Pilot union urges FAA to reject Rainmaker’s drone cloud-seeding plan

The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) has urged the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to reject Rainmaker Technology’s petition to deploy cloud-seeding flares via small drones, citing significant safety concerns. ALPA argues that Rainmaker’s proposal lacks sufficient demonstration of safety equivalence and poses extreme risks, particularly due to unclear flight locations and altitudes within controlled airspace where commercial airliners operate. The union also raises issues about the flares themselves, including potential fire hazards, foreign object debris, and the absence of trajectory modeling or environmental impact analysis for the chemical agents used. Rainmaker CEO Augustus Doricko and aviation regulatory manager Sam Kim counter these claims by emphasizing that ALPA’s objections rely solely on publicly available information and do not consider the comprehensive safety data and risk mitigations submitted confidentially to the FAA. They highlight that flights will be conducted only in predetermined safe airspace with necessary permissions, and that the environmental impact of cloud seeding materials like silver iodide has been studied for