Introduction

The Aloft Geo Portal aims to close the gap between FAA airspace rules and local ground rules for drone operations nationwide. Verified users of the portal will be able to upload and manage airspace and ground rule advisories that once authenticated, will publish to the Aloft data network including all Aloft web and mobile apps including B4UFLY.

“We’re connecting the dots between drone operators, local governments and comprehensive rules of operations to the largest and most active drone flight data network. As it exists today, there’s a major information awareness gap in the industry and for drone pilots everywhere that makes compliance elusive. Aloft aims to solve this problem as this is a missing piece for UTM systems across the globe,” said Aloft CEO and Founder Jon Hegranes.

Geo Portal puts control of advisories in the hands of verified users and enables them to reach the widest possible audience of drone pilots through Aloft.

Getting Started

To create an account and start publishing advisories, users will need to submit a verifiable email from the organization they work for as well as detailed information on the parameters and basis for the advisory. The portal is live now and accepting submissions at https://geo.aloft.ai. It’s free to upload, manage and update advisories.

Getting Verified

Only authorized users are able to publish advisories directly to the platform. To create trusted and reliable data, accounts must submit complete and accurate account information, including the following:

Simply log into your Geo Portal account and select “Add Advisory” from the menu in the top right corner. You’ll be presented with a detail panel to fill out more information related to the advisory, such as contact numbers and website addresses. You can also include start and end times to indicate temporary advisories. Toward the bottom, you’ll find additional tools to draw the advisory on the map, or you can upload shapefiles, KMLs, or geoJSON.

Publishing an Advisory

Once your account is verified, you will be able to publish advisories directly to the maps across the Aloft network. From the table view, you can see the published status as “Yes” or “No”. To change the published status, click in to the advisory detail view and click the “Publish” / “Unpublish” button.

You can make changes and edit the advisory at any time through the portal as updates are needed.

Once your publish or update an advisory, it will take a few hours for the mapping engine to process the data and publish to Aloft web and mobile applications (including B4UFLY).

For advisories with a specific date set, those will publish ahead of the planned start time. Permanent advisories will publish immediately after processing.

Need Help?

Reach out to geo@aloft.ai if you need assistance or have any questions.

Aloft Geo processes new data 4x per day. In addition, depending on the user’s device or browser, map caching may take additional time to pull in the new advisory information. You should expect about 4-6 hours for your data submissions to be fully visible across all Aloft and B4UFLY applications.

Thus we recommend publishing your advisory data as early as possible and using the effective start and end dates as needed.

Aloft Geo is designed to support both permanent and temporary advisory information.

For permanent advisories, you do not need to enter an end date and your information. You can enter both start and end dates for temporary advisories, and your advisory will become active and expire accordingly.

While Aloft Geo accepts only authoritative data submissions from verified entities, individual users are encouraged to continue submitting and sharing their flight plans on B4UFLY with the Notify & Fly feature.

We still have our crowdsourcing forms open so all users can submit areas for review. You can access this on B4UFLY web and mobile apps.

We are in communication with various Aloft enterprise customers, such as utility companies, to explore how they could utilize Aloft Geo for all airspace stakeholders and the safety of the National Airspace System. If you have any questions or ideas, please contact geo@aloft.ai.

Enterprise users will have full access to Aloft Air Control and can publish their custom airspace that can be seen only in their accounts.

All advisory information published to Aloft Geo can be seen across all Aloft web and mobile applications, including B4UFLY.

Based on the current policy, only authoritative and/or government-related accounts will be verified and able to self-manage and publish air, ground, and safety-related advisory information.