The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reviewed the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) efforts at integrating drones into the national airspace and found that its efforts at data collection–and sharing–leave room for improvement.
The FAA currently operates seven drone test sites, which have allowed for around 15,000 drone research flights since 2015. Specifically, GAO believes that the FAA could make better use of the data pulled from these sites and has recommended that the administration create a plan for analyzing affiliated data to best determine its use for advancing Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) into the larger network. GAO also recommended the FAA work to publicly share more information on how these test site programs inform integration without sacrificing protections on proprietary data.
These recommendations stem from GAO’s assertion that the FAA has yet to fully leverage the data it’s acquiring in pursuit of its integration goal. Both public and private entities have been involved in testing across a range of drone efforts: package delivery, carrying passengers, and even inspecting utilities. While much performance data has been provided, and the FAA has stated intentions to use that data in the future, there is a gap between believing and achieving: specifically, an analysis plan.
Without such a plan, GAO believes, opportunities to inform the overall integration effort and operational standards could be missed. Furthering the issue is the clamp-down on data obtained, which FAA officials told GAO was due to the wariness of exposing test site users’ proprietary data. Though indeed a concern, GAO noted that in its interviews with test site representatives and users, most agreed additional information provided on the sites’ research would be helpful for stakeholders’ research efforts and help solidify the relationships the FAA is making with them. It could even get more stakeholders to opt into using these sites.
So far, the FAA has agreed with GAO’s recommendation to share more information publicly, but only partially agreed with the call for a data analysis plan. In turn, GAO moved to change some of the language in the latter recommendation to address the FAA’s concerns.