U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Space and Technology, questioned witnesses today in a subcommittee hearing entitled “Keeping Pace with Innovation – Update on the Safe Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems into the Airspace.”

Witnesses included Mr. Earl Lawrence, Director of the Office of Unmanned Aircraft Systems at the Federal Aviation Administration; Mr. Brian Wynne, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International; Mr. Matthew S. Zuccaro, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Helicopter Association International; and Mr. Todd Graetz, Director of Technology Services at BNSF Railway Company.

Click to watch Sen. Inhofe’s remarks.

Remarks:

Inhofe: ... Tomorrow is the day that an announcement is going to be made—explain to me what the announcement is going to be, not nessecarily who's going to be announced, but what it's all about because we're very interested in following this real close from a GA perspective. …

Lawrence: ... The Integration Pilot Program--we're very much looking forward to that announcement tomorrow and getting actively working in that program and we see it as key to working with the local communities. That's one of the things we're really looking for because operations, just studying the operations from a research standpoint is one thing. How they interact with the local community is key to us and we're really looking forward to getting those operations going in the local communities and learning from them of what's the local citizens response to those operations.

Inhofe: Give an example of what type of...

Lawrence: So, let's take package delivery. It was brought up earlier. So, if we have package delivery and their being delivered in people's neighborhoods, in their backyards, in their front yards--how does that community respond to that? Do they want them at all hours of the night? Do they want them flying over the schools? Do you want them delivering at the park? Should it be in the front yard? Should it be at all hours of the day?

These are all of the things we are going to find out and how these systems interact with the local community and whether they want those services.

Inhofe: So they're going to be actually making those determinations, just trial and error, out there with pilot programs and how would you envision that the FAA and the DOT, using these pilot programs to obtain the needed data, to enable more informed drone rule-making. You know, we've had some experience already in this. I was involved in a concern about the pipelines. About, you know, getting, obviously, being able ... some things economically and much more conservatively. But, do you think it will help both the DOT and the FAA in their rule-making?

Lawrence: Yes, Senator. One of the things that I'm really proud of that's different in this project that I haven't seen previously with the FAA pilot projects is that we've assigned subject matter experts specifically to work on each one of these teams and their sole job is to take the lessons learned and normalize it into our policies, our procedures and in our rules. So, this is unique that we are having a full-time data group, not just about how many hours something flies, but actually accumulating that information and looking across all our policies and procedures and other agencies and what Congress may want to know and say--gather that information, write it up and make it available to others and those dedicated resources to this program, I think, is what makes it very much unique.

Inhofe: ... Mr. Zucarro, you and I have visited before and you highlighted the need for FAA to maintain preemptive authority and regulate the nation's airspace and not allow a patchwork of rules by multiple authorities to try and put these things together. How does the federal management of our nation's airspace provide greater safety for manned and unmanned aircraft, especially aircraft that operate in lower altitudes.

Zuccaro: That's a great question, and an important one to us. Safety is a number one priority for everybody and the bottom line is without standardization, with a patchwork, with different levels of expertise, applying the rules and regulations, and the inability, really to coordinate thousands of potential rules and regulations--nobody really knows what they're flying into and the standards are different for different people. And, that really just creates a disconnected operating environment that just kind of pleads for a safe operating environment because you're not producing one in that manner. As I mentioned in my testimony, if an average aircraft--and I can use the helicopter as an example because our members are now transitioning their missions over to UAS. So, today we might do a pipeline patrol that will run across thirty municipalities in three states. Tomorrow, we might be doing that with a UAS and how do we know with any level of certainty, that the standardization is the same? It's not going to be. Everybody is going to apply different standards, they're going to have different wishes, desires to their particular municipal boundaries and that to us, really is-- it doesn't make any sense when we have the safest airspace system in the world right now under a singularly regulatory authority that has created the standards that keep us all out of trouble.