The goal of search and rescue is to find a missing person quickly. Drones have the potential to help. But as Reno Public Radio’s Anh Gray reports laws are limiting their uses for public safety.
Attorney Ann Morgan scrutinizes the laws regarding drone use in her office overlooking the Truckee River running through downtown Reno. She’s a legal powerhouse based at the firm of Fennemore Craig.
Morgan says protecting privacy is a big concern in regulating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs. In Nevada, state lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 239 last year, to limit the use of drones.
“It addresses a number of things, but among them,” Morgan says, “it addresses what law enforcement can and cannot do with unmanned aerial vehicles, what public agencies can and cannot do, such as search and rescue, sheriffs.”
For example, the bill provides some privacy protection by restricting the airspace a drone can enter. It makes it a felony to weaponize a drone. Also, the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendmentprotects personal privacy, prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure. Law enforcement can’t use drones to collect evidence where someone has a reasonable expectation of privacy without having either a warrant, or an exception to warrant requirements.
Since a UAV is defined by law as an aircraft, the FAA also sets rules. Morgan says public agencies deploying drones in firefighting or search and rescue need to get what’s called a “Certificate of Waiver or Authorization,” or COA, from the FAA.
“The point of the COA is that no one is allowed to fly an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone without the FAA’s permission, except for a model aircraft; that’s a whole different category,” Morgan explains. “But we’re talking about for either public use or civil use, you cannot fly one without the FAA’s permission.”
Sargent Dave Hunt oversees search and rescue for the Placer County Sheriff’s Office. He says dozens of hikers and skiers get lost in the Tahoe area each year, but new drone technology hasn’t been used by his agency yet.
“There are still rules being applied at this point, and they [FAA] are still drawing them up," Hunt says. "It won’t be awhile before we make that leap.”
Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue President Chris McConnell is a fixed-wing aircraft pilot. He says it would be quite difficult to maintain the current FAA line of sight requirement in some areas around Tahoe, like the backcountry.
“That’s a big one right now is the limitation to flying a drone, and it has to be under line of sight,” McConnell says. “I always have to be able to see it.”
McConnell says it would be challenging to fly a drone for search and rescue in some cases without losing sight of it.
“You can imagine if someone is standing in the parking lot of a ski resort, a ski patrol that’s going to fly that drone up the ski resort over the back side, down a ravine,” McConnell says, “you quickly lose sight, so there’s a legal limitation today that we have to comply with to be able to maintain line of sight that makes that very difficult.”
Over in Reno, Richard Kelley’s job is to try and help solve problems with technology. He designs and tests UAVs as the chief engineer at Nevada Advanced Autonomous Systems Innovation Center, or NAASIC.
“If we start to fly in areas with denser population, we have the state law to keep in mind, we also have FAA regulations, which are fairly specific about drones and how you can conduct a flight operation above or around people not involved in the activity,” Kelley says. “We have to be mindful of those sorts of things.”
Developing a traffic management system for UAVs is a project Kelley has been working on with NASA. Kelley says that since the industry is changing so rapidly, it’s hard to keep up.
“New developments are being announced almost every day,” Kelley explains. “Honestly, the way that I keep up with a lot of the technology is by following companies on Twitter, because that’s the only medium that’s moving fast enough to capture the pace of development.”
The FAA is forming a task force to examine numerous issues, some that will be affecting the drone industry. One key topic the agency will review is whether to expand UAV flights beyond visual line of sight. Also, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2016 is a wide-reaching aviation bill that recently passed through the Senate. Many sectors, including search and rescue, research, and the commercial drone industry are paying close attention to what will happen next.
