An uptick in alleged drone sightings
along the East Coast touched off a flurry of panicked calls for investigation on Friday from residents and state lawmakers, even as public officials stress the aircraft in question are, in fact, being flown lawfully, and a retired port authority aviation expert tells Fox News Digital that fears are overblown.
The drone complaints began pouring in last month in New Jersey, where witnesses and residents first began reporting drone sightings off of coastal areas, including off of Cape May, a scenic town located outside of Atlantic City.
More recently, lawmakers in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Maryland have reported new alleged drone sightings in their home states, with some witnesses alleging the aircraft in question have been the “size of cars” or seen flying above sensitive infrastructure or in restricted airspace.
Retired Port Authority Police Detective Lt. John Ryan told Fox News Digital in an interview Friday that the uptick in activity is likely due to two things.
The first, he said, is that drones are a fast-evolving technology that has seen a boom in both recreational and commercial use in the U.S. in the last 10 years. Federal data on drone registration reflects this sharp uptick in use, most if not all of which is legal. As of October of this year, there were more than 790,000 drones registered with the Federal Aviation Association (FAA), and nearly 400,000 registered commercial drones.
That’s “just to give you an idea” of the magnitude of the number of legal drones in the U.S., said Ryan, whose extensive police career included serving for a decade as the emergency service special operations commander at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, and then later, the chief officer of the Port Authority, whose role includes oversight of all transportation facilities, including Kennedy, LaGuardia and all other airports and ports in the area.
The second mistake, Ryan said, is that the individuals in question are asking the wrong authorities for help.
“The mistake I see people making is that they’re going to the wrong agencies and asking these questions,” he added.
The FAA is the federal body tasked with registering drones and other U.S. aircraft. It’s also the one tasked with monitoring recreational and commercial drone use in the U.S.
“In New Jersey, they’ve been asking the FBI, they’ve been asking the Department of Homeland Security — they’ve been asking everybody except the people that they should be asking,” said Ryan.
Fox News Digital’s Breanne Deppisch contributed to this update.
