Over the previous decade, NASA and business have demonstrated to the FAA by a collection of assessments that drones can safely maneuver round one another by adhering to UTM. And final summer season, the company gave the go-ahead for a number of drone supply firms utilizing UTM to start flying concurrently in the identical airspace above Dallas—a primary in US aviation historical past. Drone operators with out in-house UTM capabilities have additionally begun licensing UTM companies from FAA-approved third-party suppliers.
UTM solely works if all individuals abide by the identical guidelines and conform to share information, and it’s enabled a degree of collaboration uncommon for firms competing to achieve a foothold in a younger, sizzling discipline, notes Peter Sachs, head of airspace integration technique at Zipline, a drone supply firm based mostly in South San Francisco that’s permitted to make use of UTM.
“All of us agree that we have to collaborate on the sensible, behind-the-scenes nuts and bolts to guarantee that this preflight deconfliction for drones works rather well,” Sachs says. (“Strategic deconfliction” is the technical time period for processes that reduce drone-drone collisions.) Zipline and the drone supply firms Wing, Flytrex, and DroneUp all function within the Dallas space and are racing to develop to extra cities, but they disclose the place they’re flying to 1 one other within the curiosity of retaining the airspace conflict-free.
Larger adoption of UTM could also be on the way in which. The FAA is predicted to quickly launch a brand new rule known as Half 108 which will permit operators to fly past visible line of sight if, amongst different necessities, they’ve some UTM functionality, eliminating the necessity for the difficult-to-obtain waiver the company presently requires for these flights. To soundly handle this extra drone visitors, drone firms must proceed working collectively to maintain their plane out of one another’s manner.
Yaakov Zinberg is a author based mostly in Cambridge, Massachusetts.