UAS Traffic Management Takes Its Next Step

Last week, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) jointly released a progress report on Phase 2 of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) Pilot Program (UPP). Initial results proved successful in demonstrating a number of additional UTM capabilities and allowed the agencies and partners to gain valuable information. The data, lessons learned, surveys and other artifacts will be used to generate a final report, to be published later in 2021. 

The primary goal of the UPP is to enable the development, testing and demonstration of a set of UTM capabilities to support the sharing of information that promotes situational awareness and deconfliction of drones. During the first phase of the UPP, the following capabilities were successfully demonstrated: (1) sharing of operational intent between operators; (2) generating a UAS Volume Reservation (UVR) by UAS Service Suppliers (USS) that