Experts Urge Action to Close Gaps in Airspace Awareness and Empower Local Law Enforcement
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
With a swirl of media attention surrounding mysterious drone sightings in the skies above New Jersey and other states, experts in drone systems and counter-UAS technology are calling for greater use of drone-detection systems by civilian infrastructure owners. They also think that local law enforcement agencies should be given greater authority to detect drones flying where they shouldn’t be.
In an effort to calm public fears over the sightings, a group of federal agencies recently issued a joint statement, declaring weeks of investigations had failed to identify “anything anomalous” and said the suspected high level of drone activity in the skies over the Northeast U.S. does not appear to present a risk to national security or public safety risk.
“We assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones,” said the joint statement put out by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and Department of Defense (DoD).
Nevertheless, the series of reported incidents has pointed out a number of gaps in the ability of U.S. officials to rapidly identify unmanned aircraft and determine if they pose a threat, according to a number of experts who spoke with DroneLife.
David McGill, law enforcement director for SPS Aerial Remote Sensing, said the recent surge of reports of drone sightings near sensitive military sites and critical infrastructure exposes the vulnerability of such sites to drones operated by malicious actors.
“The time to act was long ago and, and I’m afraid that we’re not going to act until something happens. We’re starting to see that this thing in New Jersey is actually kind of opening people’s eyes to saying, ‘Hey, Wow! Are we prepared for it?’”
McGill, whose company specializes in developing command-and-control systems and detection software, said SPS Aerial Remote Sensing and other companies produce technology that would help the owners of critical sites identify drones flying in or near there airspace, but this technology is not yet widely in use.
“Let’s get our stuff together and let’s put some funding in, certainly in the big city areas in the United States, the high-density populations that may be at more risk for terrorism and nefarious actors,” he said.
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