NAAA has submitted comments to the American National Standards Institute’s (ANSI) Unmanned Aircraft Systems Standardization Collaborative (UASSC) roadmap that outlines the future of voluntary industry standards in the UAV industry. 

In September 2017, ANSI launched the UASSC to coordinate and accelerate the development of the standards needed to facilitate the safe integration of UAS into the national airspace system. The UASSC was not chartered to write standards, but to review areas where standardization is needed.

The Standardization Roadmap for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Version 1.0 has identified 57 gaps in the areas of: airworthiness, flight operations, personnel training, qualifications and certification. A “gap” means no published standard or specification exists that covers the particular issue in question. Of the 57 identified gaps, 34 gaps have been identified as high priority, 20 as medium priority, and 3 as low priority.

NAAA commented that it strongly agrees with the roadmaps assessment that gaps exist in the communication, treatment efficacy, operational safety, equipment reliability and airspace integration of unmanned aircraft used for aerial application compared to their manned counterparts and that extensive research and development should be required to prove their safe use. Efficacy, drift potential, and ability to comply with the aerial application requirements on EPA pesticide labels are key areas UAVs need to comply with before certification for pesticide application use.

Additionally, NAAA strongly agreed that more research and development is needed to develop detect and avoid systems and that it should be a high priority for the aviation industry, if not the highest priority. NAAA made sure ANSI and the UASSC was aware of the Colorado Ag Aviation Association conducted a study on the visibility of UAVs at low levels and only one of five manned aircraft were able to positively identify UAS. NAAA believes detect and avoid systems should be standard on all unmanned aircraft, requiring unmanned aircraft to land autonomously when a manned aircraft is detected close by due to UAV’s limited visibility and the already high cockpit workload of aerial applicators.

NAAA disagreed with the roadmap’s assessment that as UAVs scale down, existing avionics such as ADS-B will become too large and burdensome to be properly installed on UAVs. As UAV technology progresses, so will the technology of these avionics. As it currently stands, uAvionics manufactures the “ping1090” a 20-gram ADS-B transceiver. The world’s largest UAV manufacturer, DJI, is considering equipping all of its UAVs with ADS-B out.