Drones everywhere, but who is accountable? Fort Collins Mayor Wade Troxell wonders

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s another drone over Colorado and Nebraska.

Since the holidays, these relatively small aircraft are increasingly filling the skies, inciting public curiosity and growing concern, and not even the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) can tell you who is flying them.

Perhaps Missy Blackman, a resident who saw three drones over her farm, summed it up best saying, “It’s creepy. I have a lot of questions of why and what are they, and nobody seems to have any answers.”

Welcome to 2020, where Jetsons-like technology confronts a 20th Century regulatory framework. Unmanned Aviation Systems (UAS), better known as drones, are becoming more common. And more disturbingly, these drones are flying around unchecked and unaccountable to anyone. Flights have never been so close to our communities or anticipated in such numbers.

Since manned air travel started in earnest in the 1930s, the U.S. has not seen quite a “Kitty Hawk” moment like this one. There are more than 1.5 million drones registered by the FAA, — nearly 5 times the number of registered manned aircraft — and the number’s still growing. With the emergence of drones as a new technological force over the last few years, the FAA has been scrambling to provide oversight, guidance and the rules necessary to keep the U.S. airspace safe and secure.

A small piece of good news is that just two weeks ago, the FAA finally released delayed proposed rules for remote identification of drones, which would allow the public to access information about a drone and its operator like a license plate does for cars. The purpose of the regulation is to begin to meet national security needs, pave the way for commercial operations in populated areas, and permit flights beyond the operator’s line of sight.

Until this is done, we will continue to have manhunts for the operators as Colorado and Nebraska are doing right now. But even after we take the steps to ID a drone, should it really be flying anywhere? Also, who will be accountable for our safety, privacy and security concerns? The FAA is quick to claim their jurisdiction of U.S. airspace for safety, but they also emphasize they aren’t in the business of protecting privacy or keeping errant drones out of your backyard.

As the late San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee often poignantly reminded policymakers — drones make everywhere in a city an airport, and that’s not a challenge to take on lightly. As the mayor of Fort Collins, representing the National League of Cities on the FAA’s Drone Advisory Committee, I see quite clearly that we are only at the infancy of UAS applications that could be of great value to cities in both urban and rural areas. But it won’t be simple.

There are real differences between manned aircraft and drones that the FAA is not necessarily structured to acknowledge or handle unless Congress prioritizes it. Some would also like to pretend that the FAA and industry are set up to do it all, but their powers actually stop short of the ground.

There are real issues of land use, safety, security, noise and privacy that drones will raise in cities and towns that the FAA simply doesn’t have the jurisdiction to answer. This is why Sen. Mike Lee of Utah introduced the Drone Integration and Zoning Act, to begin to bring all the layers of government together. This bill establishes a regulatory framework for drones based on the principles of cooperative federalism — sharing responsibility based on the areas we traditionally govern.

The Drone Act recognizes that the fastest way to truly integrate drones into the U.S. airspace is through a collaboration structure that mirrors and leverages the strengths of our federal, state and local governments. The sooner we recognize that federal, state, and local governments will all have a role to play to productively integrate UAS technology in U.S. communities, the faster we could see the benefits of drones.

As law enforcement continues to hunt out the operators of these mysterious drones in Colorado and Nebraska, it only reinforces the need to collaborate because UAS presents a new transportation system that goes beyond manned air flight as we have

known it.