Three public areas near the Kenai Municipal airport have received new signage dealing with a new problem: remote-controlled hobby drones that city and airport officials fear could enter approach paths to the airport and damage incoming planes.<\/p>\n
Pilots and airport staff have recorded three instances in the past year of drones flying dangerously near the airport airspace, Kenai Airport Manager Mary Bondurant wrote in an email. Kenai\u2019s airport commission and airport staff are now launching a campaign to increase public awareness of the problem.<\/p>\n
Kenai has several wide open public areas well-suited to drone flying. Unfortunately, three happen to abut the airport \u2014 The Kenai Sports Complex soccer fields alongside the Kenai Spur Highway, the baseball diamonds on Main Street Loop, and the Fourth Street Park. These are now locations of newly-installed \u201cno drone\u201d signs created by the Federal Aviation Administration to make more drone flyers aware of FAA rules that prohibit flying unmanned aircraft within five miles of an airport without notification and permission from the controllers.<\/p>\n
Some consumer drones can fly up to 400 feet \u2014 about the altitude of an airplane approaching the Kenai airport\u2019s runway.<\/p>\n
John Parker, a Kenai-based drone entrepreneur who advised the airport commission on the possible hazards of unmanned vehicles in trafficked airspace, said that although most consumer hobby drones are small and fragile, the velocity of an encounter with a plane can create a heavy impact.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost people think because (hobby drones) are small they can\u2019t cause much damage if they run into something,\u201d said Parker. \u201cTypically if you run them into a house or tree or something it breaks the props and they fall on the ground. But in a situation where you enter an airspace where you might encounter an aircraft, it\u2019s not the size of the aircraft or the materials the basic aircraft is made of. The real danger is the batteries in these things. They\u2019re heavy and solid, fairly dense, and they can cause a lot of damage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parker\u2019s business, Integrated Robotics Imaging Systems, designs sensor packages for drones used for scientific or engineering purposes. He\u2019s also a member of the state legislature\u2019s Unmanned Aerial Systems Task Force. He described one dangerous drone incident that occurred in Kenai in November 2015, during the Christmas Comes to Kenai post-Thanksgiving parade.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was dark, and we had somebody flying a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle, a term for drone aircraft) right there by the Chamber (Kenai Chamber of Commerce Visitor\u2019s Center), and that\u2019s right by the end of the runway,\u201d Parker said. \u201cImmediately my phone starts ringing. \u2018Was that your UAV out there last night?\u2019 Absolutely it was not. My UAV weighs 31 pounds. It could cause tremendous damage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Large commercial drones, Parker\u2019s aircraft require licensing from the FAA, heavier than 0.55 pounds have to be registered in a national online database. However, drones below that weight belong to an unregulated class intended for use by hobbyists. These must weigh less than 0.55 pounds, fly below 400 feet, and be for non-commercial use.<\/p>\n
Drones of both types are becoming increasingly common. The shelves of Soldotna\u2019s Hobbies, Games, and Crafts store display a variety of remote-controlled aircraft. Recreational drones range from indoor toys that might take off from inside a cereal bowl \u2014priced around $40 \u2014 to sophisticated 4-foot-wide drones that sell for between $1,000 and $3,000. Manager Eldon Smith said those prices have come down dramatically in the past year, and that the larger drones tend not to stay on the shelves for long.<\/p>\n
As hobby drones become more sophisticated, Parker said the problem of airport interference could be solved through engineering. He said drones have already been created with \u201cgeofencing\u201d programming, in which the boundaries of airports are put into a locating system along with software that won\u2019t allow a drone within a certain distance of those boundaries.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can imagine what it took for them to get all these GPS coordinates around these airports all over our country, plus all these other countries they\u2019re doing this in,\u201d Parker said. \u201cSo the industry as a whole is really reacting quite well to this.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the present, however, pilots and drone flyers will have to rely on awareness and caution.<\/p>\n
Reach Ben Boettger at ben.boettger@peninsulaclarion.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Three public areas near the Kenai Municipal airport have received new signage dealing with a new problem: remote-controlled hobby drones that city and airport officials fear could enter approach paths to the airport and damage incoming planes. Pilots and airport staff have recorded three instances in the past year of drones flying dangerously near the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":419,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[230],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-34322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-state-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/419"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34322"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=34322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}