20 Million B4UFLY Searches, 500K LAANC Authorizations, and 1 Million Monthly Airspace Events
Aloft Technologies today announced a series of milestones with record flight and airspace safety across Aloft’s applications and UTM platform. Aloft recorded half a million LAANC authorizations (1) all-time, including a record June where total authorizations grew 58% year-over-year and commercial airspace authorizations grew 102% year-over-year. On the B4UFLY application, record usage and adoption resulted in crossing 20 million airspace searches all-time. In addition, the Aloft UTM data network surpassed one million monthly airspace events in June while seeing 300% quarter-over-quarter commercial revenue growth, marking the largest expansion of the platform in company history.
Since relaunching the B4UFLY app in August of 2019 and extending it to a web-based version, B4UFLY has become the authoritative source of situational awareness for UAS operators and recreational drone pilots alike. Newer features like Notify & Fly which enables pilots to anonymously share their flight intent and location to other pilots are also seeing exponential growth. May and June saw record usage of Notify & Fly with a 3x increase from March to June of this year.
“We know that adoption by users is key to all successful compliance efforts. While we continue to build open and scalable systems, we can’t mistake walls for highways. We have to make compliance, safety and security part of the benefits that come along with accessible and easy to use tools. We’re excited to continue growing along with the broader drone ecosystem,” said Aloft CEO and Founder Jon Hegranes.
Rounding out an all-time quarter, Aloft’s latest product launch Aloft Geo, which allows government and authoritative agencies to publish air and groundspace advisories to the Aloft UTM data network, quickly surpassed 50 verified agencies in the first month. From local law enforcement and first responders to federal agencies like NASA and Department of Homeland Security, Aloft Geo is enabling the next step in UTM situational awareness by integrating these additional authoritative data sets with Aloft’s airspace restrictions and flight activity data. This extension of Aloft’s data crowdsourcing initiative is having a big impact by allowing authoritative agencies to directly manage and publish their data to the largest network of drone pilots and airspace stakeholders.
“Many pilots who fly motorized aircraft within Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (MBNMS) have told MBNS staff they use the B4UFLY app for situational awareness. Therefore, MBNMS staff made it a priority to upload the boundaries of the NOAA regulated overflight zones as a *.kml file to Aloft Geo and provide metadata and links to inform pilots where flights under 1000 feet within MBNMS are prohibited by federal regulations. Aloft Geo’s interface is intuitive and updates are efficiently published to B4UFLY,” said MBNMS Permit Coordinator and GIS Specialist Sophie De Beukelaer.
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1. In February, the FAA announced that all time collectively 1 million LAANC airspace authorizations had been issued. Aloft has been an FAA UAS service supplier since the program’s inception in 2018.