How much of a safety threat to commercial airliners are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)? Regulators and the public are trying to play catch up with the technology. It is a safety concern to us on many levels. We are concerned about when [small UAVs] find themselves in our commonly shared airspace; that's the most profound concern at this moment. We're looking for techniques to mitigate the risk. We've broken it down into four basic areas. 1) A continued emphasis on education for the operators: Require information that operators have to view before they fly [UAVs]. 2) Technology. We think geo-fencing is capable of restraining them from our airspace, and it's available. We think it should be hard to overcome. 3) Registration. Not the panacea, but if we can find a way to get these [UAVs] registered at the point of sale, when we pull them out of the carcass of my MD-88, [then] we can trace them back to the original owner. The owner may say it was stolen out of my pickup truck last week. But it's another layer. You go to Best Buy to buy one and [the clerk should say] 'Sorry, sir, I need to collect some information before I can sell it to you.' Name, address and date of sale. It also might impart some sense of responsibility to the purchaser that this is something you have to operate with care. 4) Enforcement. We have to get our arms around enforcement, formalizing our approach to enforcement. I sure hope we get all these tools in place.
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