Media and Entertainment Industries Eager for UAS Use, but Hurdles Remain

AUVSI photo.

By Brett Davis



Journalists and the entertainment world are ready to incorporate unmanned aircraft into their operations, although they acknowledge there are still safety and operational issues to work out before this becomes commonplace.



The use of unmanned aircraft for these industries was the focus of a daylong conference at Southwestern University Law School in Los Angeles on 7 Feb.



Tom Hallman, president of Pictorvision, which uses manned aircraft to capture aerial imagery for movies, television and news operations, said he would love to be able to incorporate UAS into his operations.



“To be clear, we do not use UAVs currently,” Hallman said. “… The day someone tells me it’s legal, we’re going to be jumping in with both feet. It’s clearly the way the industry is going to go, and I want to be a leader in that.”



However, because his company is successful, he’s also not willing to endanger it by running afoul of the Federal Aviation Administration. He said the FAA’s delay in allowing commercial use is creating a perverse incentive, because other entrepreneurs, who have less to lose, are already illegally taking to the air, including a “numbskull” he recently spotted flying a toy UAS with a camera over a crowd in a park.



“The gray area is actually accelerating the problem they [the FAA] wanted to avoid,” Hallman said. By keeping people like him out of the business, other users “can go underground, … and they’re doing it.”



He said small UAS can augment the footage obtained by manned aircraft but won’t replace them.



Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, addressed the conference via Skype and said news organizations are equally enthusiastic about using UAS, but they are running into other issues that don’t affect the movie industry, namely privacy and safety.



Some envision a day where a reporter can pop his car trunk and produce a small UAS to cover breaking news, but what happens when dozens of reporters try the same thing in the same space, he asked.



Reporters covering political conventions face the issue of deconflicting the bandwidth for their wireless microphones, he noted, and something similar will need to be developed for flying UAS over news events.



“They literally go through a whole process of determining who is on what frequency just so people are not stepping on each others’ sound,” he said. With unmanned aircraft, “It’s not as simple as just open the trunk and launch it. There really needs to be a standard operating procedure, and people wanting to use those things, they’re really going to have to abide by those.”



Ted Wierzbanowski, chair of the ASTM committee that will write standards to accompany the forthcoming — and again delayed — small UAS rules from the FAA, said the rules governing such systems were tightened in 2008, because “there was some really stupid stuff going on” where people were flying systems unsafely.



He was a member of the committee that gave the FAA small UAS recommendations, which “have been sitting there for four years now with no resolution.”



“It’s not the FAA holding these things up,” he said. “It’s the bureaucracy in Washington that’s holding things up,” by which he said he meant the Department of Transportation and Congress.



His committee is now standing by to write the standards to accompany the small UAS rules. They will likely fall into a category where manufacturers self-certify that they meet the standards, he said, adding, “We’re really trying to harmonize these standards worldwide.”