Development of a Portable Airspace Management System for Wildland Fire Operations

Wildland fire operations can benefit significantly from continuous, 24-hour beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) drone operations. While the UAS Traffic Management system (UTM) can manage commercial drone operations, the wildland fire environment poses unique challenges. This paper describes a novel, decentralized airspace management system aimed at addressing these unique challenges. A prototype of this system was validated in an operationally relevant environment. Initial analysis of data shows that the system could successfully share key airspace and mission data with geographically distributed teams. The ad hoc network responsible for data sharing, however, exhibited inconsistent connectivity that led to user-level latency and loss of data. Additional examination of the concept and data are underway and will be published in a follow-on technical report.