DALLAS — Drone delivery is clear to take flight in Dallas with the clearing of a federal hurdle.
In a first for U.S. aviation, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the green light for commercial drone flights without visual observers in the same Dallas-area airspace for two companies.
The authorizations for Zipline International and Wing Aviation allow them to deliver packages using unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) technology. In this system, the companies will manage the airspace with FAA oversight.
“This is the first time the FAA has recognized a third-party to safely manage drone-to-drone interactions,” said Praveen Raju, a program manager in the FAA’s NextGen Office. “As always, safety comes first, and we required exhaustive research and testing before giving the green light.”
Wing, which is a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, and Zipline already have drone delivery services in North Texas in partnership with Walmart. But they’ve been limited by a regulation called the beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) rule that limits drone operations to within sight of the operator.
The FAA expects initial flights using UTM services will begin in August. The news comes as the FAA works to release normalizing UAS BVLOS Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), which would allow drone operators to expand operations beyond where they can physically see them on a wide scale, rather than granting approval for such flights on a case-by-case basis. The FAA says they expect to release the NPRM later this year and to issue more authorizations in the Dallas area soon.
“Using UTM services, companies can share data and planned flight routes with other authorized airspace users. This allows the operators to safely organize and manage drone flights around each other in shared airspace,” the FAA blog reads. “The industry developed consensus standards, which the FAA accepted, for how to accommodate multiple layers of low-altitude drone operations through UTM services.”
The companies began testing the UTM system with beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights in the Dallas area in 2023, initially with simulations, according to an FAA blog.
“The industry is providing us with a lot of detailed documentation and we’re providing a lot of oversight,” said Jarrett Larrow, Regulatory and Policy Lead at the FAA’s UAS Integration Office. “These public-private partnerships are key to safely integrating drones into our National Airspace System.”
The FAA says the initial operations will inform their efforts to authorize additional UTM services, including improved situational awareness and enhanced cybersecurity. They also will support the FAA’s work to develop UTM rules that allow wide-scale BVLOS drone operations without special authorizations.
“UTM is a critical piece for safe, routine, scalable BVLOS operations and to ensure everyone has equitable access to the airspace,” Larrow said. “If service providers and operators are successful in cooperatively sharing the airspace using UTM, it will be a repeatable process nationwide.”
