The middle-aged man reported missing by his family couldn’t be found, but a 2-pound helicopter equipped with a thermal-infrared camera quickly told Mesa County sheriff’s deputies where he wasn’t.
DraganFlyer X6, the “micro” unmanned vehicle, sharply narrowed the search area at a much lower cost — reason enough to use the small chopper every day in the 3,300-square-mile Western Slope county, said Ben Miller, quartermaster with the Sheriff’s Department.
“We could use it to save lives,” he said.
But save for a couple of emergency situations that required special waivers, the Canadian-built contraption hasn’t ventured out of a 1-mile radius of the Mesa County Landfill.
The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates the nation’s airspace, limits operation of an unmanned aircraft system, or UAS, to demonstration flights under a special certificate.
UAS makers and users at this week’s Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference at the Colorado Convention Center complain about the FAA’s slowness in developing rules and approving the required certificate.
“The FAA system sounds great on paper, but it doesn’t work,” Miller said. And when it comes to rule-making, “we’re all waiting on the FAA.”
The FAA’s main concern about the burgeoning uses and manufacturers of unmanned aerial vehicles is safety, said spokesman Mike Fergus.
The agency aims to ensure that unmanned vehicles don’t pose a hazard to commercial air traffic since the operator-guided aircraft don’t comply with “sense and avoid” rules.
Fergus said the FAA is developing policies, procedures and approval processes by working with the UAS industry but that more safety data are needed before unmanned vehicles are integrated into the National Airspace System.
It also will be a while before people can accept unmanned vehicles as such aircraft moves from critical roles in battle zones to civil and commercial uses, several conference speakers said.
The public can support the “unblinking” surveillance for illegal cargo on the nation’s coastline as homeland security, said Northrop Grumman’s Gene Fraser. Also, UAS use in hazmat response, bomb squads, environmental sensing and weather forecasting is acceptable, he said.
But he predicted that while people will get on an unmanned airport train, he doubted they want to hop onto an unmanned plane.
People need time to get comfortable with a technology that didn’t exist a few years ago, said Brian Whiteside of Evergreen Aviation.
“There is a lot of fear about this technology and where it is going,” he said.
Ann Schrader: 303-954-1967 or aschrader@denverpost.com
