HR-3958 : Still Just a Bill

This bill directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to publish guidance and implementation procedures for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), also known as drones, that specifically address environmental assessments and reviews.

For instance, the FAA guidance and implementation procedures must

• provide guidance for nationwide programmatic approaches for large-scale distributed UAS operations to leverage environmental assessments or environmental impact statements for subsequent related actions,
• contain intra-agency process improvements to avoid providing conflicting safety and environmental feedback to operators, and
• prioritize proposed projects or activities that can be shown to contain specific factors that benefit the environment (e.g., offsets or limits the impacts of non-zero emission activities).

The bill also directs the FAA, to the maximum extent practicable, to concurrently conduct reviews and analyses for an environmental assessment required as part of the review of a UAS's design, construction, maintenance and operational sustainability, airworthiness approval, or operational approval.

Further, the FAA must develop and establish substantive criteria and standards metrics to determine the airworthiness of an unmanned aircraft based on specific noise standards.