Who has power to fly drones inside the USA?

Electronic Frontier Foundation is digging:

This 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 drone authorization program. The agency says the… two… lists… it released include the names of all public and private entities that have applied for authorizations to fly drones 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 drone manufacturers—show for the first time who is authorized to fly drones 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 Predator drones to patrol the borders. It is also well known that… DARPA… and other… branches of the military… are authorized to fly drones in the US. However, this is the first time we have seen the broad and varied list of other authorized 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 authorizations are active, expired or disapproved.… 

The… second list… we received includes all the manufacturers that have applied for authorizations to test-fly their drones. This list is less surprising and includes manufacturers like… Honeywell, the maker of… Miami-Dade’s T-Hawk drone; the huge defense contractor… Raytheon; and… General Atomics, the manufacturer of the… Predator drone. This list also includes registration or… “N” numbers,”… serial numbers and model names, so it could be useful for determining when and where these drones are flying.

Unfortunately, these lists leave many questions unanswered. For example, the COA list does not include any information on which model of drone or how many drones each entity flies. In a meeting with the FAA today, the agency confirmed that there were about 300 active COAs and that the agency has issued about 700-750 authorizations since the program 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 today said thatUniversity of Colorado… may have had as many as 100 different COAs over the last six years). The list also does not explain why certain COA applications were “disapproved” and when other authorizations expired.

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