What FAA Regulations Tell Us About Mysterious Drone Sightings

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow.

It’s been all over the news the last few weeks, a slew of drone sightings in New Jersey and elsewhere on the East Coast. Federal authorities and President Biden have said that these drones don’t appear to be a threat to public safety, and that the sightings have been a mix of legal drones, airplanes, and helicopters. But people still have a lot of questions and concerns about this. And the Federal Aviation Administration, just this week, issued a ban on flying most drones above almost two dozen towns in New Jersey.

Now, we’re not going to solve the mystery of these sightings here on Science Friday. But we will talk about the state of drone technology, how it’s advanced, and what’s available to hobbyists to use. Joining me now is my guest, Dr. Missy Cummings, Professor and Director of George Mason University’s Autonomy and Robotics Center in Fairfax, Virginia. Welcome back to Science Friday.

MISSY CUMMINGS: It’s great to be back.

IRA FLATOW: Nice to have you. OK, has drone technology evolved a whole lot over the past few years?

MISSY CUMMINGS: I think the drone technology that we’re seeing has been further optimized, say, than what we saw about 10 years ago, but I don’t think we’ve seen any substantial changes in the drone technology. But where we have seen substantial changes are in the regulation of the drone technology.

IRA FLATOW: Tell me about that.

MISSY CUMMINGS: Well, when I was first on this show, more than 10 years ago, we, at that time, were talking about, it was a wild, wild West. There really wasn’t a lot of regulation. The FAA wasn’t very happy and wasn’t very embracing the drones.

And, then, fast forward to 2024. Now, people realize that there’s a lot of commercial applications, that the technologies can actually be very helpful in a number of domains. And the FAA has really worked hard to start regulating these technologies in a way that doesn’t suppress innovation, but also still promotes safety. So, on the whole, I think we are much further along in 2024 than I would have forecasted over a decade ago.

IRA FLATOW: Is there any way to know whether these drones are for hobbyists or commercial use or what?

MISSY CUMMINGS: Well, if we’re talking about the drones flying around the Eastern Seaboard, whether it’s New Jersey or anywhere else, for the most part, if they’re flying around with their lights on, there’s a really good chance that they’re supposed to be there, that the FAA knows about them, that they’ve been registered. There is a chance– and I have done significant work on drone contraband being dropped into prison. It is a national problem that we have, what I would call unsophisticated attackers trying to drop contraband into prisons.

They’re unsophisticated because they also leave their lights on. And so it is possible that people who are either just trying to do prankster-like behavior or people trying to do more malevolent tasks, like dropping contraband into prisons, it’s possible that they are also flying out there.

IRA FLATOW: But hobbyists typically– I know I bought a drone a few years ago. And the first thing you do is you want to take pictures, movies, videos from your drone. And that’s what a lot of them do, right?

MISSY CUMMINGS: Yeah. And I think that’s a good thing. I think that one of the greatest things about drones is that it has lowered the bar for people to get into aviation. And it’s encouraging to me as a professor to see everyone so curious about the world around them. People, for the most part, who have the hobbyist drones, just want to look around and see what’s going on.

And this is a good thing. We should embrace this kind of exploratory behavior. And, indeed, the FAA has been very good about allowing people to do these kinds of behaviors in a safe manner.

IRA FLATOW: Uh-huh. And when does that become a problem for the hobbyists, so for we, about what the hobbyists are doing?

MISSY CUMMINGS: I don’t think the hobbyists are creating any problems because, in the case of New Jersey, if they were allowed to be there, the FAA knows about them. Or, can’t you rule out that there have been exercises at Picatinny, the military base that’s nearby. I’ve actually worked with that base on drone operations. So it is very possible that within the confines of their own airspace that they were operating.

It’s also very possible that over at Bedminster, the Trump golf course, that the security people are looking at using drones to do perimeter evaluation. We know that they’ve been using the little Spot robot dogs. So it’s not a far stretch. And, indeed many, many organizations are looking at drones for security.

So if the government is tight lipped about it, it may be that there were some operations, either for security purposes or for research purposes. And the military– they’re a “we can neither confirm nor deny group”– they may just not want to talk about it.

IRA FLATOW: And they’ve been talking– some of the states have been talking about bringing in drone-tracking devices. What is a drone-tracking device?

MISSY CUMMINGS: Well, there’s all sorts of technologies. Indeed, I actually did research from the National Science Foundation on developing passive tracking technologies.

I suspect what they are talking about are RF, radio frequency, detectors that basically find where there’s a radio frequency transmission. You can get an angular offset. So you know where it’s coming from depending on the other technologies.

