Now Offering LAANC as an FAA-Approved UAS Service Supplier
For months and months, our customers have been hounding us about LAANC, including customers that recently became investors. While listening to ideas and feature requests, we were heads down building and coding (aside from the occasional trip to DC to meet with the FAA :). Today we’re excited to announce that native LAANC authorizations are live available in the Kittyhawk platform, opening up more than 30,000 square miles of controlled airspace for drone flights.
As you might expect from us, we’ve rethought LAANC from the ground up. For both our enterprise customers and extensive community of commercial 107 operators, a LAANC authorization is more than about speed. Without context to your flights, your fleet, and your operations, the value of a LAANC authorization is lost. We’re making LAANC authorizations actionable, enforceable, and visible across your organization in real-time.
Within our new LAANC UI, you’ll experience new designs with a quick yet compliant flow to apply for LAANC. When creating your flight plan, you’ll experience brand new Kittyhawk maps with data sources pulled directly from FAA-approved sources. Don’t be surprised if you can’t help but smile as you go through the flow.
After you’ve applied for LAANC, you’ll have have a complete and detailed record of both past and pending authorizations with easy access to your FAA reference code. We’ve designed an intuitive timeline so that you can see the history and state changes of a request. We’ve built screens so that you can view the flight plan, compliance details, as well associated airports and airspace. Basically all of the detailed history and reporting that you’ve come to love from Kittyhawk.
Here’s a short video to learn more:
As the skies open for Kittyhawk and our customers, we took some time to think about the the platform we’ve built, the role we’re playing in moving the industry forward, and ultimately what Kittyhawk stands for — both in the present and for the decades to come. Without belaboring team off sites and design sprints, we can sum it up in three words:
Where Flight Happens
The problem for most commercial drone programs is that flight is happening everywhere for them. Multiple tools and technologies, each with their own security policies, contracts and data sources. We want to become the single source of record for commercial drone flight. One place to do everything from flight-to-flight operations, so drones can become more like other tools in the workplace. They’re safe to use, the data moves where it needs to, and ROI is clear and sustainable.
Over the past few months we’ve had some very exciting and transformational developments. We closed a round of funding with some awesome new investors, including Boeing HorizonX, followed by an investment from Travelers Insurance. We’ve been hiring like mad, and our team is growing across the board (PS, we’re hiring :). Though perhaps no bigger moment happened for our team, the company, and our customers than becoming an FAA-Approved UAS Service Supplier.
The skies are opening for all of us, and it was with this energy that we wanted to evolve the Kittyhawk brand. We’re changing on the inside, and our public face should fit with where we’re going. We love (present tense) the Kittyhawk “K”, but Kittyhawk embodies more than a letter. When we started the company, it was important to us to give a nod to where flight began. With the launch of LAANC, we’re releasing a new look, new colors, and a new mark for the company.
Different people will see and feel different things from our logo. In my mind, we’ve found a four-dimensional representation of flight. A modern day version of the infinity symbol, with ties to a Celtic knot. Inherent in this mark is transportation, flight routes, traffic, directions, and a virtual bridge. Plus, if you look hard enough, you can still find a “K”… Oh, and a new green.
Check it all out at https://www.aloft.ai.