Continuing a process that kicked off at AUVSI’s Xponential conference in Dallas earlier this year, the International Civil Aviation Organization is seeking to develop a global concept of operations for an unmanned aircraft traffic management system.
 
ICAO’s remotely piloted aircraft program manager, Leslie Cary, issued a request for information for UTM systems at Xponential, and ended up receiving 76 proposals from industry, academia and others.
 
That led to the Drone Enable conference, held Sept. 22-23 in Montreal, at ICAO’s headquarters, where the developers of many of those proposals gathered to discuss what a global UTM framework should include.
 
“Keep your minds as open as possible to how we address these problems” said Fang Liu, secretary general, while kicking off the conference, which followed on the heels of ICAO’s second RPAS conference.
 
Drones are “amazingly versatile tools, and they are also aircraft,” she said. ICAO wants to develop UTM solutions that encourage innovation, but “we need to determine regulatory approaches which are flexible and adaptive so all UAS approaches can make use of them.”
 
Cary said of the 76 responses to ICAO’s RFI, seven had speakers in a plenary session at the conference, and another 24 were to present in the “streams,” or topic areas set for the rare Saturday, Sept. 23 conference session.
 
Those streams are divided into three areas: Registration, identification and tracking; communications; and geofencing.
 
All are deemed critical to a future UTM system, especially the first topic.
 
“Drones cannot be anonymous, just as we don’t have anonymous phones or cars,” said Gur Kimchi, vice president of Amazon Air.
 
Kimchi was one of several presenters who outlined potential UTM systems. In Amazon’s case, it would be a dynamic air control system based on interlocked communications, similar to what exists today for cell phones.
 
“What we’re proposing is something we know works,” he said. “It’s been working and serving us for the past 25 years.”
 
Other companies, ranging from Boeing to startup uAvionix, outlined their proposals as well. Many included not only air-to-ground communications, but aircraft-to-aircraft communications as well, which would allow UAS to avoid other aircraft automatically.
 
Demonstrations of these systems are occurring around the world, from NASA’s efforts in the United States to similar efforts in France, Italy, Singapore and many others.
 
The goal is to produce a document outlining a UTM framework and present it at the Second Global Air Navigation Industry Symposium, scheduled for mid-December in Montreal. The framework wouldn’t be legally binding but could help countries set up a harmonized UTM.
 
AUVSI President and CEO Brian Wynne, who had appeared with Cary in Dallas in announcing the RFI, and who spoke in Montreal, said this would “allow the entire global market to tap into the benefits” of unmanned systems.

Below, Gur Kimchi, vice president of Amazon Air, outlines Amazon's concept of a UTM system. Photo: AUVSI