New Flight Sharing Feature Available Now for B4UFLY iOS, Android and Web
Today we’re excited to announce the introduction of Notify & Fly for B4UFLY on iOS and Android. It’s the new simple and easy way to let other drone pilots know that you’re flying in the area. By anonymously submitting via the app, you’re letting the largest audience of other drone pilots know that you’re in the area too.
Whether you’re a hobbyist, a commercial pilot or saving lives as a first responder, using Notify & Fly contributes to the overall safe integration of drones into the national airspace by increasing situational awareness, without sacrificing privacy.
People Already Want to Notify & Fly
Our work on B4UFLY over the last two years has informed our thinking into how drone pilots want to engage with the airspace and it’s many stakeholders. Since we relaunched the app in August of 2019, we’ve powered over 13 million searches of the airspace and now average 800K searches a month. We also see thousands of crowdsourced submissions a month, half of which are users looking to announce their flight intention. And in our initial Web-only test of the Notify & Fly feature, we received over 200 submissions in a limited testing period.
Time and again, we’ve seen a huge unmet need among the vast majority of safety conscious drone pilots to proactively communicate their intentions on behalf of a safer airspace. Notify & Fly is a major step forward to solving this problem.
How to Use Notify & Fly
To use it, you simply update the B4UFLY app on your phone. Navigate to the main map screen and you’ll see the Notify & Fly icon. From there you have the ability to choose whether or not you’re a commercial operator, recreational pilot or first responder.
We’d love your feedback. Notify & Fly will be a feature we both scale to the rest of our enterprise platform and that we iterate on. Get in touch with your feedback at b4ufly@aloft.ai.
Jon Hegranes - Aloft CEO
Jon is the Founder & CEO of Aloft, the market leader in drone airspace systems & UTM technologies. Aloft’s patented technology is used in today’s leading recreational, enterprise, and government drone applications.
Jon is a certified commercial drone pilot as part of FAA Part 107, the founder of the Drone Advisory Council, and is an active member of other industry groups, including GUTMA, NBAA Emerging Tech, the FAA’s Advanced Aviation Advisory Committee (AAAC) and working groups, and is a founding member and data working group chair of the FAA Drone Safety Team. He’s a self-taught iOS developer, writes about drone topics for technology news outlets including VentureBeat, TechCrunch, and Forbes, and regularly speaks at industry events such as Commercial UAV Expo, 2B Ahead Future Congress, and DJI AirWorks. Jon graduated from TCU with a major in finance and received his MBA from Thunderbird Global School of Management (ASU). Jon has served on multiple FAA Advisory and Rulemaking Committees (ARCs), including drone detection, counter UAS, and Beyond Visual Line of Site (BVLOS).