Farther than the eye can see
New frontier for commercial drones involves letting them fly out of sight of their pilots
REMINGTON, Va. — For years, there’s been a cardinal rule for flying civilian drones: Keep them within your line of sight. Not just because it’s a good idea — it’s also the law.
But some drones have recently gotten permission to soar out of sight. They can now inspect high-voltage power lines across the forested Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. They’re tracking endangered sea turtles off Florida’s coast and monitoring seaports in the Netherlands and railroads from New Jersey to the rural West.
Aviation authorities in the U.S. and elsewhere are preparing to relax some of the safeguards imposed to regulate the recent boom in off-the-shelf consumer drones. Businesses want simpler rules for new commercial applications, although privacy advocates and some airplane and balloon pilots remain wary.
For now, a small but growing group of power companies, railways and delivery services like Amazon are leading the way with special permission to fly drones “beyond visual line of sight.” As of early July, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration had approved 230 such waivers — one of them to Virginia-based Dominion Energy for inspecting its network of power plants and transmission lines.
“This is the first step of what everybody’s expecting with drones,” said Adam Lee, Dominion’s chief security officer.
That expectation — of small drones with little human oversight delivering packages, assessing home insurance claims or buzzing around on nighttime security patrols — has driven the FAA’s work this year to craft new safety guidelines meant to further integrate drones into the national airspace.
The FAA said it is still reviewing how it will roll out routine operations enabling some drones to fly beyond visual line of sight, although it has signaled that the permissions will be reserved for commercial applications, not hobbyists.
“Our ultimate goal is you shouldn’t need a waiver for this process at all. It becomes an accepted practice,” said Adam Bry, CEO of California drone-maker Skydio, which is supplying its drones to Dominion, railroad company BNSF and other customers with permission to fly beyond line of sight.
“The more autonomous the drones become, the more they can just be instantly available anywhere they could possibly be useful,” Bry said.
Part of that involves deciding how much to trust that drones won’t crash into people or other aircraft when their operators aren’t looking. Other new rules will require drones to carry remote identification to track their whereabouts.
Not everyone is enthused about the pending rules. Pilots of hot air balloons and other lightweight aircraft warn that crashes will follow if the FAA allows largely autonomous delivery drones the right of way at low altitudes.
Broader concerns come from civil liberties groups that say protecting people’s privacy should be a bigger priority.
“There is a greater chance that you’ll have drones flying over your house or your backyard as these beyond-visual-line-ofsight drone operations increase,” said Jeramie Scott, a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center who sat on the FAA’s advisory group working to craft new drone rules. “It’ll be much harder to know who to complain to.”