument Valley, down the Las Vegas Strip, and through the Grand Canyon. The team has also flown above Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Berlin, London, and Istanbul. (...)
Team BlackSheep is willfully—gleefully, really—flying through loopholes in the regulation of American airspace. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allows unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to fly as long as their operators keep them in sight, fly below 400 feet, and avoid populated areas and airports.
The FAA also forbids any drone to be flown for business purposes. "In the U.S. right now, it's completely open, so long as you do it for noncommercial purposes," Pirker says. "The cool thing is that this is still relatively new. None of the laws are specifically written against or for what we do." (...)
Federal, state, and local agencies can apply for FAA waivers to be able to put drones to work. Although the process is cumbersome and time-consuming, there has been a sharp rise in requests (see "Rising Drone Demand," page 81). For example, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) operates a fleet of 21 T-Hawks, ducted-fan UAS that can be readied for takeoff in 10 minutes and can ascend to altitudes of 8000 feet. The USGS has obtained permission to use these craft to view hard-to-reach cliff art, track wildlife, inspect dams, and fight forest fires. Others are not so lucky. Last year the FAA grounded a $75,000 drone that the state of Hawaii bought to conduct aerial surveillance over Honolulu Harbor. The agency would not waive the rules because the flights were too close to Honolulu International Airport.
In a bid to force a reassessment of the regulations, Congress in 2012 ordered the FAA to open the National Airspace System (NAS) to unmanned aircraft. The law sets a deadline of 2015 for the FAA to create regulations and technical requirements that will integrate drones into the NAS. "Once the rules of the air are established, you're going to see this market really take off," predicts Ben Gielow, a lobbyist for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
The FAA predicts that, because of the law's passage, 30,000 public and private flying robots will be soaring in the national airspace by 2030. For a sense of scale, 350,000 aircraft are currently registered with the FAA, and 50,000 fly over America every day.
Some experts express alarm at the prospect of tens of thousands of extra aircraft flying in the already cramped U.S. airspace. "To most of us air traffic controllers, it's unimaginable. But we're also smart enough to know it's coming," says Chris Stephenson, an operations coordinator with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "I refer to UAS as the tsunami that's headed for the front porch."
Raphael "Trappy" Pirker controls the aircraft from a nearby hill. The bridge is within sight, but the 29-year-old enjoys the scenery through virtual-reality goggles strapped to his head. The drone's-eye view is broadcast to the goggles, giving Pirker a streaming image of the bridge that grows larger as he guides the radio-controlled aircraft closer. Pirker, a multilingual Austrian and a master's student at the University of Zurich, is a cofounder of a group of radio-control-aircraft enthusiasts and parts salesmen called Team BlackSheep. This California flight is the last stop of the international group's U.S. tour. Highlights included flights over the Hoover Dam, in Monument Valley, down the Las Vegas Strip, and through the Grand Canyon. The team has also flown above Rio de Janeiro, Amsterdam, Bangkok, Berlin, London, and Istanbul. (...)
Team BlackSheep is willfully—gleefully, really—flying through loopholes in the regulation of American airspace. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allows unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to fly as long as their operators keep them in sight, fly below 400 feet, and avoid populated areas and airports.
The FAA also forbids any drone to be flown for business purposes. "In the U.S. right now, it's completely open, so long as you do it for noncommercial purposes," Pirker says. "The cool thing is that this is still relatively new. None of the laws are specifically written against or for what we do." (...)
Federal, state, and local agencies can apply for FAA waivers to be able to put drones to work. Although the process is cumbersome and time-consuming, there has been a sharp rise in requests (see "Rising Drone Demand," page 81). For example, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) operates a fleet of 21 T-Hawks, ducted-fan UAS that can be readied for takeoff in 10 minutes and can ascend to altitudes of 8000 feet. The USGS has obtained permission to use these craft to view hard-to-reach cliff art, track wildlife, inspect dams, and fight forest fires. Others are not so lucky. Last year the FAA grounded a $75,000 drone that the state of Hawaii bought to conduct aerial surveillance over Honolulu Harbor. The agency would not waive the rules because the flights were too close to Honolulu International Airport.
In a bid to force a reassessment of the regulations, Congress in 2012 ordered the FAA to open the National Airspace System (NAS) to unmanned aircraft. The law sets a deadline of 2015 for the FAA to create regulations and technical requirements that will integrate drones into the NAS. "Once the rules of the air are established, you're going to see this market really take off," predicts Ben Gielow, a lobbyist for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
The FAA predicts that, because of the law's passage, 30,000 public and private flying robots will be soaring in the national airspace by 2030. For a sense of scale, 350,000 aircraft are currently registered with the FAA, and 50,000 fly over America every day.
Some experts express alarm at the prospect of tens of thousands of extra aircraft flying in the already cramped U.S. airspace. "To most of us air traffic controllers, it's unimaginable. But we're also smart enough to know it's coming," says Chris Stephenson, an operations coordinator with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. "I refer to UAS as the tsunami that's headed for the front porch."
by Richard Whittle, Popular Mechanics | Read more:
Image: Craig Cutler