But if you have an RF detector, which is actually pretty cheap– you can probably go buy one yourself on amazon.comm– you can find not only the drone, but also the ground control station. And so it’s not hard to find these systems. And if the government put their mind to it, they can. But they also may know where they’re coming from.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah. And some of the sightings that people have are talked about. They suspect the drones are like large, a really big, like the hood of a car. Are there commercially available drones that big?

MISSY CUMMINGS: These hood of a car-sized drones are actually not rare. Companies that film movies, for example, will have drones approximately on that size.

Are we seeing those in that area? Doubtful, because if that were the case, they would have been registered with the FAA. And then the FAA would have made an announcement that there was some filming going on.

While I believe that some people are seeing drones, I believe that there have been a few drone sightings. When people start to see them at those large sizes, it is probably more likely than not that they are seeing an airplane.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. And that’s what we’ve been hearing, is that people have not really seen drones. They’ve seen airplanes. The FAA has said that some of these drones that have been reported are virtually in the landing patterns of airplanes.

MISSY CUMMINGS: Right. And I think that’s another thing to remember about that area with Newark, JFK, LaGuardia, and Philly and Baltimore are not that far away. It is the busiest airspace in the entire country, maybe arguably even in the world. And so your odds of spotting an aircraft in some kind of setup for a landing configuration at one of those airports, it’s extremely high.

IRA FLATOW: If a drone is brought down, if it falls down, can it be tracked back to its owner?

MISSY CUMMINGS: This is a great question. And I’ve worked with a lot of prisons who– it turns out these unsophisticated attackers usually crash into trees, power lines, whatnot. So we’ve been able to get a lot of drones from ne’er do wells.

It depends on how unsophisticated that attacker was. Depending on if you can find the make and the model– and you maybe can backtrack that to a purchaser. Sometimes people steal them or whatnot. And it’s much more difficult.

But, sometimes you can. And I couldn’t give you a percentage. But it is possible.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. When I bought my hobby drone, I had to register it to even fly it in my backyard. And I imagine that is still true. Tell us what the process of registration is like?

MISSY CUMMINGS: Well, when you register, you really have to ask yourself one of two questions. Am I going to be a hobbyist that’s just flying for fun? Am I going to try to do commercial operations, like do real estate photos for websites? So depending on whether you’re a hobbyist or commercial, you’ll go down a couple of different paths.

You have to get some training. You have to register your drone. Recently, the FAA instituted a remote ID policy, which is– it’s actually a very important tool that allows manned aircraft to know that there’s a drone nearby, because it would be catastrophic if a drone went down the engine of a commercial jet. So we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.

And you’ll get remote ID, both for commercial and hobbyist operations. But the FAA has actually created these spaces where you can fly without all of these issues. But you just stay within a confined area, which I strongly recommend to everybody.

It seems easy to fly these. But I’ve been doing this for years and everyone crashes at some point in time because winds are unpredictable. Weather can be unpredictable. Winds at the surface are different than winds aloft.

And I find that most hobbyists are really responsible and trying to do the right thing. I would like to point out, though, that if there are people trying to do pranks– and I do believe pranksters have come out of the woodwork since this story started airing. These people are not registered.

IRA FLATOW: Yeah. And many states and municipal lawmakers are even calling for stricter rules on drones. Can the rules get any more strict?

MISSY CUMMINGS: It is possible. And the FAA is exploring this. They’re doing this, to do temporary flight restrictions over certain areas to calm people’s nerves. I don’t think that they need to do anything more. I think it would be counterproductive for commercial applications, if they tried to clamp down on this.

And, certainly, people need to understand that you should not be shooting these things down willy-nilly because there’s ramifications of shooting guns in the air and also drones flying in particular ways. And if you’re trying to shoot at what you think is a drone, and it’s a low-flying aircraft, this could be a very serious problem.

So I think what will happen is this will calm down. This is not the first time we’ve had a lot of concern. In the early days of my drone career, people really hated me and hated the work I was doing–

IRA FLATOW: Really?

MISSY CUMMINGS: –because I was trying– Yeah. I was trying to advance drones in commercial applications. And now, fast forward, more than a decade later, it’s a thing. And people are accepting.

And I just think we live in a world right now of extremes. And social media has not helped in this case. But also being a college professor of a bunch of teenagers, I promise you that there are a lot of people coming out now, just trying to make the situation worse by flying their drones around.

That’s why you’re hearing reports all the way from Boston to North Carolina. But, like in Boston, they arrested a couple of people. So I’m a big fan of that because if they’ll make examples of a few of these pranksters, then they’ll stop doing it.

IRA FLATOW: All right. Final good words to leave us with. Thank you, Dr. Cummings, for taking time to be with us today.

MISSY CUMMINGS: Thank you for letting me come back.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome– Dr. Missy Cummings, Professor and Director of George Mason University’s Autonomy and Robotics Center. That is in Fairfax, Virginia.

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