As part of the testing, drone operators at each site simultaneously flew a variety of remote-controlled unmanned aircraft systems. The test sites are dispersed across the country and included locations in Alaska, North Dakota, Nevada, New York, Virginia, and Maryland. At one point, a whopping 24 drones took to the air at the same time during this early stage of testing.
To hit that number, each test site flew up to four drones at a time while interacting with the UTM system during all stages of the flight. Before flying, each drone operator entered a flight plan into the UTM system, which checked the proposed path for potential conflicts and either approved or rejected the flight. Operators were notified of their approval status before their scheduled flight time. Once in the air, the drone’s flight pattern was tracked by the UTM both on a local and a national level — leading to the amazing image atop this article. Not only were the flights tracked at each FAA test site, each drone also was monitored remotely by engineers working at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
Welcome to drone day on the Adafruit blog. Every Monday we deliver the latest news, products and more from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), quadcopter and drone communities. Drones can be used for video & photography (dronies), civil applications, policing, farming, firefighting, military and non-military security work, such as surveillance of pipelines. Previous posts can be found via the #drone tag and our drone / UAV categories.
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