Future FAA Role in UAS
Under the provisions of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2012, the FAA has been directed to develop regulations to facilitate the widespread use of UAS within the United States and to present its plan to do so to Congress by the end of 2012. The FAA has announced that it will authorize at least six UAS test sites in the United States, and has created the Unmanned Aircraft Program Office (UAPO) to oversee the development of procedures, standards, and policies that will govern this activity. These sites will be operational sometime in 2013. The FAA says that it plans to fully integrate flights of UAVs into the NAS by September 30, 2015. But this conclusion presumes that issues of privacy and possible encroachments on 4th Amendment rights will have been settled by then. As of this writing, it appears that a battle may be looming over the general deployment of drones over the United States.
Investigation
The FAA conducts investigations of aircraft accidents subordinate to and in cooperation with the National Transportation Safety Board pursuant to an arrangement known as the Accident Investigation Selectivity Program. This program is formalized in an agreement between the NTSB and the FAA and is designed to delineate responsibility in accident investigations and to avoid conflicts.2 Previously, separate investigations conducted by the NTSB and the FAA sometimes resulted in contrary findings and conclusions, and were the occasion for embarrassment to one or both agencies.
The types of accidents investigated by the FAA are normally limited to general aviation accidents or those that, by comparison to airline accidents, are relatively limited in scope or impact in the aviation community. It should be noted that the objectives of an FAA investigation are different from those of the NTSB. In particular, the FAA is looking for violations of the FARs, and it scrutinizes whether the accident was a result of deviations from standards adopted by the FAA. FAA investigations seek to determine whether FAA facilities were a factor and whether the FARs were adequate. The FAA also investigates aircraft incidents that do not result in accidents, such as “near misses” by passing aircraft or other instances when aviation safety may have been jeopardized. The FAA is also mandated by Congress to investigate all reports of violations of the FARs.