The US Is Getting Lapped on Commercial Drones, and That Might Be OK

America is quickly losing its chance to lead the world’s future drone economy—but does it even want to?

On Wednesday, industry leaders and academics told the Senate Committee of Commerce, Science & Transportation that other countries are quickly lapping the US in the commercial drone sector—as in, other countries have one and the US doesn’t—but that’s probably not going to speed up the integration of unmanned aerial vehicles into domestic airspace.

Federal Aviation Administration rule-making on the issue has been extremely slow—the agency has missed nearly every deadline Congress has set for them on the issue. And a series of Congressional hearings on the US's commercial drone outlook has made it obvious that there are plenty of issues that still have to get ironed out before drone commerce gets going in any meaningful fashion.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said yesterday that “since the drone was invented here, we have a real responsibility to be the first in the field with regulations.”

The fact is, the US isn’t the first country to regulate drones, not by a longshot. Many European countries, including the United Kingdom and France, have been allowing the commercial use of drones for years, and are already working on second-generation regulations after seeing the successes and shortcomings of early regulation. And then there's Japan, which has allowed the commercial use of drones for even longer.

“The United States in my opinion is not leading the commercial drone industry, it’s lagging,” Missy Cummings, a former Air Force Pilot and director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Laboratory, said at Wednesday's hearing. “This country needs to move more expeditiously to capitalize on the economic potential, and it needs to grow at least an order of magnitude in an industry in which we remain woefully behind.”

There’s lots of reasons other countries are doing laps around America in the dronespace right now. The US has the most complex airspace of any country on Earth, and the FAA is obsessed (rightly) with maintaining its nearly-impeccable safety record. There’s also still the perception, even among some members of Congress, that American commercial drones will somehow resemble the Predator drones used to take out suspected insurgents overseas. Drones also raise a whole host of privacy issues that lawmakers aren’t sure how to navigate. Those in the industry say existing Peeping Tom laws are enough; civil liberty groups disagree. The result is more gridlock, more hearings that cover the same issues over and over, and more legislation that ultimately goes nowhere.

Lawmakers have no idea what to do about any of this. That much is obvious by the fact that they keep holding hearings like this despite the landscape having barely changed over the past 18 months. The FAA has finally named the six sites where commercial drones will be tested, but it’s unclear when, exactly, they will start operating, or what the requirements for getting a drone business license will be. For all intents and purposes, the US is about as far away—from a legislative and regulatory standpoint—from implementing commercial drones in any meaningful way as it was a year ago.

And that might be OK, at least in the eyes of some lawmakers. While Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada wondered “why are we 20 years behind” countries like Japan, others, such as Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, took a more pragmatic view.

“Is that a bad thing [if the US falls behind]? We get ahead in some things and we get behind in others,” he said, adding that he’s potentially worried about the implications of American companies profiting off of technology developed by the military. “Drones came out of the two wars we’ve been engaged in for a long time,” Rockefeller said.

Even as the national economy begins to look much better than it did a few years ago, that take probably isn’t going to be one that’s favored by businesses that are more anxious than ever to get a piece of the untold millions of dollars that are going to be made in the industry. But it's important, Feinstein said, "to proceed with caution."

One way of doing that is to stop looking at drones as an all-or-nothing sort of proposition. There are drones that weigh less than a pound that can take high definition video and be nearly undetectable, and there are drones that are the size of jetliners that fly many thousands of feet above the ground. The rules won't—and can't—be the same for both of them. Henio Arcangeli, an executive at Yamaha who testified Wednesday, said there's no reason why some types of drones can't be cleared to fly now.

"At least some of these products should be available to US farmers today," he said. "Other countries are already reaping substantial economic benefits from them."

Flying a drone far below where most airtraffic flies, and in the middle of an unpopulated field, erases many of the safety concerns the FAA is worried about, while the rural nature of agriculture drones removes many of the privacy concerns civil liberties groups are worried about. Why not, Arcangeli says, let the US test the waters that way?

None of this is going to happen unless lawmakers and the FAA stop dragging their feet and start making some admittedly tough decisions—and those decisions probably won’t get made until it’s obvious to the layperson that the US is getting crushed in the commercial dronespace. A couple small companies moving overseas won’t be enough.

“I think there’s a peculiar American idealism wrapped into this issue, where we don’t want to move forward in this area,” Cummings, the former Air Force pilot now at Duke, told Motherboard. “But, in the global economic market, we’ll get our butts handed to us, and then we’ll get onboard and play catchup.”