FAA Drone Advisory Committee – UTM Performance Capability Priorities Report Finalized
The FAA’s DAC is made up of high-level industry participants from various companies, levels of governments, airports, and the manned aviation community. The volunteer members provide their expertise to the FAA on critical issues facing the future of the UAS industry at public meetings, as well as in task groups settings. At the October 17, 2019 meeting of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (“FAA”) Drone Advisory Committee (“DAC”), the Designated Federal Officer (“DFO”) established Task Group #7 (“TG7”) which was made up of members including ANRA Technologies representing organizations that are all apart of the UAS ecosystem and provided their expertise to compile a strong list of prioritization for UTM capabilities.
The final work product from the group includes this high level report, a definitions document as well as a “road map” that looks at resources requirements and priority levels for both industry and the FAA.
Over the course of the 90 day tasking, TG7 met multiple times to build out two main deliverables—first, a definition document for the specific performance capabilities prioritized; second, a matrixed document that breaks down the specific performance capability by the responsibility (e.g. FAA or Universal Service Supplier [“USS”]), the type of resource required to make that performance occur (e.g. industry standard), the current status of that capability and then finally industry’s priority level for that performance capability in the next 12-24 months.
The performance capabilities used in the documents came from the FAA’s UTM CONOPs 1.0, early drafts of CONOPs 2.0 and industry driven priorities. TG7 feels that this list encompasses a mature view of the UTM system and takes into account six critical pieces of the UTM puzzle. They are:
- IT Services
- Security Services
- Operations Support Services
- Conflict Management Services
- Communications Services
- Data Services
These capabilities were then prioritized into low, medium and high categories for resources in the near term (0-24 months).
TG7 believes that this report will provide the DAC, FAA and other relevant stakeholders a comprehensive overview of the current state of UTM performance capability development as well as set up a road map for areas for the FAA to prioritize resources in the near term.
