The drone was 100 feet below and 100 feet to the right of the plane, according to a Federal Aviation Administration report, and didn’t require any evasive action. The plane landed safely, but airport police were notified about the drone’s unauthorized intrusion into the airspace, one of 44 reported at North Texas airports through the first nine months of 2016.
None of the cases resulted in planes being struck and just one, a small Beechcraft plane, had to alter its flight course to avoid a collision at an elevation of 10,500 feet near DFW Airport.
But airport officials and U.S. aviation regulators are increasingly worried about potentially catastrophic encounters as drones become more widely used by businesses and hobbyists.
“The bottom line is that anyone who flies a drone in and around the airspace near airports can pose a serious safety risk,” said Michael O’Harra,” said Michael O’Harra, a deputy regional administrator for the FAA.
For the last week, the FAA and several partners have been testing new technology at DFW Airport that’s meant to quickly identify drones in restricted airspace.
The tests are set up like a high-tech game of hide and seek, with a team of operators flying a drone on the west side of the airport, while engineers for Gryphon Sensors use a combination of radar, radio-frequency and optical sensors to identify and ultimately pinpoint the aircraft.
The tests at DFW are the sixth and final in a series of tests around the country evaluating different technologies for drone detection.
O’Harra said DFW Airport, which has about 1,800 daily take offs and landings, provided an ideal place to test the technologies in a heavily congested airspace. One of many challenges facing the sensors is being able to differentiate between unauthorized drones; other, authorized aircraft and even non-aircraft objects like wildlife or stray plastic bags blowing in the wind.
The research also allows the FAA to compare different proposed system, gauge how many sensors would be needed to monitor a given area and see what combination of different sensors provide the quickest and most accurate detection.
The FAA recorded about 1,800 reports of unmanned drones, or sometimes model planes, in 2016, relying for now on visual sightings by pilots or people on the ground. That’s up 50 percent from the roughly 1,200 sightings reported in 2015, a trend that FAA officials expect will continue as drones become more widespread.
“We believe that most people who fly drones for fun or those who do so for commercial purposes intend to fly those drones safely,” O’Harra said. “Some people don’t understand exactly what flying safely means.”
Hobbyists are not allowed to operate drones within five miles of an airport unless they’ve received permission from airport and air traffic control officials.
Civil penalties for operating near an airport can range up to a fine of $27,500, according to an FAA official.
The testing being done at DFW and other airports is only the beginning stages of eventually incorporating these types of drone-detecting systems across the country. Researchers will analyze the data gathered and use it to develop minimum standards detection systems should meet.
From there, airport officials and regulators would still have to figure out how the systems would be incorporated into an airspace, who would be responsible for responding when a drone is identified and ultimately who would pay to install the technology.
The work represents a small but critical step toward safely incorporating more drones into the airspace.
“We don’t want pilots coming unexpectedly across a drone. You could run into impact issues...quite frankly it could be a distraction to the pilot if they weren’t expecting to see it. We’re concerned about anything that could take the pilot's attention away from the flight they’re operating.
©2017 The Dallas Morning News Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
