The city of Reno has been chosen as the test site for a new NASA demonstration of drone traffic management.
“For the first time in U.S. aviation history in a metropolitan area under beyond visual line of sight conditions, Nevada will conduct this NASA demonstration over several months in downtown Reno, Nevada,” officials with the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems noted.
NASA designated the state of Nevada as the winner of a competitive process for the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM) Technical Capability Level (TCL) 4 operation.
“This involves Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) flying in higher-density urban areas for tasks such as news-gathering, package delivery, and large-scale contingency mitigation,” officials noted.
“This NASA milestone operation promises to develop a safe and reliable airspace platform to integrate drones into the National Airspace System (NAS),” Nevada officials note. “The innovative NASA concept under Nevada’s Smart Silver State (S3) theme will lead UTM to an advanced level only imagined a few years ago.”
The Nevada (Smart Silver State) NASA UTM partners include Fortune 50 companies and Nevada Teammates/Airspace developers including: Uber Elevate, Switch, AirMap, Avision Robotics, Harris Corporation, AiRXOS a GE company, ANRA Technologies, WhiteFox Defense, Iris Automation, Drone America, Echodyne, Fortem, UltiSat, Inc., AviSight, Inc, Utah State University AggieAir, Deseret UAS, Telesis, College of Southern Nevada (CSN), Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority, the Cities of Reno and Henderson, Town of Laughlin, Apex Unmanned, Ainstein, escAerospace, Viasat, University of Nevada Reno (UNR), international partners Institute of Aviation, Warsaw (ILOT), RelmaTech, Aerium Analytics, Canadian UAV, AVSS-Aerial Vehicle Safety Solutions Inc, and ACAMP.