With drones and planes elbowing for airspace, Canada tightening its rules

[Press Association]

White-knuckle fliers looking for another reason to avoid getting on a plane may be adding drones to their list of worries.

A suspected collision between an Airbus A320 and a drone over the weekend at London’s Heathrow Airport is just the latest incident involving the popular remote flying devices, which are increasingly elbowing their way into the airspace usually reserved for planes, helicopters and other vehicles that carry actual people.

While British regulators have spent the last few days emphasizing the dangers of flying drones near airports, Transport Canada is in the process of overhauling 20-year-old rules that govern drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) — rules that were conceived in an era when a UAV was a motor-powered model plane.

“You talk about innovative disruptive technologies, this is disruptive,” says Aaron McCrorie, director general of Civil Aviation at Transport Canada.

“We built a regulation in a particular moment in time when nobody contemplated the proliferation of UAVs.”

Transport Canada says it investigated 96 reported incidents involving UAVs in 2015, up from 61 in 2015. And the government agency’s CADORS site, where pilots can report incidents, reveals the increasing proximity between drones and planes.

Just last week, an Air Canada Boeing 777 en route from Shanghai spotted a nearby drone as it was landing in Toronto, while a Porter Airlines flight from Sudbury, Ont., encountered one while landing at Toronto’s Billy Bishop airport.

Now, these aren’t necessarily near-misses, but often situations where the proximity was perhaps a bit too close for the pilot’s comfort.

But international incidents have been more disturbing, including the suspected Heathrow collision, and a drone that came within 60 metres of hitting a Lufthansa jumbo jet near Los Angeles International Airport last month.

And then there was that car in Belleville that crashed head-on into a drone in December, causing $1,000 damage, but no injuries.

“It’s up there (on the worry scale),” says Bernard Gervais,” president of the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association, an aviation advocacy group for small-plane pilots.

“They want to follow a plane, they want to be at 3,000 feet, which you shouldn’t be doing, and they just want to go as far as they can.”

And while the smallest drones can look like little more than elaborate Lego constructions, Gervais says that at high speeds, they can easily disable a plane.

“It can break the propeller, or maybe it goes into the engine,” he says. “It can kill the pilot and passengers.”

With the number of drones in the sky rising steadily, there’s sure to be more close calls to come. Like many regulators, Transport Canada is scrambling to keep up.

“Because they’re so readily available, easy to fly and relatively inexpensive, we’re seeing a whole new class of recreational users who just don’t know how to operate safely, or increasingly perhaps don’t want to operate safely,” says Transport Canada’s McCrorie.

Under the current regime, strict rules govern the operation of commercial UAVs, which are classified as weighing more than 35 kilograms. Operators of these drones, which are often used for commercial photography or research, have to apply for a special operating certificate.

But smaller UAVs are largely unregulated. The rise in recreational drones prompted Transport Canada to launch an awareness campaign in 2014, and its website has a list of do’s and don’ts for the drone pilots, which advise, for instance, staying nine kilometres away from any airport, and no more than 90 metres above the ground.

The new rules, which could be introduced this year, will remove the 35-kilogram distinction, and widen the umbrella of UAVs that could require certification for operators. Rather than focus on size only, it will take into account where and how the drone is being operated.

“Larger UAVs operating in more complex higher risk environments, in a built up area near an (airport) will need to comply with much more rigorous regulatory requirements,” McCrorie says.

“Small UAVs operating in less complex environment, safer environments, a rural area in northern Saskatchewan, for example, will have to comply with less onerous regulatory requirements because the risk is lower there.”

It will also put in place operating rules that will apply more broadly across the spectrum, giving Transport Canada more ammunition to enforce how the drones are used.

McCrorie says the new approach mirrors the direction being taken in the United States and Europe, and is aimed at both improving flight safety and reducing the administrative burden on the government, which has seen applications for large-drone operator certificates skyrocket.

“It’s really to protect aircraft in the air and people on the ground,” he says.