If drones are to become a part of airspace around the world, the rollout of robust, secure and efficient infrastructure is vital.
It is widely acknowledged that drones and other unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have the potential to unlock transformational benefits for society. They offer flexibility, lower operating costs and reduced environmental impact compared to manned aircraft, can access remote or dangerous areas easily, operate without onboard pilots and perform precision tasks.
In urban environments, they excel at navigating congested airspace and tight areas between buildings, meaning they can perform last-mile deliveries and remove the strain and emissions from increasingly congested roads. Additionally, drones enable rapid emergency response, infrastructure inspection and urban planning surveys, while their quiet operation and small size help to minimise noise pollution and visual disturbance.
None of these benefits can be realised if drones cannot be integrated into airspaces at scale. This is a tough challenge that must at least in part be solved with the development and deployment of what are now known as Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) systems.
Differing definitions
Parimal Kopardekar is mission integration manager for the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) Mission at NASA. He holds numerous awards for his work and was recently named among the 25 most influential people in the drone industry.
Known to his peers as PK, he pioneered the UTM concept for safe large-scale drone operations at lower altitudes. The concept is being developed and applied by numerous organisations around the world.
“To me, UTM is best described as a collection of services and data needed initially for small drones to safely enable their scaled operations without overloading conventional air traffic management,” PK says.
“These include remote identification, trajectory planning, intent exchanges with other operators, strategic deconfliction, tracking and conformance monitoring, weather information, 3D maps, and more. Currently, the initial UTM system is focused on enabling small drone operations that are likely to operate below 500ft.”
French aerospace and defence giant Thales is also at the forefront of developing UTM systems.
There are several components and features to Thales’ solution. The most notable include the registration of drone operators and unmanned aircraft, flight missions request and services around authorisation and notification, traffic information, network identification and management, geo-awareness, deconfliction, weather information, conformance monitoring, and incident and emergency management.
According to Ludovic Lang, a director and head of digital aviation and UTM at Thales, the solutions and services being deployed for UTM are paving the way to the next generation of ATM solutions.
“We believe that UTM is due to become a subsystem of the air traffic control,” Lang says. “Drone applications and air taxis will sooner or later populate the skies and cohabit with traditional manned aviation, hence the skies will have to be managed as unified airspace.”
Indeed, such will be the level of integration needed, other players have adopted new terminology altogether.
One of those is Altitude Angel, whose head of air traffic management, Phil Banks believes that UTM is not simply about dots on a map and tracking drones. Instead, he argues that we should be approaching the subject through a much more unified approach under.
“Everything we see in the sky, from the smallest drone to the largest passenger jet or cargo aircraft, needs to be incorporated within a single view and a single strategy,” Banks says. “And this is starting to be realised. We all know that segregation is not an effective way to approach air traffic management, and we know that as demand and traffic volumes go up, segregation creates even more bottlenecks.”
We could do this tomorrow
Lang echoes this sentiment, pointing to examples from Europe and the USA where several key developments are advancing the UTM and air traffic management landscape. “This is being driven by the need to safely integrate drones into increasingly crowded airspaces while enabling a variety of commercial and recreational drone applications,” he adds.
“The main challenge is to enable access to the airspace for these new users, and UTM is the key to it. It aims at enabling UAS operations at scale, including Beyond Visual Line of Sight [BVLOS] flights, to unlock the full potential of drones from an economic and societal perspective.”
Indeed, according to PK, this is the key benefit afforded by UTM. He says, “You can imagine if you have multiple UAS that need to operate in BVLOS mode. They need to be aware of where other UAS are before they depart, and once airborne, to ensure that all UAS safely operate and do not conflict with each other.
“So, in any airspace, you have the potential to operate multiple BVLOS UAS for conducting domestic deliveries, and carrying out inspection, monitoring, search and rescue simultaneously. UTM is crucial to making this happen.”
Banks is confident the technology is already mature enough to see drones and UAS become a routine part of airspace around the world. Asked about when this might happen, he simply responds: “We could do this tomorrow.”
This naturally leads to another question – what is stopping this from happening?
A challenge acknowledged by both Banks and Lang is gaining acceptance at societal and political levels. Banks refers to research carried out by Altitude Angel for its Project Skyway initiative, which aims to build a 165 miles (265km) long drone superhighway in the UK.
“The public perception of drones is surprisingly positive,” Banks says. “Especially when the benefits around delivering medical supplies, conducting search and rescue operations and delivering essential goods to remote places are cited as use cases.
“The public do have concerns. These usually focus on three issues – incidents, noise, and privacy. But it’s our job to allay these concerns with the facts, and to not let people vocalising their worst fears become the reality.”
Likewise, Lang and Thales recognise the importance of building public trust. “A key challenge is gaining acceptance through transparent communication about the benefits, safety measures, and privacy protections associated with drone operations, as well as addressing concerns about noise pollution and environmental impact,” Lang adds.
