July/August 2023

Uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) service suppliers are calling for the Federal Aviation Administration to implement a regulatory framework to safely integrate small UAS into airspace at altitudes of 400 feet and below, after years of delays.

The FAA is working with industry and public stakeholders to develop a UAS traffic management (UTM) system. The FAA began collaborating with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2015 to establish and implement a framework to research, develop and test increasingly complex UTM concepts and capabilities with industry stakeholders. Small UAS weigh less than 55 pounds (25 kilograms).

Jon Hegranes, founder and CEO of Aloft, told Avionics that the FAA and NASA are “sitting on their hands,” waiting to see what industry does. Hegranes called this approach “kind of backward.”

“Create some rules, create a framework where you can fly more,” Hegranes said. “As you've seen, companies will invest millions of dollars in supporting that system if it enables a new capability.”

The emergence of UAS has the potential to provide significant social and economic benefits to the United States, according to a January 2021 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The FAA in 2020 forecasted that, by 2024, the small UAS commercial fleet, those operating in connection to a business, would grow from 507,000 to 828,000.

The UTM concept aims to create an ecosystem that will allow small UAS operations to occur at a very high scale, according to a top NASA official. Parimal Kopardekar, director of the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute (NARI), told Avionics that this predicted growth in UAS operations requires a system that will enable these operations without overloading the existing air traffic control (ATC) system and without causing any safety challenges, particularly when flying beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS).

The current ATC system operates on spoken word, or pilots asking for permission to perform tasks. An air traffic controller watches a radar display for information that is accessible only to him or her. As a result, for every change that a pilot wants to make, such as a change of speed or altitude, they must ask for permission from the air traffic controller to guarantee safety.

Kopardekar said current ATC methods are not a practical solution to safely accommodate expected growth in small UAS operations. This is because UAS do not have onboard pilots and the scale, density, and tempo of expected future operations will be very high.

Industry and the FAA collaborated to develop a UAS data exchange that is considered a key building block toward UTM. This Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) provides UAS pilots with access to controlled airspace at or below 400 feet and awareness of where pilots can and cannot fly.

LAANC also provides air traffic professionals with visibility into where, and when, UAS will operate. UAS pilots planning to fly under 400 feet in controlled airspace around airports must receive airspace authorization from the FAA before they fly.

But the FAA has left many programs in pilot program status and has not enabled them to be successful, according to a congressional source familiar with UTM. This congressional source, granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to reporters, told Avionics in June that one of these is the Integration Pilot Program (IPP). The goal of the IPP is to accelerate the safe integration of UAS into the national airspace by testing and validating new concepts of BVLOS operations in a controlled environment. The IPP focuses on detect-and-avoid technologies, command-and-control links, navigation, weather, and human factors.

The IPP also addresses ongoing concerns regarding the potential security and safety risks associated with UAS operating in close proximity to human beings and critical infrastructure. The congressional source said while the technology associated with UTM has progressed, the lack of regulatory structures has limited the broader adoption of companies able to generate revenue with new aircraft.

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 required the FAA, in conjunction with NASA and industry stakeholders, to develop a plan to allow for the implementation of UTM services that expand operations beyond visual line of sight, have full operational capability, and ensure the safety and security of all aircraft. The FAA is responsible for safely integrating UAS into the national airspace system.

Under UTM, the FAA would first establish rules for operating unmanned aircraft. UAS service suppliers and operators would then coordinate flight execution. Operators would likely be able to access UTM, for example, through smartphone applications to map routes for UAS flights and check for flight restrictions.

The FAA said it abided by the Reauthorization Act of 2018 and submitted a plan for full operational capability of UTM. Rick Breitenfeldt, FAA spokesman, said that the administration's UTM Concept of Operations (ConOps) v2.0, issued in March 2020, was the FAA's plan for safely implementing UTM services.

A powerful lawmaker disagrees.

“There's still stuff from the last FAA (Reauthorization), you just pointed out one of them, that we required of them, that they have yet to do,” Representative Sam Graves of Missouri, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman, said on July 18 at an advanced air mobility (AAM) summit hosted by Honeywell in Washington. “That's been a frustration.”

Matt Beatty, an AAM advocate and consultant who most recently served as director of business development at DroneUp, a UAS service supplier, told Avionics on May 31 that he also disagreed with Breitenfeldt's assessment. Beatty said while the UTM ConOps 2.0 is a great document for the design or integration of UAS operations into U.S. skies, a legitimate plan confers commitment of time, timelines with milestones, people, and resources, among others.

The FAA on July 18 released its Advanced Air Mobility Implementation Plan, which provides the steps it, and others, will need to take to safely enable AAM operations in the near term. Beatty said while the plan lays out the integrated master schedule with a goal of having integrated AAM operations at one or more key site locations by 2028, it does not attach specific date periods.

“UTM and PSUs (providers of services for urban air mobility) are an integral part of this broader picture,” Beatty said. “Perhaps it gives investors enough confidence to continue funding with a clearer horizon on return on investment.”

The U.S. and Europe are taking different approaches to implementing UTM concepts. Beatty said that the U.S. is trying to tackle AAM problems, including larger aircraft being developed by companies such as Joby Aviation and Lilium Air Mobility, with rules for small UAS.

Beatty said Europe has used an iterative approach to put together a very good framework for airspace regulation. This approach, called U-Space, offers a set of new services relying on a high level of digitalization, automation of functions, and specific procedures. These procedures are designed to support the safe, efficient, and secure access to airspace for large numbers of UAS. U-Space, Beatty said, enables an economy of small UAS to take advantage of airspace risk assessment.

Beatty said the US approach of waiting to incorporate larger AAM aircraft has slowed the implementation of a UTM system for small UAS.

“Instead of taking a more iterative approach to establishing some regulatory framework that could be conducive to small UAS sooner … the small UAS ecosystem is lumped in with a lot of these larger problems, challenges, and issues of advanced air mobility at the larger vehicle level,” Beatty said.

Paul Snyder, University of North Dakota assistant aviation chair and director of UAS programs, said U.S. UTM implementation has been delayed in part because of a lack of regulatory framework. Industry needs minimum performance requirements in order to streamline performance authorizations and industry standards development under UTM, Snyder told Avionics in a recent interview.

The current method of authorization, Snyder said, requires a back-and-forth dialogue between UAS operators and the FAA that delays operations. It is also hard for the FAA to accept an industry standard when there is no regulatory framework to attach it.