Sharing the skies (safely): Near term perspective on sUAS integration in the NAS

Abstract

Current projections indicate that the number of commercial UAVs in the US airspace may grow to as much as 500,000 by 2020. In order to fully enable commercial UAS operations, a scalable solution to airspace integration that accommodates the rapid influx of UAS is crucial, or the system is likely to be unable to respond to demand. Additionally, any approach which seeks to integrate with Air Traffic Control (ATC) services, even near-term ones, must ensure that any additional workload on ATC be minimized. The primary responsibility of ATC is for the safe, orderly, and expeditious flow of air traffic, which does require equipment interface for various functions. However, any added responsibility or requirement for additional tasks must be incorporated with workload and functionality considered as key factors. Fortunately, technologies are available which open up the possibility of meeting both safety and scalability requirements with no need for compromise as a result of fast, reliable data transmission and advanced data processing capability. These same approaches form the foundation of an unmanned traffic management (UTM) system, and can be leveraged to provide ATC with required information and functionality. A key action, therefore, even at early-stage development is to understand potential failure modes of these technologies and the systems which propose to use them, along with the level of risk any potential failure introduces into the NAS.