Potential Solutions to Integrating UAS into National Airspace

Introduction

Getting drones into controlled airspace has been a topic that has been swirling around the FAAs discussions ever since the past few years when flying has really picked up. Some of the greatest agencies in America and other countries have attempted to come up with solutions for maintaining safe flights while also allowing the freedom that flying allows. NASA has developed a potential UAS traffic management (UTM) system that has the potential to allow for safe tracking of UAS inside controlled airspace. The FAA has also developed test sites in order to test potential ideas. The Netherlands even has integrated UAS into their airspace!

NASA's UTM system

NASA has proposed two systems under the UTM system. One a portable version that is smaller and designed for the agricultural fields that use drones today to spray solutions onto their crops. This would solve a large issue for the agricultural side of UAS ops. The second design was for low altitude operations that are much more varied by nature. the benefit of this system though is that it is always monitoring and will be able to detect all ops within its range, whereas the Ag solution is more for small business and only detects when it's on and only for a small area. 

Testing Sites

These tests were initially ordered by Congress for the FAA to prove that they could successfully monitor UAS platforms while they were in controlled airspace. Initially, they found that many states were interested in testing, and about half of the US submitted their own proposal for them to be chosen as a site. If this didn't find anything in the testing it at least discovered how much of a demand there is for UAS platforms to be allowed into the national airspace and should encourage further testing.

Netherlands Airspace

For a long time, the Netherlands had shelved the idea that they could incorporate UAS into their current airspace. A study was developed in 2001 with the Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Ministry of Defence where they have addressed many of the issues of having UAS platforms enter their airspace. They have currently elected to do so gradually and go through each phase step by step to ensure that both sides of the situation are covered and one side isn't limited unfairly.

Conclusion

By looking around and taking what works from many things and combining them together, sometimes you get something greater than the sum of its parts. As this problem is super complicated and raises a lot of issues the best thing that can happen as of now is to wait for solutions to be developed. As there already have been many of the major problems covered by various countries and programs around the world, it'll only be a matter of time before we can fully integrate UAS into national airspace