Homeland Security’s Crashed Drone Is a Problem for the FAA

Image: US Department of Homeland Security.

At almost any given moment, a fleet of Department of Homeland Security spy drones is whirring over the US-Mexico border, looking down. Only now—after a mechanical failure brought down one of the $18 million Predator B drones off Point Loma, CA, late Monday night—the agency has temporarily grounded all 10 of its unmanned surveillance aircraft out of “an abundance of caution”, DHS representative Michael Friel said in a statement.

“The cause of the failure is unknown,” according to Friel, who added that nobody was injured as a result of the emergency landing.

The crash—and perhaps more tellingly, DHS’s safety precautions—elevate the ongoing discussion and debate over the speed at which the government can clear US skies for the potential widespread use of commercial drones. In 2012, the FAA was tasked with fully integrating civil unmanned aerial system into American airspace by 2015. The air safety agency has been woefully behind schedule basically from the start: As we’ve reported, the FAA’s recent selection of six domestic drone test sites came a whole year late. At this point, it’s probably safe to say the FAA will fall short of next year’s deadline. 

And maybe that’s a good thing. If anything, the FAA might now enjoy a bit more (much-needed) time to see the whole plan through with all due and thorough diligence now that that DHS’s squadron of southern border drones sits quietly at an operating base in Arizona. There’s a strong case to be made that the rapid introduction of guidelines to allow commercial drones like Amazon’s Prime Air to deliver your soap with cold, unfeeling precision shouldn’t come at the expense improving airline safety operations, Bloomberg reports.

“If you are going to meet that same high safety bar, it means you better be very careful, very deliberative,” Air Line Pilot Association national safety coordinator Sean Cassidy told Bloomberg.

Of course, there is a marked distinction between something like the Predator B that splashed down in a controlled crash some 20 miles southwest of San Diego, and a small quadcopter—a distinction still largely lost in the hysteria over drones above. A small quad- or hexacopter is not the same as the sort of thing DHS works with.

To continue the Prime Air example, remember that the sort of system Amazon plans to use has a roughly 30-minute battery life, and a payload of just a few pounds. The Predator B, variously known in Air Force lingo as the MQ-9 Reaper, can stay aloft for 27 hours at 50,000 feet, all while handling a 3,000+ pound payload of sensors and cameras (and if needed, weapons), according to General Atomics, the California-based firm behind the Predator. (As of early 2013, DHS required that its Predators’ at-home surveillance capabilities should be able to sniff out whether an upright human in the dark of night is “armed or not”,  CNET reported last March.) Prime Air’s delivery drones, and others like it, are about two feet across, if that; the Predator has a 66-foot wingspan. The one that that went down this week was one of two specially kitted out drones used for maritime surveillance. 

Beyond specs, there are regulations. Which brings us back to the sticky position the FAA finds itself over getting civil drones off the ground. Government agencies such as Customs and Border Protection can only fly drones after receiving a special permit—a direct result of the FAA having not yet set in stone the guidelines that it says will clear the way for the everyday use of unmanned vehicles.

But even still, the fact of the matter is that American skies are going to get more and more crowded over the next few years. Set aside all the knotty privacy concerns and concerns that drones give rise to, and we’re left with the sobering thought of very soon having to manage untold tens of thousands of aircraft, manned and unmanned, over our heads. The ALPA’s Cassidy, himself a pilot and head of North America’s biggest pilot union, says that it all “creates a much more complex issue than just pointing it [a Predator] out to sea.”

Which is not to say the FAA’s drone problem is not still in some sort of tailspin. Just that now, it’s got some time to land without hurting anyone or anything.