FAA expands drone testing in urban areas and beyond the sight of device operators
Jack Nicas / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2015, the FAA was still handling commercial drones case by case — CNN's agreement to test professional-grade newsgathering drones that January was one of the few sanctioned operations. The expansion reported here moves testing into the two areas those one-off waivers avoided: cities and flight beyond the operator's line of sight.
That matters because the FAA's own advisory panel had just recommended allowing some commercial drones over populated areas depending on weight and impact risk depending on unit weight and risk of impact, making this urban test program the practical groundwork for rules that later arrived as the first formal small-drone regulations with pilot licensing requirements and a nighttime flying ban.
First-order effects
- Companies and local governments gain legal access to urban test corridors and beyond-line-of-sight flights without negotiating individual FAA exemptions like CNN's.
- The FAA gets real-world data on urban operations that its rulemaking panels had been estimating from paper risk models.
Second-order effects
- Newsgathering and logistics operators that secured bespoke waivers now push for those privileges to be generalized into standing rules rather than remaining case-by-case grants.
- Airports and security agencies face more drones in shared airspace, raising the stakes for detection systems like the FBI's, which the FAA was already evaluating at JFK.
Third-order effects
- If testing validates urban and beyond-sight operations, US drone policy shifts from per-company exemptions to category-wide rules, which is the arc the later small-drone regulations and the loosened federal test program both followed.
The trend: US drone regulation is moving from individually negotiated waivers toward standardized rules for urban and beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations.