By Alan Levin Feb 14, 2014 12:00 AM ET
It came from the sky.
One moment, Eileen Peskoff was enjoying
a hot dog after running with the bulls at a Petersburg, Virginia,
racetrack. Then she was on her back, knocked down when a 4-foot drone
filming the event in August lost control and dove into the grandstands
where she was sitting.
“You sign up for something called running
the bulls, you think the only thing you’ll get hurt by is a 1,200-pound
bull, not a drone,” Peskoff said in an interview.
Drones flown
for a business purpose, like the one that left Peskoff and two friends
with bruises, are prohibited in the U.S. That hasn’t stopped an invasion
of flights far beyond the policing ability of the Federal Aviation Administration, which since 2007 hasn’t permitted commercial drones in the U.S. while it labors to write rules to allow them.
Drones have nonetheless been used to film scenes in the Martin Scorsese-directed movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” and sporting events for Walt Disney Co. (DIS)’s
ESPN. They’ve inspected oilfield equipment, mapped agricultural land
and photographed homes and neighborhoods for real estate marketing,
according to industry officials, company websites and videos on the
Internet.
All such flights in the U.S. are outside the rules.
While the FAA hasn’t ruled out granting commercial-use permits under
limited circumstances, it has so far only allowed operations in the
Arctic.
Ignorance, Avoidance
Some operators plead
ignorance of the rules. Some say their flying is legal under exemptions
for hobbyists. Using drones is so lucrative for Hollywood that they’re
flown knowing they’re illegal, said one operator who declined to be
identified.
The FAA is aware the number of flights is increasing
and tells users to stop when it learns about them, it said in an
e-mailed response to questions. The agency said it’s considering new
guidance on what’s permitted.
For every time the FAA orders an operator to stand down -- as it did after a Michigan florist did a test delivery by drone Feb. 8, and in January with Lakemaid Beer, which posted a video
online proposing 12-pack deliveries to Minnesota ice fishermen - -
untold others fly below the radar, said Patrick Egan, a Sacramento,
California-based author and producer of an annual unmanned aircraft expo
in San Francisco.
Small
drones available on the Internet or at hobby stores for less than
$1,000 -- some equipped with high-definition cameras like those made by San Mateo,
California-based GoPro Inc. -- are flooding the U.S. and being used by
tens of thousands of people, whether legal or not, Egan said.
Airliners, Drones
The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation on March 4 after pilots on an Alitalia SpA Boeing Co. (BA) 777 nearing New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport spotted a multirotor copter that came within about 200 feet (61 meters).
At
least six other pilots, including a crew on another airliner, have
reported close calls since September 2011 with what they believed were
small unmanned aircraft like those favored by hobbyists,
cinematographers and other businesses, according to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System, which logs safety issues.
While
the government needs to do more to control the growth in drones, it has
been “swamped” by political cross-currents and budget cuts that have
made it difficult to craft rules, Doug Davis, who ran the FAA’s unmanned aircraft office in the mid-2000s, said in an interview.
‘No Way’
As
airline pilot unions call for strict standards on the qualifications of
drone operators, industry advocates including Egan say the standards
should be eased. Lawmakers such as Senator Dianne Feinstein,
a California Democrat who said protesters flew toy drones outside her
house last year, have pressed the FAA to add privacy requirements as it
crafts safety rules.
“The FAA is going to have to step up the
enforcement of people who use these things,” Sean Cassidy, national
safety coordinator for the Air Line Pilots Association, said in an
interview. ALPA is the largest pilots union in North America.
The
FAA conducted 17 enforcement actions for illegal drone use in the 13
months that ended in July 2013, according to agency data that doesn’t
include informal steps like phone calls. It has issued one fine, which
is being contested.
The FAA, set up to enforce manned aviation,
doesn’t have the resources to enforce existing rules on a new form of
flying that isn’t tied to airports and requires so little training
almost anyone can do it, Davis said.
“The reality is there is no way to patrol it,” Davis said. “There’s just no way.”
Scorsese’s ‘Wolf’
Some businesses flying drones make little attempt to hide what they’re doing.
Freefly Cinema, an aerial photography company in Los Angeles and Seattle, has photos on its website of helicopter drones it says it flew to film scenes for “The Wolf of Wall Street” and a commercial for Honda Motor Co. (7267)
Tabb
Firchau of Freefly declined to comment in an e-mail. Rebecca Cook at
the public relations company 42West LLC, which represents Scorsese,
didn’t respond to e-mails requesting a comment.
A Freefly drone shot footage for a documentary about the U.S. Civil War battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
that aired on most Public Broadcasting Service stations in the U.S. in
November, the filmmaker, Jake Boritt, said in an interview.
Boritt
said he got permission to film from the U.S. National Park Service.
“It’s not something that we did a whole lot of research into,” Boritt
said.
The park service, which controls access to the Gettysburg
site and not the airspace, didn’t check with FAA about aviation
regulations, Katie Lawhon, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
Worth It
While
ESPN hasn’t used drones to film events, some independent production
companies supplying video to the network have, Josh Krulewitz, a
spokesman, said in an e-mail. ESPN is telling production companies it
works with to comply with regulations, Krulewitz said. He didn’t specify
events at which drones were used.
For Hollywood, the benefits
of using drones are worth the miniscule risk of being caught, said an
operator who films scenes for TV shows and commercials. He asked to be
unidentified because the practice isn’t permitted.
An unmanned
aircraft system costing a few thousand dollars or less can replace
dollies, booms and stabilization equipment costing tens of thousands,
this operator said.
Surf’s Up
Eric Sterman, of Haleiwa, Hawaii, on Oahu’s
North Shore, created a stir this year in the surfing world with a
series of drone-shot videos of some of the world’s best surfers.
Sterman’s
videos show wave riding at Oahu’s Banzai Pipeline and Maui’s Pe’ahi
Jaws, filmed by a remote-controlled copter that floats above the waves.
In one, filmed this year, his drone hovered next to a piloted helicopter
also filming.
Sterman said in an e-mail he didn’t go near the
helicopter. “I’m just having fun filming as a hobby and sharing it with
friends and followers,” he said. Sterman, who lists a professional photo
agency on his Vimeo.com page, said he wasn’t paid for any of his drone
video work.
Flying model aircraft is permitted provided it’s for
recreation only, the FAA said in a written response to questions. In a
1981 advisory, the FAA said these unmanned aircraft should be flown no
higher than 400 feet and away from populated areas. It also said they
shouldn’t be flown near planes and helicopters, and that operators can’t
use the hobbyist exemption to fly commercially.
‘High Concern’
Flying
a drone next to a helicopter violates safety protocols, Matthew
Zuccaro, president of Helicopter Association International, an
Alexandria, Virginia-based trade group, said in an interview.
“We
have a very high concern that there are people operating unmanned
vehicles without our knowledge and without communications,” Zuccaro
said.
Asked by the Australian surfing publication Swellnet.com
about the regulations, Sterman said, “I know you can fly them as a
hobby. But no, I really don’t know the rules at all,” according to a
Jan. 15 story.
The drone that hit Eileen Peskoff and two
friends, Brad Fillius and Patrick Lewis, on Aug. 24 is owned by Scott
Hansen, a Virginia Beach filmmaker.
Hansen was hired to produce
aerial views of the event for a promotional video, Rob Dickens, chief
operating officer of The Great Bull Run LLC, said in an interview.
The drone was operated by an employee of a local hobby shop, according to the FAA. Hansen wasn’t at the event, Dickens said.
Quad-Copter, GoPro
Peskoff
said Hansen told her some of the batteries died. He wrote her a check
for her medical bills afterward, Peskoff said. Hansen didn’t return
three phone messages left at his production company, Digital
Thunderdome.
The FAA said it spoke with the operator and the
hobby shop’s owner to explain the rules, and the owner agreed to provide
training for customers who purchase model drones. Additional
enforcement action is still being considered, the agency said in a
statement.
“It was kind of lucky,” Peskoff said. “The place was filled with young people. It hit three adults instead of a child.”
Also
filming that day was a drone being flown for ESPN’s Kenny Mayne’s Wider
World of Sports show, Matt Doyle, executive producer and director of
Big Brick Productions in Manchester, New Hampshire, said in an interview.
The
production company has used drones to film commercials and feature
shows for ESPN, and hasn’t looked into the legal restrictions, Doyle
said.
“It seems like everyone and their mother has a quad-copter
and a GoPro attached to it,” he said. “It’s not just a production
company.”
Vague Rules
GoPro, which filed for a U.S.
initial public offering last week, makes cameras that surfers, skiers
and sky divers use to record their exploits. Katie Kilbride, a
spokeswoman, said the company declined to comment on drone operations
and safety.
Drone advocates like Egan and the Association for
Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an Arlington, Virginia-based
trade group, said the FAA’s drone standards are vague and helped lead to
the explosion of users pushing the envelope.
“AUVSI is
certainly concerned that the longer FAA takes to write the safety rules
for small unmanned aircraft, the more difficult it will become to
regulate this industry,” Ben Gielow, general counsel of the group, said
in an interview.
‘Careless, Reckless’
The FAA had planned
to propose rules by 2011 allowing commercial flights with drones
weighing less than 55 pounds (25 kilograms). The agency now doesn’t
expect to unveil the proposal until November.
The agency also
isn’t expected to meet a Congress-imposed deadline to craft rules for
safely integrating unmanned aircraft into the nation’s airspace by 2015,
the Transportation Department’s inspector general said in a report Feb.
5.
Even without those regulations, the FAA says it has the
authority to prohibit commercial unmanned aircraft operations and
“careless or reckless” flights by drones, which it calls unmanned aerial
systems or UAS.
On Feb. 12, for example, an FAA inspector
called Wesley Berry, chief executive officer of Flower Delivery Express
LLC in Commerce, Michigan, after the company posted a video showing a
drone delivering flowers to a home, Berry said in an interview. The
tests, which showed the technology wasn’t ready for routine deliveries,
were shut down, Berry said.
‘Genie Out’
“We are
concerned about any UAS operation that poses a hazard to other aircraft
or to people and property on the ground,” the agency said in a
statement.
After the agency fined a Swiss man $10,000 for flying
a drone over a Virginia university in 2011, the only fine the FAA has
issued, his lawyer argued there were no regulations that applied. An
administrative law judge hasn’t ruled on the appeal.
The number
of civilian unmanned aircraft will reach 175,000 by 2035, most of them
smaller models, a report by the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Volpe
National Transportation Systems Center found. Many such aircraft, such
as the DJI Phantom 2, are already on the market.
“All of these people are out there flying trying to make a buck,” Egan said. “The genie is definitely out of the bottle.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Alan Levin in Washington at alevin24@bloomberg.net
Story and comments/reaction: http://www.bloomberg.com
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