Meet the IPP Sites: Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership to spearhead Virginia's work for IPP project

A White House and FAA initiative, the UAS Integration Pilot Program involves 10 locations that will use unmanned aircraft in a wide variety of ways. AUVSI is writing a series of profiles on the locations.

Virginia, already home to one of six Federal Aviation Administration test sites devoted to helping integrate UAS into the national airspace, will now continue and augment that work through its selection as host to an IPP site.

“What we’re really focused on is getting to deployable, commercial operations that can be sustained long term,” says Mark Blanks, director of the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, based at Virginia Tech.

MAAP is the heart of the Virginia test site and will also carry out the day-to-day operations of the IPP work, Blanks says, on behalf of the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), based in Herndon. Which will handle policy recommendations.

The Virginia IPP has identified three use cases it wants to study: package delivery; infrastructure inspection; and emergency management and disaster recovery. Project Wing, part of Alphabet’s (formerly Google’s) X division, worked with MAAP on food deliveries in 2016, and before that the drone company Flirtey famously delivered medical supplies to then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

MAAP has also worked with Hazon Solutions and Dominion Energy on various infrastructure inspection projects, including using drones to inspect their electrical lines, and with Sinclair Broadcast Group on an aerial journalism training program.

The selected use cases are the ones the state considered to have the greatest economic potential and are also in areas where the “the communities and the public at large are most likely to interact,” Blanks says. “High-potential use cases that will impact people on a routine basis.”

As MAAP has been active for years, some of the projects are ongoing, while “others will be entirely new, from scratch,” he says.

Insurance

One of the partners on the project is the insurance giant State Farm, which has been working with drones since at least 2011, and is already using them as a safer, cheaper, more efficient way to conduct roof inspections. It was the first insurance company to get a Section 333 exemption and among the first to get waivers from the FAA for expanded flights.

Todd Binion, a section manager who is working to “operationalize” drones for State Farm, says although the company is now using drones in its day-to-day operations for roof inspections, current FAA rules for commercial use are “kind of inhibitors for us.”

“If we had multiple homes damaged … in the same neighborhood, the rules don’t make it very easy for you to do a larger mission that’s broader than one house,” he says. Limits on beyond-line-of-sight flights and flights over people “are limiters for us.”

After a natural disaster, people tend to be out in the street, so it can be difficult not to fly over them if you’re using a drone, he says. Pushing beyond those limitations is what attracted State Farm to work with MAAP in the first place.

“What we saw was an opportunity to approach the FAA and say, we want to fly beyond line of sight and over people,” he says, and so engaged MAAP “on a research program for exactly that.”

Then along came the IPP, and “it just frankly aligned perfectly with what we were already doing. It was a pretty easy decision for us to join the MAAP [team],” he says.

“We’re not doing the research for the sake of research. We have a practical use case that we’re trying to develop, and as soon as we can get the waivers, we want to go out into the real world and operate in real world scenarios.”

MAAP’s Blanks says Virginia has proposed using airspace across the state, not just in the Blacksburg area that is home to Virginia Tech. Other areas will include central Virginia, five Virginia counties, and more urban environments.

“We’ll be flying all over the state,” he says.

Emergency response

Another company hoping to push the envelope through flights over people and flights beyond the line of sight is Airbus Aerial, the relatively new division of the industry giant which fuses data from satellites and drones for uses such as storm damage assessment and infrastructure inspection.

“This important work will help the US government to lay a foundation for drone operations in the United States,” says company President Jesse Kallman.

The company plans to fly smaller, fixed-wing UAS to study flooded areas or blocked roadways, then fuse that with the satellite data to give companies such as State Farm “ a really broad level of understanding,” Kallman says.

“We’re hoping this allows us to really do the work in a efficient way,” he says of the IPP effort. It will also allow the FAA to have a “sandbox” for testing out operations not currently covered by the rules.

“They’ll be able to start learning” and find that drones are “not as inherently risky as we once thought, there are ways to do it without a completely robust sense and avoid system, and a 100 percent UTM [unmanned traffic management system, maybe there are things now that we can do,” he says.

Airbus Aerial plans to work with both the Virginia and North Dakota IPP programs on infrastructure inspections, but the North Dakota work “will probably be different from what we’re doing with MAAP,” perhaps covering topics such as land use, fire monitoring and other efforts.

Inspection

Dominion Energy has been working with drones for the last three years, inspecting nearly 10,000 transmission lines and related structures, says Steve Eisenrauch, manager of Electric Transmission Forestry & Line Services at the company.

“Current regulations for our structure inspections using visual line of sight flights seldom impact our inspections unless it is close to an airport or in the no-fly zone around Washington, D.C.,” he writes in an email to Unmanned Systems. “Where regulation is hindering us is with BLOS flights. Without the ability to fly BLOS, we cannot realize the true efficiencies that BLOS flights will bring.”

Working with the IPP will enable Dominion to take advantage of expedited waivers from the FAA to conduct those BLOS flights and will in turn provide the agency with some of the data it needs to “help write new rules around BLOS flight that can be implemented across the country, similar to Part 107 rules for VLOS flight.”

Dominion also hopes to “test machine learning algorithms that potentially will achieve automated defect detection of issues on our lines and structures, so that we can proactively correct those issues before they cause outages,” Eisenrauch writes.

Education

Educating the public about drones and their positive uses will be a big part of the Virginia work, says Blanks.

“I am a firm believer that there a lot of concerns out there that are legitimate, that need to be addressed,” he says. “I’m a big believer that the value has to be perceived in order to tolerate the negative. We tolerate a tracking device in our pocket 24/7, because the perceived value is so high,” he says, referring to cell phones.

“If we succeed in our vision, I see growth in jobs and improved efficiencies.”