GAO Wants Better Small Drone Safety Risk Management by FAA

The FAA should establish a means for ensuring its management of small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) safety risks follow the applicable principles and requirements in the agency's policies, GAO said in a study Thursday. It said the FAA is only partially following principles of safety risk management in its policies on analyzing and assessing safety risks of UAS, implementing controls of those risks and monitoring the effectiveness of those controls. It said better risk management practices would help the agency decide whether more steps are needed to ensure airspace safety. It said the FAA lacks reliable information about the extent of unsafe use of small UAS, since the thousands of reports of potentially unsafe use it has collected offer limited information, though the agency also is trying to improve its data. In a letter dated March 9 included in the report, Assistant Transportation Department Secretary Keith Nelson said the FAA agrees it could improve documentation of its safety risk management activities for small UAS operations, and it concurred with the recommendation.