UAS Bring Promise but Need Regulations to Flourish, Toscano Tells Aero Club

AUVSI photo.

By Brett Davis



AUVSI President and CEO Michael Toscano addressed the Aero Club of Washington, D.C., on Friday, saying unmanned systems represent still-untapped potential that will be unleashed once regulations allow.



Unmanned aircraft and other systems will be useful in the fields of medicine, search and rescue, wildfire fighting, natural disaster recovery, pipeline inspection, the movie industry and more, he said.



“So you can imagine the capabilities that are coming with unmanned systems,” Toscano said. 



The economic impact will be huge as well. According to AUVSI’s economic forecast for aerial integration, released last year, within the first decade of commercial flight there will be 100,000 new jobs created and more than $82 billion of economic activity.



However, before that can happen, several things need to be addressed. For UAS, Toscano said five things need to be done: operators must be properly trained; vehicles must be airworthy; the flight environment should be assessed for safe operation; there should be accountability for misuse, including some type of system to identify the owner of a given UAS; and data must be handled properly.



The regulations must be in place to allow this to happen, he said, noting that the Federal Aviation Administration has missed rulemaking deadlines.



“We have got to be able to understand what the standards must be, and we have got to start fielding this technology,” Toscano said, later pointing out that “for every day we’re not flying in the national airspace … it costs us, from an economic standpoint, about 27 million dollars a day,” plus a loss of efficiency, especially in jobs where people put their lives on the line.



“That is why this technology will be fielded,” Toscano said. “It’s just a matter of when.”