In a first for U.S. aviation, the FAA has authorized commercial drone flights without visual observers in the Dallas-area, sharing airspace with conventional aircraft.

The authorizations for Zipline International and Wing Aviation allow them to deliver packages while keeping their drones safely separated using Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) technology. In this system, the industry manages the airspace with rigorous FAA safety oversight. 

In a Tuesday session at the FAA Drone/AAM Symposium in Baltimore, Zipline Aviation Counsel, Benjamin Berlin, emphasized the importance of “All the industry colleagues who participated in building the [UTM] standards, we got here because we developed and adopted new standards that let us work together and talk the same language.”

Using UTM services, companies can share data and planned flight routes with other authorized airspace users. This allows the operators to safely organize and manage drone flights around each other in shared airspace. All flights occur below 400 feet altitude and away from any crewed aircraft. The FAA expects initial flights using UTM services will begin in August and issuing more authorizations in the Dallas area soon. 

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton, CEO and Co-Founder of Zipline, commented that “This approval of Zipline’s UTM system lifts up the entire industry. We’ve been able to leverage Zipline’s expertise and learnings from flying 80 million commercial autonomous miles, to make the entire industry safer, scalable and more efficient.”

This comes as the FAA works to release the Normalizing UAS BVLOS Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which would enable drone operators to expand operations while maintaining the same high level of safety as traditional aviation. The FAA plans to release the NPRM this year, following strong Congressional support in the recent FAA reauthorization.