Government contractors in the Aerospace and Defense sector are poised to see new opportunities for domestic growth as the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) released its first annual Roadmap outlining efforts needed to safely integrate unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into the nation’s airspace late last week. Should the FAA stay on schedule, drones are likely to start flying regularly in the US by late 2015, and the FAA predicts as many as 7,500 commercial drones flying in domestic airspace within the next five years, and as many as 30,000 non-military UAS’s are expected to be in the sky by the middle of the next decade. Some analysts predict this industry could generate as many as 70-100,000 new jobs within the next five to ten years.
This Roadmap is required by the FAA Modernization Reform Act of 2012 (Pub. L. 112-95) and outlines the FAA’s approach to ensuring that widespread UAS use is safe and efficiently integrated into the national airspace. The Roadmap plans to accommodate UAS flights in domestic airspace in the near-term, i.e. the next 5 years, and the midterm plan is to fully integrate UAS flights within the next 5-10 years. The FAA proposes many civil and commercial applications of UAS including: Security awareness; Disaster response, including search and support to rescuers; Communications and broadcast, including news/sporting event coverage; Cargo transport; Spectral and thermal analysis; Critical infrastructure monitoring, including power facilities, ports, and pipelines; commercial photography, aerial mapping and charting, and advertising.
Beyond the proposed civil applications for UAS, government contractors will see new opportunities in areas as varied as: automated sense and avoid systems; command and control systems, including new spectrum and radio frequency requirements for both line-of-site and beyond-line-of-site flight; and UAS training and licensing requirements for both pilots and ground crew, including the need for ground based simulators. But even design and build contractors could see new opportunities as the Roadmap details the needs to integrate UAS into airport flight patterns. This very complicated issue could easily require the development of special UAS airports, or off-airport locations where UAS can easily launch and recover.
In addition to the FAA’s Roadmap, as required in the 2012 FAA Reauthorization, the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) has developed a comprehensive plan to safely accelerate the integration of civil UAS into the national airspace system. That plan details a multi-agency approach to safe and timely UAS integration and coordination with the NextGen shift to satellite-based technologies and new procedures.
