Avionics News December 2020 - 39

T

he Federal Aviation Administration is making
steady progress on integrating unmanned aircraft
systems into the national airspace system with
demonstration projects, but the heavy lifting is just ahead to
achieve large-scale use of commercial drones.
At the FAA's fifth UAS Symposium, which took place
in cooperation with the Association for Unmanned Vehicle
Systems International, several speakers mentioned the
phrase " crawl, walk, run, " and surely the sector is not yet
at the run stage. But whether the
drone industry is in the walk stage
of a toddler with limited radius or a
more-mobile middle school student
is in the eye of the beholder. And
when will the commercial UAS
sector run like athletes? In manned
aviation, the management of highdensity air traffic into New York City
hub airports is like an Olympic sport.
The FAA is obviously looking for the
most-professional, safest and mostsecure solutions to drone traffic so it
can integrate with what is happening
in the world of manned aircraft. The
Olympics for drones may be out
there, but how far is unclear.
To move ahead, the FAA aims
to publish a final rule for remote
identification of drones by December
and the agency is assessing more
than 50,000 comments received
on the preliminary rule earlier this
year. This is to be followed by more
FAA work on how to permit beyond visual line of sight
operations and flights over people and at night on a moreroutine basis rather than by exception and waivers as it
occurs in limited cases now. And to achieve this, the FAA
and the drone industry have to figure out the performance
requirements for a detect and avoid system of sensors and
algorithms that can substitute for the human eye in spotting
conflicting traffic nearby.
If that wasn't enough to keep a senior FAA executive up
at night, you can throw in coming up with a new-fangled air
traffic management system that will be different in that there

won't be a controller talking to each remote pilot as with
manned aircraft. In fact, there won't even be one remote
pilot for each drone with growing use of autonomous
aircraft monitored en masse by computers and algorithms.
The FAA is retaining responsibility for the airspace
below 400 feet, but it wants to turn over the flight planning
services and tracking of drones to private companies -
UAS service suppliers that can keep the FAA informed
of what is going on and if a drone has gone off the

Boeing Insitu ScanEagle is
FAA type certified

rails. So the FAA never surrenders its authority over the
airspace, it just delegates the air traffic management under
its close supervision. Some UAS service suppliers are
already servicing drone traffic and assisting it in one FAA
program the agency deems a success named Low-Altitude
Authorization and Notification Capability, or LAANC
(pronounced " Lance " ).
UAS service suppliers provide desktop and mobile
applications to automate the application for authorization,
Continued on following page
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Avionics News December 2020

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