Why Did the FAA Wait Two Months to Report Drone Near Collision?

It was widely reported this weekend that there was a near miss involving a drone and a jetliner. The event which happened on March 22nd over the skies of Tallahassee, Florida was acknowledged by FAA Administrator Jim Williams at a Drone Conference in San Francisco last Thursday.

Williams was addressing a group of 150 participants at the Small Unmanned Systems Business Exposition, a group focused on the commercial application of drones. According to Williams’ report, the pilot of the 50-seat Canadair Regional Jet CRJ-200 airliner said the drone was at an altitude of about 2,300 feet, five miles northeast of the Tallahassee airport.

FAA rules state that all unmanned aircraft should be kept below 400 feet above ground level and should be flown a sufficient distance from airports.

The intentional or unintentional key take away from his presentation was that a drone almost brought down a commercial airliner. This message was amplified by the press covering the event. The FAA, which has taken a fair amount of heat for not moving faster to enable the commercial use of drones, was likely pleased with the press’ additional coverage explaining the lengthy process of assessing safety risks and establishing UAV rules of operation.

It’s not clear why the FAA first reported the near miss at this conference rather than, say, when it happened two months ago. Clearly, this event was viewed as a significant news story (just Google “drone jet near miss”). It is possible the announcement of the incident is the FAA’s attempt to curb the (subtle) anti-FAA fervor found at both the sUSB Expo and this week’s AUVSI Unmanned Systems conference in Orlando.

Some skeptics even go as far to say that the story may be a fake. As Brendan Schulman, lawyer for the defendant in the Raphael Pirker Case, noted on Twitter there is no record of the incident in the Aviation Reporting System database. Pilots and air traffic controllers typically (though voluntarily) file a report in the database whenever anything remotely close to a collision occurs so as to protect themselves from legal repercussions.

There is no trace of the Tallahassee incident anywhere in the database.

Still others speculate that the drone in question wasn’t privately owned. Instead, the aircraft was a military drone out of one of the several Department of Defense test sites located just 75 miles from the Tallahassee airport. In his presentation on Thursday, Mr. Williams pointed out a picture (on the right…pulled directly from the presentation) of an aircraft that resembled the drone described by the airline pilot. The only difference, Mr. Williams said, was that the drone in question was painted in green camouflage.

So, basically, it looked like an Air Force fighter jet. 

Finally, the near miss had very little to do with the core elements of commercial drone operation that the FAA is attempting to regulate. Its not as if the reaction to this story is “Well, if the FAA had regulations in place, this wouldn’t have happened.” Flying a drone at 2,300 feet within five miles of an airport will never be legal. In the immediate future, there is nothing the FAA can do to prevent something like this from happening again so it is difficult to discern the intended message beyond “look how dangerous these things can be!”

In fact, the UAS community, which pretty much polices itself, stands the best chance in preventing a collision. For an explicit example of this, see DJI’s most recent firmware update that uses GPS tracking to automatically land their drones if they come within a specified range of an airport.

Let us know what you think in the comments.