UTM and the future of drone logistics

You will remember that very recently, we covered a story where the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) broke new ground by giving licence for more than one drone to simultaneously fly in the same airspace in Dallas Texas.

This historic feat has been made possible the workings of an unmanned traffic management (UTM) system brought forward by drone logistics company Zipline.

Many in Africa would recognise Zipline’s drone traversing the lower atmospheres in Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire; laden with medical supplies whose destinations were previously unreachable before drone technology came to the fore.

In the below article, Zipline explains how this UTM systems work, and how it will be a game changer in drone logistics in populated areas across the world.

Ahead of massive industry growth and expansion, the FAA just announced a first-of-its-kind approval for Zipline that lets us easily work with other drone operators to keep flights safe.

This is a key moment for the entire aviation industry as the world prepares for a future with more flights and an even greater need for coordination.

Every time you fly commercially, your pilot talks with an air traffic controller to make sure it’s safe to take off; that the flight won’t overlap with another plane’s route; and that when you arrive it’s safe to land.

Air traffic controllers work with all pilots, no matter who they’re flying for, and strictly follow operating procedures to handle flights in a safe, fair and transparent way.

Drones though, are not managed by air traffic controllers.

Instead, professional drone operators work with each other to fly safely. Right now, that is sometimes as manual as calling or texting each other about upcoming flights that are nearby. It works, but as drone delivery rapidly expands, a better way is needed.

Thanks to our recent FAA approval, we have one.

Over the past few years, we’ve built our own product for implementing Uncrewed Aircraft System Traffic Management or UTM, which maintains safe, fair, and transparent operations between Zipline and other drone operators.

We can now start using our UTM product in the US. We have integrated it into our US operations and are ready to bring it to areas we will soon serve, like Dallas.

This lets us leverage our expertise and learnings from flying more than 80 million commercial autonomous miles to make the entire industry safer at scale. It’s a landmark achievement that opens up the sky for easier commercial deliveries.

UTM starts with a simple idea: drone operators work together to share where they intend to fly so that drones won’t fly too close to each other. Without UTM, that can take a long time as teams frequently manually handle route validation, safety checks and all of the documentation that is required for every flight.

With UTM, those same steps can be done in seconds.

Zipline has put years of work into improving and strengthening the processes needed to make commercial drone delivery flights easy to increase in volume while maintaining safety and regulatory compliance. As drone operations scale, automating these processes becomes an essential investment. 

We’re not doing this alone. To be successful, UTM requires collaboration. UTM has matured into a critical part of aviation thanks to the hard work and joint-efforts of regulators like the FAA, other operators, global standards groups like ASTM, and innovative organizations like NASA and GUTMA.

This collaborative effort is why we’re so confident our UTM product will grow the industry. Regulators are charged with harmonising the increasingly complex and crowded sky. Operators need safe, fair ways to manage air traffic.

Zipline is serving everyone by combining existing protocols and industry-standard processes with our own proprietary software to enable automated, safe air traffic management at national scale.

The UTM product will help the entire uncrewed aviation industry fly safely even in a future with millions of drone delivery flights a day. 

With this approval, Zipline has the foundation for safe drone flights at a massive scale. This is just the start of what will grow into a global UTM ecosystem as millions of people will soon routinely experience fast, convenient, zero emission drone delivery.

0 Comments

Leave a Comment

Login

Welcome! Login in to your account

Remember me Lost your password?

Lost Password