UAS updates: Advancements in integration, new UAV approvals and more

Airbus Zephyr HAPS. (Photo: Aalto)

Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) is an air traffic management system for UAVs and other unmanned air taxis or similar aircraft. In the United States, this is in airspace below 400 ft, avoiding other airborne traffic — including other UAVs — and informing authorities of your intended flight plan and how you execute it versus the posted plan.

Where are we on getting such a system? Well, there is an entire directory of nearly 80 UTM suppliers, mostly commercial outfits that offer UAV traffic control of some description for some application – typically like surveying a limited area for construction or maybe a related military application. Few companies possess “full function” UTM capabilities, along with extensive expertise and experience. Each commercial flight needs the approval of the FAA, so software packages include an FAA application to fly and feedback of authorization for the flight plan, as well as approval of operator certification and UAV type. There are complex packages from third-party sources, including NASA-developed UTM, as well as independent commercial systems.

So, how would that work across a major geographical area, such as the entire United States? The FAA and NASA have been working to establish how it could work, at least at a test site in Dallas, Texas.

First, the industry participants in this trial who wanted to operate in the same area had to accede to cooperate. Agreements were signed and means were established for data to flow between the participants, their drones and the FAA (the North Texas Shared Airspace Implementation).  The limits of the area near Dallas/Fort Worth for the trial were established as the boundaries in which the parties would fly and, in this case, complete deliveries. The players are Walmart, Amazon, Wing, Manna and ANRA, with FAA and NASA watching carefully.

One of the principal actors in Air Traffic Management (ATM) is ANRA in Washington D.C., with offices in London, UK, and New Delhi, India. With more than 100 customers in 15 countries and more than 200 projects, their UTM/ATM systems are gaining wider experience in several different airspaces and differing traffic compositions. The system is evolving with wider applications as installations worldwide meet new requirements. AAM for eVTOL passenger-carrying aircraft provides mission planning, traffic deconfliction, vehicle tracking, constraints management, route authorization and vehicle registration. EVTOL aircraft will likely fly not only in and out of existing airports but also from new Vertiports specially built for short-hop eVTOL flights across cities. ANRA has already engineered a Vertiport Management System (VMS) to control unmanned and autonomous access to airports and Vertiports alike.

Another unrelated development in the world of UAVs is the phenomenon of high-altitude platform station (HAPS) UAVs and their ground infrastructure. Although flying at altitudes on the edge of space, it is likely special provisions would be required within its associated UTM system to keep track and warn other high-altitude flyers. Nevertheless, the highest-flying commercial aircraft would probably be at an altitude nearly 30,000 ft below HAPS remote Stratospheric perch.

Airbus company Aalto Haps, based in Farnborough, UK, is now responsible for the manufacture, operation and commercialization of the Airbus Zephyr HAPS vehicle line. Designed to fly for months at a time, with wings covered in solar cells for power, Zephyr has established a world record of 64 days on station in the Stratosphere, and aalot has a target to fly for 200 days regularly.

So, what do you do with such a high-altitude, long-persistence platform? Well, it is like having your own satellite, which you can hang payloads on for tasks such as surveillance, disaster assessment and relief, border control, and numerous precision GNSS applications. With an apparent footprint of close to 3,000 square miles and an appropriate communications relay capability, you have a cell-phone tower in the sky. Perhaps even a partial equivalent to the Space-X Starlink space-based satellite communication service for provision of voice and internet, but seemingly far less infrastructure than the conventional 250 ground cell-towers needed for such an area.

Places starved of phone and internet service — such as Africa — could greatly benefit from flying their kite and gaining wide area coverage. To demonstrate how this capability would work, Aalto recently established a presence in Laikipia, Kenya, building an AALTOPORT ground facility and working with the Kenyan civil aviation authority to qualify Zephyr and its communications role for operations in Kenyan airspace. It is, of course, opportune that Kenya’s location on the equator provides access to one of the most sunny days available to power Zephyr at altitude. Laikipia County is also on a raised plateau, providing Zephyr with an altitude advantage for initial launch. Incidentally, Aalto flew Zephyr for 13 days over Kenya to prove the point.

With the facility in the UK able to build Zephyr-like UAVs every three months or so, Aalto aims to establish a number of hubs (such as the one in Kenya) around the world and operate a number of HAPS aircraft continuously, providing communications and all sorts of services commercially.

A new startup is investigating the concept of putting a tethered drone in the air with specially designed propellers driven by electric motors. This combination then turns into electricity generators for a particular flight pattern.

Initially focused on propeller design, Windlift was established in 2006 and is still based in Durham, North Carolina. Its approach is to use UAVs as a power source — flying repeatedly in a figure of eight, potential energy is converted to electricity in several non-powered phases of flight. The specially designed rotors turn to capture energy in those phases and their prop motors become generators of electric current, which is passed to the ground through the tether wire, to be ultimately supplied to the grid.

However, this setup could be portable, making it suitable for a small military or research team in the field needing power. This portability could be related to a $30 million contract Windlift has received from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which is interested in technologies that the Navy and Marine Corp could use. Under the contract, the building and testing of a working prototype and demonstration to the Department of Defense is required. According to Windlift, this is a successful result of several earlier, smaller Small Business Innovation Research contracts to helped develop the necessary technological elements of today’s system.

Commercially, the UAV power generation approach appears to be extremely cost-effective versus the costs associated with today’s wind farms of huge wind turbines. Not only is the construction cost of each tower, its generator, and the huge blades very high, but the wear and tear of operations over time require expensive maintenance. Meanwhile, the UAV, while still in its infancy with lots of reliability and weatherproofing to be accomplished, has the potential to reduce power generation costs by up to 80%, Windlift said.

This month’s UAS news indicates how UTM is well along the path towards managing UAV integration into the National Airspace System, HAPS high-altitude aircraft may be back in the news as Aalto moves forward with commercialization plans, and yet another application for UAVs appears to involve a new potential approach for power generation. A pretty wide range of unmanned requirements and applications.