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over a ski resort in Colorado, but that day will soon come. The six drone test sites, announced at the end of 2013, have until September 2015 to fi nd solu- tions that will allow drones to weave seamlessly into the national airspace.
Like a crack team of bank robbers planning a heist, each test site brings diff erent resources to the project.
Nevada was a shoo-in with its clear skies, huge amount of restricted airspace and history of military research. The Univer- sity of North Dakota has one of the largest civilian fl ight training schools in the world and is the only continental test site located in a temperate climate zone. Researchers in Alaska have been involved with drone
By Colin Wood / Contributing Writer
Drone research has been ramping up in workshops and universities around the country for more than a decade, but it’s the scientists at six test sites (see sidebar) designated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) who will pave the way for a new future in fl ying. Just as the Wright brothers changed the world with the invention of manned fl ight, these pioneers will propel unmanned aircraft into the skies and alter the course of history.
In November 2013, the FAA released a road map report that recognized the
untapped value of drones and also outlined the obstacles to integrating them into the National Airspace System. Unmanned aircraft were never designed or intended to meet the same rigorous standards as traditional aircraft, so there are many tech- nical and logistical barriers that prevent the FAA from permitting their use in the national airspace if its leaders want to sleep well at night. There’s much work to be done before a Boeing 747 full of passen- gers eastbound for Chicago crosses paths with an unmanned airplane seeding clouds
Sharing the Skies FAA drone test sites in North Dakota, Nevada and Alaska off er unique resources and expertise to help unmanned aircraft safely integrate into the national airspace.
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The possibilities for drones are seemingly limitless, from aiding emergency response to scouting the locations of polar bears.
Drone Test Sites • University of Alaska • State of Nevada • Griffi ss International
Airport, New York • North Dakota Depart-
ment of Commerce • Texas A&M University,
Corpus Christi • Virginia Tech
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research for 13 years, and their partnerships with institutions in Oregon and Hawaii offer a geographically diverse testing area.
Applications for Drones Ro Bailey is the deputy director of the
Alaska Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a retired Air Force brigadier general. Her test site will help develop safety standards for drone systems and run test flights in extremely high altitudes and at high speeds over water.
But the public should first understand why they’re doing all this, Bailey said — this technology will change the world.
“There are so very many benefi- cial uses of unmanned aircraft systems that have nothing to do with people looking in windows,” she said.
A big piece of the FAA’s push to integrate drones into the national airspace is to put an end to the battle between legislators, advocacy groups and drone proponents. Drones can help save lives, put out fires and rescue lost people, but the red tape limiting their use by first responders has made such stories rare. The 19 firefighters who died in a blaze outside Phoenix in June “prob- ably” would have been spared with the help of drone intelligence, Bailey said.
“We have mapped the borders of wild- fires, which provides better information to the incident commander for deployment of firefighters the next day,” Bailey said. “We could use [unmanned systems] to assist with monitoring rivers that are at risk of flooding and provide better information to emergency managers in real time. We’ve used them for infrastructure assessment, in cases where putting manned aircraft in that place was too dangerous,” she said, refer- ring to a case where drones were used to survey an oil company’s active flare stack.
“We can do volumetric measurements far more accurately and more quickly for potential avalanches or how much material
has been taken out of a gravel pit. We can do precision mapping for archaeological digs, and in many cases be able to give them such detailed instructions that they can go straight to more promising locations to begin the digs,” Bailey said. “We can locate polar bear dens so you can keep people away from those dens.”
When the imagery comes back for Steller sea lion counts, she said, the team can always tell whether the images were captured by a drone or by a manned heli- copter — when it’s a manned helicopter, the
animals are either staring at the camera or diving into the water, but they don’t notice the drones.
Drone research allows scientists to be less inva- sive. Researchers in Alaska, for example, are developing a Breathalyzer drone that flies through a whale’s spout
and analyzes the bacteria collected to determine the animal’s health.
Drones are also used to study volca- noes to learn more about how their ash interacts with aircraft and where it’s safe for manned aircraft to fly.
Bailey also described how drones are used in research to help ships navigate
dangerous, icy waters. In one instance, 250 miles north of Alaska’s northern shore, drones were flown at 1,800 feet, dropping small buoys into the water that collected temperature data from 9 meters underwater and then wirelessly trans- mitted that data back to the drones.
“There’s not a manned aircraft in the world that would do that for safety reasons,” she said. There’s no replace- ment for unmanned aircraft when it comes to that kind of work, Bailey added, and that kind of work could prevent a ship from sinking someday.
Safety Focus While the FAA wants drones in the air,
it has also made it clear that compromising existing aviation safety standards is not an option. One of the ways Alaska will facili- tate the harmonious integration of drones into the airspace is by helping to develop the drone type certificate process. Type certifi- cates for traditional aircraft are the proof that its design has been approved by an authority like the FAA, so when someone buys an aircraft, there’s no question as to whether it is safe, assuming it’s current on maintenance. Drones don’t have FAA-approved designs, and most people probably wouldn’t feel
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There are so very many beneficial uses of unmanned aircraft systems that have nothing to do with people looking in windows.
