UAS Traffic Management The Key to the Future of Drones
Even someone who has never touched a controller and thinks that Part 107 is a household cleaning product can tell you that the answer is “No!” Their evidence? No Amazon delivery drones have yet graced their front porch. Likewise, there have been no routine operations beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) for linear infrastructure inspection, no fully autonomous flights for perimeter security around sensitive facilities, and so on.
These types of missions are the hallmarks of full integration, but none has been achieved except by a waiver to Part 107 under tightly controlled circumstances. However, we cannot waive our way to making uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) full participants in the national airspace system (NAS). That will require three things: rules, technology, and a plan. The good news is that we’ve got the plan.
Actually, it’s the second draft of a plan—so we’ve still got a ways to go, but even a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single footstep.
UTM CONOPS 2.0
Let’s begin by defining a few terms, starting with UTM. It’s an acronym for UAS Traffic Management, the system which must be put in place to permit the full integration of drones in the NAS. Briefly—because the balance of this article will be spent describing it in more detail—UTM is air traffic control (ATC) for drones.
What about “ConOps”? That’s a contraction for “Concept of Operations,” a term widely used in aviation, engineering and the military, but less familiar to people who are not deeply embedded any of those fields. Just like it sounds, a ConOps is a document that describes the functioning of a system from the perspective of its end user. It’s a disciplined approach to transforming an idea into a real-world product or service, by identifying all of the individual components and how they will interact with each other.
Remember when I said that we have a plan? That wasn’t quite true. What we actually have is the second version of a UTM ConOps developed by the FAA in partnership with a litany of other aviation- and standards-related organizations. These include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), and a whole bunch of other rarefied groups with convoluted acronyms for names that you would forget by the time you finished reading the paragraph, anyway—so I’ll spare you the trouble.
The goal of the ConOps is to define a system that will permit UAS operations up to 400 feet above ground level (AGL), including BVLOS and autonomous operations, in both controlled and uncontrolled airspace. That’s right: when this system
