Government in the way of progress?

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is holding up a massive industry in the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) with its current requirements and its bureaucratic slow walking on easing these requirements to a more reasonable approach.  A couple of weeks ago the Administrator of the FAA, Michael Huerta, gave a keynote address at the AUVSI Xponential 2016 conference and afterwards he took about 15 minutes of Q&A, but I bet you are not surprised that he didn’t get a real fireball of a question to answer despite the countless number of frustrated people who were in attendance.  Although he didn’t take any of my questions, here are some of the things that I would have wanted him to know.

Over the last 7 years the FAA has essentially kicked the can down the road keeping an entire industry hostage while it moves at the speed of government.  Investors and entrepreneurs have poured their hearts and wallets into this industry and many have been forced to move on when they finally give up on the idea that the FAA is going to get out of the way and let the market for this industry develop.  The FAA is quick to point out that our national airspace is the busiest and most complex airspace in the world and that is was also the safest.  That is really awesome and I am proud of this accomplishment, but I also realize that San Francisco has some crazy traffic and we have found a way to test unmanned automobiles there.  We have to fly a commercial unmanned aircraft system within unaided visual line of sight and under 500 feet altitude, in the daylight, but San Francisco has autonomous cars driving around its streets?    

The frustration the FAA has ignited is simply because this is the one thing that entrepreneurs and investors cannot overcome.  It’s unreasonable government regulation.  You can’t outspend it.  You can’t out innovate it.  You can’t outwork it.  You can’t outsmart it.  All you can do is try to talk to our elected officials and our political appointees to see if we can speed up the “speed of government.”  We have to tell them that we understand the FAA doesn’t want us flying at night because the pilot can’t see it and then try to explain that technology in thermal imaging is far better than the human eye.  We have to ask them why the FAA wants a collision avoidance system on drones, when manned aircraft aren’t required to have them.  We have to tell them that the big companies are moving their UAS test sites outside of the United States so they can move forward with their development which is essentially taking jobs away. 

Government regulation is the one thing that most business owners fear the most because you can’t always count on them to do things that make sense.  The FAA is doing a lot of talking about speeding up and becoming more open to industry ideas, but it’s taken them 10 years to come up with an advisory council.  Now their biggest problems are probably what to name the council, how many members will be on the council, and defining a process for selecting council members.  I’m sure they will get through these things before Mr. Huerta’s five-year term is up!  My guess is that it will be 10 years before we see any meaningful progress on autonomous flights of unmanned aircraft.  Don’t get too worried about Amazon not being able to deliver your package using their Prime Air service because I’m sure Amazon, Google, Facebook, and a few others will get some type of exemption to allow them to fly autonomously but I wouldn’t expect any wholesale change to the Federal Aviation Regulation Part 107 allowing any company to do it.