Political willpower is also crucial. As PK explains, governments will have a huge role to play in getting UTM systems well and truly off the ground. “Governments have role in setting BVLOS rules and establishing service requirements,” says PK. “In addition, they will be responsible for the acceptance of third-party service suppliers and ensuring governance of those third-party service providers.”
Connecting the dots
Another critical challenge to overcome involves joining up numerous stakeholders and ensuring visibility across the entire integrated air traffic management system.
According to Lang, this is about implementing dynamic airspace management techniques to accommodate fluctuating drone traffic demands and ensure safe separation between drones and manned aircraft. It also requires routine BVLOS operations to be enabled through detect-and-avoid technologies, robust communication links, and updated regulatory frameworks to manage flights safely.
Banks picks up on the communication point, adding: “Few countries today have escaped the ‘drones in controlled airspace’ problem. But quite often, when you investigate, the issue is not so much the drone, it’s the visibility. It’s that the drone flight might have been authorised, but that information was not shared with other stakeholders and security must respond.”
Similarly, Banks refers to how airports and national ANSPs have limited information about low-altitude traffic, citing it as a cause for major change to happen.
“We need to pay more attention to what’s happening close to ground level,” he continues. “We must improve our awareness of everything moving in the sky and consider the systems required to handle and interpret this large amount of data.”
Doing so will require collaboration between a complex web of stakeholders, from government and security authorities to UTM system developers, drone/UAS manufacturers and users, as well as ANSPs and airport operators.
This is also recognised by Lang, who adds: “Thales has been working on UAM systems and UTM solutions for many years. But we believe no one alone has the solution to create the enablers for the new advanced air mobility market to emerge.”
Security and scalability
Lang cites several other challenges to widespread UAS adoption across airspaces in the coming years, many of which will require close collaboration to overcome.
One is cybersecurity and the ability to protect UTM systems from malicious attacks that could disrupt operations or compromise safety. Ensuring robust encryption and secure communication channels is crucial. Here, civil aviation authorities must establish foolproof protocols to prevent unauthorised access, data breaches, and malicious interference that could compromise safety and public trust in drone operations.
And as UTM rollouts scale, so too does the potential for cybercriminals to breach networks and cause damage. This is one of many considerations around expanding UTMs and highlights the need for a scalable and resilient UTM infrastructure that can safely handle automatically high volumes of drone traffic and the necessary advanced communication, navigation, and surveillance systems.
“Funding is the other key challenge,” Lang adds. “Securing sufficient investment to develop and deploy UTM infrastructure and services is crucial to routine commercial drone operations, and this needs to come from multiple sources, including public funding, private investment and public-private partnerships.”
So, where does this leave us in terms of assessing the progress and potential for UTM today?
As is clear from the insight provided by leaders in advanced air mobility concepts, while UTM systems and drone integration offer exciting possibilities, the path to widespread adoption is complex.
Technological readiness alone isn’t sufficient. Significant hurdles remain across multiple areas, from gaining public and political buy-in to building out regulatory frameworks and securing funding. Meanwhile, coordinating diverse stakeholders and ensuring seamless communication across all airspace users presents ongoing challenges.
Progress is being made, but large-scale drone operations in urban airspaces may take years to fully materialise. The key to enabling these advances remains sustained collaboration between parties: if the ecosystem of players can unite, then we are far more likely to see drones and other UAS become a fixture in our airspaces.
Managing future eVTOL aircraft traffic
Rapid progress is being made to develop eVTOLs aircraft as a sustainable form of air travel. Rob Weaver, urban ATM business development lead for Embraer company Eve Air Mobility, is working to fit this new type of aircraft into ATM systems.
Q: How do air traffic systems for eVTOL aircraft differ to UTMs?
A: The major difference is that eVTOLs are a piloted aircraft as opposed to autonomous drones. A challenge for urban air traffic management (uATM) system developers such as Eve Air Mobility is that we need to integrate with urban airspace immediately. That leads into another challenge around managing the flow of aircraft.
Unlike conventional airliners, eVTOLs will have to land at vertiports and cannot taxi to another place to park. Similarly, helicopters have more flexibility in terms of where they can land.
Conceptually, I would say that uATM combines some of the elements of UTM and traditional ATM. The flow management concept is similar to conventional ATM systems, while the software-as-a-service style of delivery is where we cross over with UTM systems. Fast forward 20 years, and I envisage a fully integrated airspace which has all three systems running in parallel with each other.
Q: When might we see the first uATM applications?
A: “We have been developing our system for uATM for six years, and by the end of this year, we should be ready to bring it into service. We have carried out helicopter-based trials in the UK and are currently trialling in the US as well.
Q: Where do you envisage UATM infrastructure being deployed?
A: Initially, I see this being built within existing aviation infrastructure, with airports developing dedicated vertiport areas with charging points. There is also the potential to make use of over-water pontoons for take-off and landing.
Skyscrapers represent a whole new and bigger challenge – the place to keep an eye on is Sao Paulo, which already has an extraordinary number of helipads in use. If the market goes that way, Sao Paulo will be one of the first places it will work.