FAA sets date for small unmanned planes in U.S. airspace.

• Author: Jean, Grace V.
• Position: Homeland Security News

Mid-2013 is the latest estimate for when the Federal Aviation Administration will allow operators of small unmanned aerial vehicles to fly in national airspace without having to go through a lengthy bureaucratic certification process, according to an agency official.

That day can't come soon enough for UAV manufacturers, who want to expand their market beyond the military. Police departments, for example, are keenly interested in using small remotely piloted aircraft to fly over cities. They are quieter, and much less expensive, to operate than a helicopter.

Rick Prosek, manager of the FAA's unmanned aircraft program office, said a committee to write the proposed rules for operating the aircraft was formed in June.

"We are plowing through the small UAS rule to put that on the street," he said at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference.

There will be a lengthy process of producing a draft, comment periods, and then the finalizing of the procedures operators will have to go through to launch, fly and land small UAVs, just as general aviation pilots do every day without having to notify Washington.

Currently, any entity wishing to fly an unmanned aircraft in national airspace must obtain a certificate of authorization from the FAA.

The office has 285 active COAs with 85 organizations for a total of 82 aircraft, said Randy Willis, who is in charge of approving the certificates for military operations.

"It is a very wide, broad range of aircraft and capabilities that come to our office," he said.

Pressure to allow regular UAV flights is coming from both industry and the military.

The services can fly their aircraft in restricted airspace over their bases, but want to expand their reach as more of the unmanned aircraft that are currently in Iraq and Afghanistan return to the United States. Pilots and operators will need more room to train on their systems.

A recent collision between unmanned and manned aircraft in Afghanistan was poor timing for those hoping the FAA speeds up the rulemaking process. It involved an Army RQ-7 Shadow UAV and an Air Force Special Operations Command MC-130.

"Had we been operating a ground-based sense-and-avoid system at the time of that incident, it would have been completely averted," the Army's deputy project manager for unmanned aircraft systems, Timothy Owings, told reporters during a briefing.

UAVs' ability to automatically sense-and-avoid other aircraft has...