Are Pilots Over-Reporting “Near Misses” Between Drones and Airplanes?
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Historically speaking, the FAA has had a difficult job; imagine the complexity of safely coordinating all of the air traffic. Now, thanks to the rapid proliferation of drones, the FAA’s job has gotten even harder. Drones are responsible for creating 770,000+ new pilots. While the drone operators aircraft is small, it still shares the same airspace, and as such falls into the FAAs domain.
The Federal Aviation Administration exists to keep the skies safe for people. In the past two years, that task has grown much more complex. The FAA added an unprecedented number of new pilots: 770,000 registered drone operators, which is almost 200,000 more than the 584,000 total pilot certificates held in 2016. As one might expect, that massive increase in people operating flying machine is accompanied by a jump in how many pilots saw strange airborne objects.
What didn’t change, even as hundreds of thousands of drones joined the skies over the United States, is the number of dangerous close encounters with drones. The Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), a hobbyist organization founded in 1936, today published a report examining the reported close calls between drones and crewed aircraft. Looking at data collected and published by the FAA, the AMA report found that, out of a dataset of 1,270 drone sightings released in February 2017, only 44 of those encounters, or 3.4 percent, were near misses or close calls. Further, this is consistent with data provided in 2016 and 2015, where the number of closes calls hovered between 3.3 and 3.5 percent of the total reports.
By Sam Estrin|2017-06-04T12:38:43+00:00June 5th, 2017|Drones, FAA, Safety|Comments Off on Are Pilots Over-Reporting “Near Misses” Between Drones and Airplanes?