On May 10, 2012,
in the South Korean city of Incheon, an engineer from the Austrian company Schiebel
was demonstrating to South Korean military personnel his firm's S-100
camcopter, a 150-kilogram remotely piloted drone aircraft that could assist
South Korean patrol operations at the country's border with North Korea. In the midst of the camcopter's flight,
it suddenly veered out of control and crashed into the control van where the
engineer was sitting, setting the van on fire. Two Koreans were injured and the Austrian engineer was
killed. Speculation immediately
arose that the loss of control stemmed from intentional jamming of GPS (Global
Positioning System) frequencies by North Korea, which has caused numerous
navigational problems in the area in the past.
Drones, a term
that includes helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and anything else that flies
without a human on board, have played a major role in warfare for at least a
decade. But prices are falling and
capabilities are rising to the extent that commercial and private interests are
now wanting to use drones for a wide variety of applications, ranging from
surveillance in domestic law enforcement to cargo transport. Federal Express has even expressed an
interest in using pilotless aircraft instead of manned cargo planes, for
example. But in an article in the
November issue of Scientific American,
two "drone-spoofers" from the University of Texas at Austin raise
serious questions about the safety and legal aspects of using drones these
ways.
Around the same
time that the S-100 crashed in South Korea, UT researchers Kyle Wesson and Todd
Humphreys took command of an $80,000 drone at the White Sands Missile Range as
part of a demonstration to show how easy it is to distract such aircraft by
sending out false GPS signals.
Because GPS signals are so feeble in most locations, it takes relatively
little radio-frequency power to overwhelm the real signals from satellites with
cleverly devised fake ones. Once
you have taken over the GPS receiver of a drone that relies on GPS for
navigation (as many semi-autonomous drones do), you can lead it like a dog on a
leash. Wesson and Humphreys
carried their spoof just far enough to show that they did indeed control the
craft, and then a backup manual operator took control and landed it
safely.
This demonstration
shows that while drones have gained greatly in technical sophistication and
capabilities, including the ability to fly completely without manual control
from a human operator, the regulatory environment has not kept pace. The Federal Aviation Administration is
charged with the responsibility of making U. S. airspace safe, first of all,
then hospitable to air travel for both humans and cargo. The outstandingly good safety record of
air travel in this country is partly due to the FAA's conservatism with regard
to changes in the basic way it does things.
On a flight I took
recently from New Jersey to Texas, the captain put the cockpit's air-traffic
control channel on one of the audio channels at every seat, and I spent most of
the flight eavesdropping as he checked in with a total of six or eight
way-stations of the air along our route.
It was reassuring in a way, but at the same time I was impressed by the
fact that such conversations would be completely familiar to a pilot who last
flew in 1959. The FAA follows the
principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and they change their
basic procedures about air-traffic control very slowly, if at all. A major change from radar-based control
to satellite-based control involving GPS is in the works, but the present
system will remain in place for nearly a decade into the future.
Wesson and
Humphreys worry that in the shift to the new system, drones will be left to
fall between two stools. If the
new rules for air traffic control make no provision for drones, the whole field
could be crippled by the absent-mindedness or hostility of legislators and
regulators. Already, several
states have adopted anti-drone-surveillance laws arising from privacy
concerns. These laws would not
directly impact the transportation aspects of drone use, but could severely
handicap legitimate surveillance with drones. If the FAA requires that licensed unmanned aircraft always be
within visual sight of the operator, that would make drones unusable for most
of the promising applications their developers hope to find. But on the other hand, if it is really
as easy as it seems for someone to take control of a GPS-equipped drone, there
has to be some way to prevent that from happening if the public safety is to be
protected from large, heavy machines falling out of the sky.
The FAA traces its
history back to the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which charged the U. S.
Department of Commerce with taking actions to ensure the safety of the
then-novel field of air travel.
While Congress's delegation of authority to quasi-autonomous agencies
has been abused in recent years, the FAA has by and large been a poster child
for how a federal agency should behave, keeping safety uppermost in mind while
restraining itself from issuing industry-crippling regulations. It has accomplished this feat by
embodying the best features of conservatism and by basing decisions on sound
technical arguments as well as on politics. It remains to be seen whether the FAA can manage to
incorporate drones in its next major upgrade of the way it keeps people and things
safe in the skies.
We are entering an
era in which artificial intelligence and remote control systems are bidding
fair to replace human transportation operators in many fields: railroads, automobiles, and now
aircraft. It will be interesting
to see whether those in charge of the FAA's safety regulations can adapt them
to accommodate beneficial uses of remotely-controlled and autonomous vehicles
without putting the public at undue risk of accidents. How the FAA handles drones will be a
test case for a number of other similar problems that will arise in the near future.
Sources: The November 2013 issue
of Scientific American carried the
article "Hacking Drones" by UT Austin researchers Kyle Wesson and
Todd Humphreys on pp. 54-59. I
referred to an article on the fatal South Korean drone accident at http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/
and a brief summary of the history of air traffic control in USA Today at
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-10-10-atc-history_N.htm,
as well as the Wikipedia article on the Federal Aviation Administration.
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