By Philip E. Ross6 May 2015 22:22 GMTFAA Will Let Some Drones Fly Beyond Line of Sight Photo: PrecisionHawk

The U.S. government will finally allow a few operators to test the boundaries of rules governing unmanned aircraft, the Federal Aviation Administration said today. It represents the latest in a long—even excruciatingly long—process of responding to Congressional directives to speed commercialization of the technology.

The point is to do things right the first time so that people won’t have to “take a step back because we do something too fast,” said FAA Administrator Michael Huerta, at Unmanned Systems 2015, an annual convocation of UAV makers and users, this year held in Atlanta.

Three organizations will get to break two rules: that of staying within sight of the operator and that of staying out of inhabited areas. PrecisionHawk, a maker of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, will use them to study farmland along an “extended line of sight,” farther than the naked eye can see but still along a straight line back to a control point. BNSF Railroads will use UAVs to inspect railbeds far from the launch point, balancing the lack of visual contact with another means of tracking the vehicle, perhaps radar.

The third operator, CNN, will use UAVs to take video in crowded urban areas, which the FAA normally puts out of bounds. The news network will, however, keep the devices in sight—indeed, it will have them tethered to a ground station.

Such use of betatesters is one way the FAA can prove to its critics in Congress and the aviation industry that it’s on the ball. Those critics have been darkly hinting that they’d start developing their commerce-oriented UAVs in Canada or other similarly hospitable countries. In 2013, for example, the agency allowed ConocoPhillips to use the ScanEagle fixed-wing UAV to explore for oil in waters off the Alaskan coast. 

FAA将允许某些无人机飞离视线

faa可能会让一些无人机飞过的sight照片：precisionhawk
美国政府最终会让一些运营商测试控制无人驾驶飞机的规则边界，美国联邦航空管理局说，今天。它代表着新的一长&mdash；甚至很长&mdash；回应国会的指令速度的技术商业化的过程。

关键是做正确的事，第一次使人们不会；没有&ldquo；退后一步，因为我们太快的做一些事情，&rdquo；FAA局长米迦勒Huerta表示，在无人驾驶系统2015，无人机制造商和用户的年度会议，今年在亚特兰大举行。

< P >三组织将突破两个规则：保持操作者的视线内，不居住区。precisionhawk，制造无人驾驶汽车，或无人机，将用它们研究沿着“农田；扩展视线，&rdquo；比肉眼看到的但仍沿直线回到控制点越远。BNSF铁路将使用无人机进行检查railbeds远离发射点，平衡与跟踪车辆，另一个是视觉缺乏接触也许雷达。

< P >第三接线员，CNN，将使用无人机拍摄在拥挤的市区，而FAA通常提出了界限。新闻网，然而，保持设备的景象&mdash；事实上，它将把他们拴在地面站。

使用betatesters是单向的FAA可以证明 ；批评国会议员和航空业 ；它'在球。这些批评被黑暗暗示他们&rsquo；D开始发展他们的商务型无人机在加拿大或其他类似的好客的国家。2013，例如，该机构允许康菲公司使用“扫描鹰”固定翼无人机在海域勘探石油阿拉斯加海岸。 ；