Potential Issues with UAS integration into national airspace

Introduction

When trying to add something into the already crowded airspace today provides a lot of potential challenges. Even something like a rocket launch causes flights to be rerouted just for that brief point that it must travel through controlled airspace. Integrating something like UAS provides its own unique challenges, size, flight characteristics, and safety all will impact the industry.

Size

Drones come in many shapes and sizes, Some only about 5 inches while others are as big as small aircraft. This provides its own challenge as most of the time the pilot is scanning the airspace that they are traveling through with there eyes. Seeing something that is 5 inches while traveling at close to 150 mph is next to impossible, and for a pilot, if you can't see something you can't avoid it. This provides challenges in spotting for something like a quad that wants to travel through controlled airspace. Developing ways to combat this is one of the first steps that are needed in order to integrate UAS into the national airspace.

Flight Characteristics

As a typical airliner takes off they fly something called point-to-point. This means that when they leave they leave the congested airspace to fly to another airport with congested airspace. As drones typically have a limited flight time they are more likely to stay close to an airport like a GA aircraft. This means that they are more likely to add to the congestion that the airport is already facing making jobs like air traffic controllers more difficult as they have to continuously route aircraft around the unmanned vehicle. 

Safety

A potential issue that affects drones is the risk of a total communications loss. This would impact the data coming from the drone and the data going to the drone. Data like position data coming from the drone telling both other aircraft and the pilot where the drone is is extremely dangerous. As stated previously drones are already not very large aircraft and not being able to know exactly where the aircraft is puts anything that is in the air around the aircraft at risk. Another point on this is the fact that even if the pilot could get video the controls wouldn't work in this case as well, making flying the aircraft impossible. This can be mitigated with proper fail-safes in place that will direct the drone on what to do if communications are lost. 

Conclusion

These three points are some of the most important points that must be considered when adapting the modern airspace to one that will allow for drone flights. Usually, the military is used as a stepping stone to help see integration practices but in this case, they aren't helpful. Military drones typically operate in a segregated airspace away from manned ops, and they even let drones fly over soldiers as the data that they can record from a battle is more likely to add to the success of the mission then provide issues.