All eyes are on the FAA has it drafts rules for small commercial drones. It has already missed a deadline in August and the agency now feels that the delay could cause it to miss the September 2015 deadline for these new rules. A top FAA safety official, Peggy Gilligan, made these comments in front of a congressional House panel today, saying “We all agree that the project is taking too long.”
The FAA’s failure to come up with drone rules is hurting businesses that want to deploy the technology for deliveries, among other things. Amazon, which wants to be able to do drone deliveries at some point, has even said that it will move drone testing outside the U.S. because of the FAA’s inability to come up with the rules.
According to Gilligan a “balanced” proposal on drones is under executive review but when it is made public many months may be required for the FAA can arrive at a final set of rules. This process could bring about additional delays.
Gerald Dillingham, the Government Accountability Office’s director of civil aviation says that “the consensus of opinion is the integration of unmanned systems will likely slip from the mandated deadline until 2017 or even later.”
For businesses this means that they’ll have to keep waiting for the FAA to get this done, and put any plans they have of incorporating this technology into their business on hold.