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It has been said that for uncrewed flights beyond the visual range of the operator (BVLOS) to happen and become a daily reality, six items need to be fined tuned or implemented, namely:
So, the question is how many of these six items are ready to go? Given recent developments, we think DAA is getting ready to take off, no pun intended. In two different announcements, separated by just one day, uAvionix, the leading DAA company in the USA made clear that this technology is bound to be used by crewed and uncrewed aviation in equal measure.
In the first press release on April 16, it was announced that the company had “…been awarded a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) contract to scale C-Band frequency management for Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) Command and Control (C2) communications to a regional level with multiple UAS operating in proximity to one another.”
This is a purely uncrewed aviation technology aimed at creating order in areas where hundreds of drones will be sharing the NAS and where absolute coordination is not a nice-to-have, but a total must have.
The second announcement on April 17 highlights that its “FlightLine ADS-B surveillance and situational awareness system has been selected by the FAA as a qualified product for Air Traffic Control (ATC) use for reducing the risk of runway incursions at U.S. airports.”
This one is solely crewed aviation, and it comes at a very good time when the industry is in a bit of turmoil given the number of recent runway incursions and close calls in almost every busy airport in the USA.
DAA might be an anomaly given the close relationship between traffic monitoring in every phase of flight of both drones and general aviation. The recent acquisition of Iris Automation by uAvionix, and the fact that the CEO of Iris would be named the leader of the new entity, is an indication that these two flying modes, with and without a pilot on board, are getting closer.
On top of DAA, uAvionix just announced, a few hours before this article was published, that they are partnering with Viasat to increase reliability in communications for uncrewed aircraft. This means that they are now checking two of the six boxes in the BVLOS list.
The fact that one company is working in parallel in both crewed and uncrewed technology gives hope that eventually all six items in the above-mentioned list will follow similar development paths, ensuring that every T is crossed and every I is dotted in order to have full integration of crewed and uncrewed aviation in the National Airspace for the benefit of all.
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Juan received a degree in Geodesy and a master in digital photogrammetry from Universidad Central de Venezuela and a MBA in international Finance from Florida International University. He has over 750 hours of experience in photogrammetry navigation and camera operation in aircraft as varied as WWII B-25, Cessna 310, Lear Jet 25C and Piper Aztec. Juan holds a Commercial, Multi-engine Pilot certificate. Juan has been selling mapping UAV’s in Latin America for four years and is a frequent guest speaker in events where the safety of flying UAV’s and the fact that unmanned and manned aircraft inevitably will share the same airspace, is a relevant topic. He is the CEO of Plaza Aerospace Corp., a services’ firm specializing in UAV and general aviation issues.
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