Night Flight Authorization for Drones with LAANC 5.0

For the last three years, Airbus Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) has participated in the FAA’s Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability program (known as LAANC) which is the first step towards operationalizing UTM in the United States. By providing LAANC services, we function as a sort of intermediary between the FAA and drone pilots who are able to - through the Airbus UTM LAANC service - quickly provide information to the FAA about their flight plan and receive authorization to fly.

Each year, Airbus UTM is certified by the FAA to provide the latest LAANC capabilities, and this summer, we have been approved as a provider for LAANC version (5.0). Version 5.0 allows pilots to request automatic authorization for flights at night under Part 107 among other improvements. The night authorization capability is vital to pilots who are being asked to complete night jobs, but weren’t able to accept assignments due to the limitations of LAANC 4.0. We’re thrilled to be able to support drone pilots as they seek to expand their work while continuing to obey the rules to safely operate in our shared airspace. We continue to provide our LAANC services to pilots through partners like DroneDeploy. In addition to LAANC services, we also provide flight briefing services in the US and Australia, and are hoping to expand briefings to the UK and Canada as well.

Our LAANC and flight briefing offerings are hosted on the Airbus UTM platform, which is a cloud-based platform that hosts a variety of performant and secure UTM services. The UTM platform is also a very important early step towards digitizing the global airspace and operationalizing UTM. We have recently completed upgrading all of our customers onto our single common core Airbus UTM platform, which will make it easier for us to continue rolling out new functionality and making it immediately beneficial to our customers and their users.

In addition to achieving LAANC 5 certification, Airbus UTM has also recently obtained certification for the ISO 27001 security standard. ISO 27001 is a globally recognized standard governing the implementation, management, and maintenance of information security processes. With this certification, our customers can be assured of a high level of security of the Airbus UTM platform and services globally.

More is ahead for our team each day and we look forward to keeping you all updated on our progress!

- Michael Torres