The six test sites have until September 2015 to work on technical and logistical issues that currently prevent drones from entering the national airspace.
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comfortable fl ying if they knew they were sharing the air with a drone someone built in their garage. It would be the air equiva- lent of a pedestrian wandering around on the freeway.
All three test sites that Government Technology interviewed named “sense and avoid” functionality as one of the most pressing areas of research. One of the biggest problems with putting drones in the air is there’s no consistent way for an aircraft without a person on it to obey the rules of the sky as currently written. But the FAA has stated that it will not change existing “sense and avoid” rules to accommodate drones, so researchers will need to get inventive so unmanned aircraft can follow the regulations.
Linking and sense-and-avoid systems are two areas of research North Dakota will help develop. The Northern Plains Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Site is led by Bob Becklund, a colonel with the North Dakota National Guard and former commander of the 119th Fighter Wing.
“Links have got to be assured and reli- able, which means they have to be secure from hacking, encrypted, redundant, reliable — all that kind of stuff ,” Becklund explained. “That’s quite a challenge. Or in the event a link gets unreliable or there’s a component failure, which of course can happen and the airplane loses its link, then it has to have onboard systems that it can recover itself safely and without hurting anybody on the ground, autonomously in this example.”
Air traffi c control needs to be aware of what a drone is doing at all times, just as with any aircraft, so if something goes wrong such as losing the link with the ground, it can then direct other aircraft away from that area, Becklund said.
Safety research is a huge priority for the North Dakota site, but the staff hope that drone research won’t just minimize safety impacts in 2015 when drones begin launching, but also that their discoveries will contribute to making all of aviation safer. “As far as what we proposed for the test site, that covers the whole spectrum, everything from pilot training standards, which is what the University of North Dakota specializes in, certifi cation in pilot training and evaluation standards for air crew, the aircraft and ground station and air worthiness [type] certifi cation.”
The university off ers undergraduate degrees in unmanned aircraft systems operations, and it’s that industry and culture of aviation and drones that likely led the FAA to select it as one of the test sites, he said. The university’s engineering school also leads research on nanoscale electronics, which is connected to many of the size-weight-power engineering problems faced by drone researchers.
“This region can really off er the FAA and this nation and the world, for that matter, an expertise pool and airspace that’s unencumbered by other aircraft density, and a ground population that’s nice and low,” said Becklund. “It’s a perfect place to do fl ying with new technologies.”
There are a few potential drone appli- cations that Becklund likes: The movie industry will be able to save money renting helicopters if it wants aerial shots, real estate developers can easily and cheaply get aerial photos of properties, energy companies will have a cost-eff ective solu- tion to look for breaks in their pipelines or power lines, and auto racing events could be enhanced for fans by assigning each car a drone with a camera.
In Nevada, the Desert Research Institute has already begun promoting its own brand of drone innovation, as it looks for new ways to increase snowpack in Lake Tahoe ski resorts. Lake Tahoe today relies on cloud seeding towers that introduce silver iodide crystals into
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Researchers in North Dakota hope to improve not just drone safety but aircraft safety in general.
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the atmosphere, increasing regional rain and snowfall by an estimated 10 percent. In January, the Desert Research Institute put a cloud seeding drone on display at Heavenly Village in South Lake Tahoe, Calif., to promote what its drones might someday off er the region.
Nevada was a natural choice for one of the FAA’s test sites. The state has about 320
fl ying days per year, thanks to limited cloud cover and 10 times more restricted airspace than all the other states combined, said Tom Wilczek, defense and aerospace industry liaison at the Nevada Governor’s Offi ce of Economic Devel- opment. The huge amount of airspace it can use for testing and the existing
drone research and industry experts in Nevada would have made it seem strange if it wasn’t selected, Wilczek said.
“This is its birthplace,” he said. “The industry came from here, and it came here because of the [U.S. Defense Depart- ment] applications. I’d say the whole unmanned systems industry is kind of our birthright. It was a matter of pride.”
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the University of Nevada, Reno were both quick to off er their research and development to the project, Wilczek said, and they received 100 percent political support from all levels.
Nevada’s wide open airspace will allow researchers to test things they might not be able to experiment with in other areas,
Wilczek said, like various climb rates and angles of descent. The FAA has said Nevada will concentrate its eff orts on developing drone standards and operations, operator standards, certifi cation requirements and air traffi c control procedures. The state has a wealth of experts in all areas of drone manufacturing and research to help.
Some applicants that wanted to be test sites may have talked about creating a local economy around drone manufacture and research, Wilczek said, but the FAA doesn’t have time for that. The FAA chose the places that already have an industry in place, because it wants drones now.
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We could use [unmanned systems] to assist with monitoring rivers that are at risk of fl ooding and provide better information to emergency managers in real time.
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