During the last decade, NASA and industry have demonstrated to FAA through a series of tests that drones can maneuver safely with each other when adhering to UTM. And last summer, the agency approved for multiple drone delivery companies that use UTM to start flying simultaneously in the same airspace over Dallas, a first in the history of the aviation of the United States. Drones of Drones without Interior capabilities of UTM have also begun to license UTM services of third -party suppliers approved by FAA.
UTM only works if all participants comply with the same rules and accept sharing data, and has allowed an unusual level of collaboration for companies that compete to gain a support point in a young and hot field, Peter Sachs notes, head of the airspace integration strategy in Zipline, a company delivery company based in the south of San Francisco that is approved to use UTM.
“We all agree that we need to collaborate on the nuts and practical screws behind the scene to ensure that this distrust prior to the flight for drones works very well,” says Sachs. (“Strategic distrust” is the technical term for processes that minimize drone drones collisions). Zipline and Drones Ala, Flytrex and Droneup companies operate in the Dallas area and are competing to expand to more cities, however, they reveal where they are flying to another in the interest of maintaining the free air conflict.
A greater adoption of UTM can be on their way. FAA is expected to soon publish a new rule called part 108 that can allow operators to fly beyond the visual vision if, among other requirements, they have some UTM capacity, eliminating the need for the difficult exemption of obtain that the agency currently requires for these flights. To safely manage this additional drone traffic, drone companies will have to continue working together to keep their plane out of the other.
Yaakov Zinberg is a Cambridge -based writer, Massachusetts.
