View Map of Domestic Drone Authorizations in a larger Google map.
Last week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) finally released its first round of records in response to EFF’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for information on the agency’s unmanned aircraft authorisation programme. The agency says that the two lists it released include the names of all public and private entities that have applied for authorisations to fly unmanned aircrafts domestically. These lists—which include the Certificates of Authorizations (COAs), issued to public entities like police departments, and the Special Airworthiness Certificates (SACs), issued to private UAS manufacturers—show for the first time who is authorised to fly UAS in the United States.
Some of the entities on the COA list are unsurprising. For example, journalists have reported that Customs and Border Protection uses Predators to patrol the borders. It is also well known that DARPA and other branches of the military are authorised to fly unmanned aircraft in the US. However, this is the first time we have seen the broad and varied list of other authorised organizations, including universities, police departments, and small towns and counties across the United States. The COA list includes universities and colleges like Cornell, the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, and Eastern Gateway Community College, as well as police departments in North Little Rock, Arkansas; Arlington, Texas; Seattle, Washington; Gadsden, Alabama; and Ogden, Utah, to name just a few. The COA list also includes small cities and counties like Otter Tail, Minnesota and Herington, Kansas. The Google map linked above plots out the locations we were able to determine from the lists, and is color coded by whether the authorisations are active, expired or disapproved.
The second list includes all the manufacturers that have applied for authorisations to test-fly their aircraft. This list is less surprising and includes manufacturers like Honeywell, the maker of Miami-Dade’s T-Hawk; the huge defence contractor Raytheon; and General Atomics, the manufacturer of the Predator. This list also includes registration or “N” numbers,” serial numbers and model names, so it could be useful for determining when and where these aircraft are flying.
The COA list however does not include any information on which model or how many aircraft each entity flies. The agency confirmed that there were about 300 active COAs and that the agency has issued about 700-750 authorisations since the programme began in 2006. As there are only about 60 entities on the COA list, this means that many of the entities, if not all of them, have multiple COAs (for example, an FAA representative said that University of Colorado may have had as many as 100 different COAs over the last six years).
Click here to download the List of Certificates of Authorizations (COAs) Issued to Public Entities.
Click here to download the List of Special Airworthiness Certificates – Experimental Category (SACs) Issued to Private Entities
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Amazing, things start to work and propably in the rest of the world.