The Northern Plains UAS Test Site hosted Vantis Fly Day on May 28 at the Gorman Field UAS Test Range near Emerado, North Dakota, showcasing the operational capabilities of the nation’s first statewide beyond visual line of sight drone network.
The event brought together representatives from public safety, state agencies, higher education, and industry to observe live BVLOS demonstrations and assess how the Vantis system’s connected infrastructure enables scalable unmanned operations across diverse sectors.
The fly day coincides with a significant network expansion: Frontier Precision, an employee-owned surveying, mapping, and UAS solutions company with 38 years of industry experience, has joined Vantis as its second champion operator. The company secured a new FAA BVLOS waiver that is fully aircraft-agnostic for systems under 55 pounds — allowing Frontier Precision to operate any NDAA-compliant platform within Vantis’s four established service volumes, covering more than 5,000 square miles of managed airspace. The platform-agnostic structure marks a departure from traditional waivers tied to a single aircraft and reflects the maturity of Vantis’s safety case. According to NPUASTS Operations Manager Hunter Hegel, the Vantis infrastructure has reduced waiver approval timelines from years to 23 business days.
“This waiver is another strong example of what Vantis was built to do — to help operators move beyond limited visual line of sight operations and into scalable, real-world BVLOS missions,” Hegel said. Frontier Precision Regional Sales Manager Collin Kemmesat cited the operational value for commercial customers in oil and gas, utilities, and agriculture: “To truly unlock the potential of ‘big data’ in sectors like oil and gas, utilities, and agriculture, we must move beyond the limitations of visual line of sight.”
The partnership has near-term expansion plans that extend beyond fixed-wing and small multirotor operations. Upcoming efforts include onboarding Group 3 VTOL aircraft up to 1,320 pounds for long-endurance missions, and developing autonomous swarm operations for agricultural applications. The Vantis network, built on infrastructure from Collins Aerospace, L3Harris, and ThalesUSA and managed from a Mission and Network Operations Center in Grand Forks, activated the FAA’s Federal Radar Enclave earlier this year — giving North Dakota access to the same real-time radar data used by federal air traffic controllers, a capability no other state currently has. Attendees at Fly Day also included public entities eligible under North Dakota Senate Bill 2018, recently passed legislation that funds replacement of noncompliant UAS platforms with NDAA-compliant alternatives.
