Manage Your Air & Ground Space Drone Advisories
Every day across the US, there are thousands of drone flights where the aircraft is in perfect harmony with FAA regulations while the pilot on the ground unknowingly is not in compliance with rules on the ground. I know firsthand, having been approached by park rangers in San Francisco. While flying in Class G (uncontrolled) airspace in a wide-open park — a very natural and safe place to fly — a park ranger, body cam and all, kindly let me know that flying drones in parks is against San Francisco regulations. He then quickly added, “don’t worry about it, no one knows about these rules.”
It wasn’t just my own personal experiences, but all the support requests — from drone pilots and law enforcement alike — reaching out to Aloft to get help with this all too common problem of lacking canonical, accessible data to understand all the rules (air and ground) that pertain to a drone flight. Constantly different localities are trying to get the word out of where to fly or not fly, such as this recent story from the Columbus Dispatch.
It’s time to replace “no drone” signs and buried regulations, with useful, widely accessible, and visible data that will benefit drone pilots and government officials.
The next step that we took at Aloft to help solve this problem was launching our data crowdsourcing initiative in late 2020 .
Since then we have received tens of thousands of submissions, along with countless emails from various parks and agencies that want their data to be visible.
While we’ve started to address this in a fairly manual nature of adding in data, like what we did with San Francisco parks, we’re taking the next step to allow you to manage your own advisories that will be published across the Aloft UTM data network, including B4UFLY, where we power over a million airspace searches per month.
Announcing Aloft Geo
If you’re a government official or a state/local agency that wants to get your advisories in front of the largest network of drone pilots and airspace stakeholders, sign up now for early access to Aloft Geo. It will be free to manage and publish your information. Enter your name and email address to receive early access to Aloft Geo to start contributing your air & ground space advisories.
The remotely-piloted nature of drones is precisely what makes them so revolutionary, so transformative, and so safe. But it also causes havoc when it comes to compliance. Not only does one need to comply with Federal airspace regulations, but you also need to adhere to the rules on the ground that apply to your feet and thumbs. We’re going to solve this for the benefit of all of our users, partners, and the future of the industry. If you think this is an issue with small drones and recreational pilots, just wait for drone delivery and air taxis.