Illegal drone flights ruffle feathers

QINGDAO — Civil aviation industry insiders have called for tighter regulations over illegal drone flights as China has become the world’s largest manufacturer of consumer drones.

The country has about 20,000 unregistered unmanned aerial vehicles, according to attendees at the China UAV Safety Development Forum, which opened in Qingdao, Shandong province, on Saturday.

Wu Qiang, deputy chief engineer of the Aviation Industry Development Research Center of China, said illegal drone flights threaten the operational safety of civil aviation flights.

For example, nine illegal drone flights near Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport in Sichuan province in April caused the cancellation of 43 flights and delayed another 142, while 112 flights were diverted to alternate airports.

There should be increased supervision over the safety of drones as more products come onto the market, Luo Ge, director of the China Association of Remote Sensing Applications, said at the forum.

The Civil Aviation Administration of China has developed two cloud computing systems — U-cloud and U-care — for drone flight registration and monitoring.

Every drone equipped with a chip of over 100 grams can access the U-care system, allowing the system to track its movements and give timely warnings to the operator about flight zones and speed limits, according to Lan Yudong, its developer.

Shi Rong, business director of Huawei Wireless X Labs, predicted that aviation supervisors will soon rely on the 5G mobile network to verify a drone and precisely locate its movements.