FAA to Track and Identify Drones in 2018

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February 10, 2018

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There was really no doubt that this would happen. It was just a matter of time and number of close incidents to make it become a reality. The FAA Deputy Administrator, Carl Burleson said that regulations would go into effect later this year (2018) to allow tracking of drones in the air. Mr. Burleson discussed this with guests at the Singapore Airshow. There are many reasons to track all of the activity in the air, not just for safety concerns but primarily for security reasons.

“If we were simply dealing with safety, it would be a hard-enough challenge as a regulator,” he told the audience. “But here we have a whole set of concerns and interest by the law enforcement community, by the national security community.”

In order to accomplish this, Carl Burleson laid out a three-part plan on how it needs to be implemented:

  1. “First, the regulator wants to integrate those aircraft into the national airspace system in the U.S.”
  2. “Second, it wants to make decisions based on what kind of risks an individual drone may pose.”
  3. “Finally, the FAA, Burleson said, wants to collect and study data that would help the authority to understand those risks better.”

There is no question, implementing drone tracking, will be a heavy topic over the upcoming months and it will be interesting to see how all of this flushes out.