The U.S. commercial drone industry is at an inflection point. After years of incremental progress, the FAA’s landmark Part 108 Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) rule is expected to take effect later this year, unlocking a new era of scaled commercial drone operations across delivery, infrastructure inspection, public safety, perimeter protection and beyond.
It’s a pivotal moment for drone operators to get ahead of the most significant regulatory shift the commercial drone industry has seen.
AirData UAV has just announced that it is joining the Commercial Drone Alliance (CDA), bringing its operational platform into the industry’s broadest coalition for drone policy and progress. The membership positions AirData to help hundreds of thousands of pilots and operators navigate the path for continued compliance through regulatory change while actively contributing to the policies and standards that will define the next chapter of the U.S. drone economy.
Part 108 introduces sweeping new operational requirements across pre-, during and post-flight documentation, personnel roles, risk-categorized operational areas, and mandatory continuous data reporting, and AirData’s platform is already built to meet them.
AirData represents the critical piece of the data infrastructure required to enable the next phase of drone operations in the United States. As the industry moves toward broader BVLOS operations and frameworks like Part 108, access to scalable, reliable operational data will be essential to safely unlocking the full potential of the drone economy.
— Lisa Ellman, Executive Director of the Commercial Drone Alliance
AirData’s platform delivers the tools operators will need to meet Part 108’s requirements, including: checklists, automated compliance documentation, flight logging across every mission, and fleet-wide analytics that give program managers visibility into operational risk. With more than 61 million flights across 450,000 pilots and 850,000 drones globally, AirData has been building the compliance infrastructure the industry now needs.
As the industry’s leading policy advocate, the CDA has been central to advancing the regulatory frameworks. AirData’s membership offers one of the industry’s most powerful operational datasets and will work alongside the CDA and its members — including leading drone operators, manufacturers, and technology providers — to help shape the policies and operational standards that will define the BVLOS era.
We are excited to join the CDA and work alongside its members, who represent many of the world’s premier drone operators, to help accelerate the growth of the U.S. drone economy. We have long served as the intelligence backbone for drone operations, and we look forward to leveraging our data, insights, and experience to enable scalable, compliant, and mission-critical drone programs, particularly as frameworks like Part 108 unlock the next phase of scaled BVLOS operations in the United States.
— Eran Steiner, CEO and Founder of AirData UAV
AirData’s platform is available today, giving public safety agencies, enterprise operators, and drone programs of every size the maintenance documentation, pilot currency tracking, asset management, checklist discipline, and operational data history that regulators will expect when Part 108 takes effect.
Source: AirData