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Unmanned Aircraft Pose US Airspace Problems
coondoggie writes to tell us that congressional watchdogs have called on Congress to create a body within the FAA to oversee unmanned aircraft development and integration. The group cited the rapidly growing unmanned aircraft community and is worried about the possible repercussions. "The GAO also called on the FAA to work with the Department of Defense, which has extensive unmanned aircraft experience, to issue its program plan. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assesses the security implications of routine unmanned aircraft access to commercial airspace, the GAO said. Even if all issues are addressed, and there are a number of critical problems, unmanned aircraft may not receive routine access to the national airspace system until 2020, the GAO concluded."
It might crash (not saying it's more likely to do so than a manned one)
Particles, stuff that matters.
Let's see ... if you can buy a UAV or overrun the control station, then you can target anyone within the fuel range. You can easily crash into an airliner in takeoff, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people. You cane easily spread chemical weapons, not so easy, but quite plausibly.
And that's the bullshit security implications. More importantly, though, you'll have unseeing devices sharing airspace with pink squishy things that won't see them (like me). UAV's, by nature, are generally smaller then manned aircraft. That makes them very difficult to see.
Consider the glider pilot. Let's say that he has a transponder. He's not required to, but he does. His transponder fails. Now, he's invisible to the the UAV. His airplane is painted the same color as the clouds (white) because fiberglass and heat don't work well together. His fiberglass airplane is invisible to radar. if the UAV's coming out of the sun, he's never going to see it, and it won't see him. A person would have seen him, but the UAV doesn't have a person looking out all the windows.
How does the military do it? We block off huge chunks of airspace and keep manned aircraft far away from the UAV's. Oh yeah, and the larger UAV's are driven by certified pilots. The Army has folsk who aren't pilots flying the,m, and crashes a *LOT* of them. The idea of joe cop flying a UAV is bad in every imaginable way. People on the ground, people in the air, privacy, it's just a can of worms.
The security concern is that someone grabs control of the unmanned aircraft, for example, by hacking into the datalink that controls the aircraft.
It's a bunch of adults overseeing children, not a bunch of children just given weapons and told to go have fun.
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Really Long Off Topic Combo
There seems to be a tacit assumption in posts thus far that unmanned craft will be flying willy-nilly through the commercial lanes. That's just not the case. UAVs have pilots controlling them through encrypted datalinks. The few that have or are proposed to have "autonomous operation" will do so at altitudes that are far above normal flight levels or in restricted zones. Even during autonomous operations, monitoring is continuous and a crew is standing by to take over flight operations. As far as Air Traffic Control is concerned, UAV in-flight emergencies will be handled just like piloted craft in-flight emergencies. Airspace will be cleared around the disabled or uncontrolled craft.
I'm much more concerned over the modernization of our air traffic control systems, than the impact of UAVs.
Invenio via vel creo
So it is not a valid concern, and we should ignore it? Human beings do a bad job of judging low probability events, confusing low probability with zero probability.