Domestic drones.

• Author: Spinetta, Lawrence
• Position: Readers' Forum - Letter to the editor

* In "Safety Concerns Still Blocking Unmanned Aerial Vehicles from National Airspace" (Feb. 2012, p. 12), Stew Magnuson documents how the FAA, despite pressing national defense and homeland security requirements, continues to deny requests from the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, and NASA to allow unmanned aircraft regular access to the national airspace. The FAA justifies blocking access, in part, based on the premise that the UAV accident rate exceeds that of manned aircraft. Safety statistics, however, suggest the concern is unfounded.

As the article notes, crash-rate comparisons between unmanned and manned aircraft vary, which is not surprising given how the term UAV includes everything from the Raven, a small, hand-launched model aircraft that flies a couple hundred feet above the ground to the RQ-4, a jet aircraft the size of an airliner that flies upwards of 60,000 feet. The article then cites a July 2010 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report that alleges UAV accident rates are "multiple times higher" than their manned counterparts, a claim that seems to give credence to the FAA's decision to block UAVs from enjoying regular access to national airspace.

The CRS report's claim, however, is only true if one lumps all UAVs together, something that does not make sense from an airspace regulatory perspective. Indeed, UAVs weighing more than 1,320 pounds, referred to as Groups 4 and 5 under the Joint Unmanned Aircraft System (JUAS) Center of Excellence classification system, enjoy a safety' record that is on par with manned equivalents.

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Consider, for example, the Predator's record versus that of the F-22 and the F-16. U.S. Air Force Safety Center statistics (http://www.afsc.af. mil/organizations/ aviation/aircraftstatistics/index.asp) reveal that the Predator has endured 7.69 Class A accidents per 100,000 flight hours since a prototype was rushed afield to support combat operations over the former Yugoslavia in 1997. In comparison, the F-22 has suffered an accident rate of 6.37. Similarly, the F-16, during its first 15 years, suffered a Class A accident rate of 5.96. Unlike the F-16 and F-22, the Predator did not benefit from a full development program, yet it managed to achieve a comparable safety record. Furthermore, the vast majority of the Predator's flight time was in combat; the F-22 has yet to fly a single combat mission.

The Predator's safety record is all the more remarkable considering how...