Enabling Large-scale Beyond Visual Line of Sight Small Drone Operations

This paper describes a system that could enable large-scale, beyond visual line of sight operations of small drones (i.e., 55 lbs. and under). The paper focuses on two key concepts. The first concept is understanding contributing factors to air traffic controller workload and how the current air traffic management (ATM) system operates. Such discussion leads to understanding the factors that may limit scalability of the current airspace operations and why a current approach may not be ideal to enable small drone operations in low-altitude airspace. The second concept is developing a future traffic management system that will scale to accommodate future demand of small drones without being limited by the air traffic controller workload. Therefore, the paper is organized in a manner that presents the current airspace operations paradigm, describes bounds of air traffic controller workload based on aircraft number, discusses lessons learned to improve understanding of contributing factors to air traffic controller workload, and elicits how decision support tools could support air traffic controllers. This paper lays the foundation for why the current paradigm will not be adequate to meet the demand of future small drones. Next, it presents a case as to why a different paradigm is needed to enable large-scale small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) or drone operations in the airspace, so they are not limited by workload factors, and provides a description and test results of a new airspace paradigm that safely enables scaled sUAS operations.