Aircraft, sensors, communications systems, digital data exchanges, digital models, and operating software support useful drone services today within defined operating conditions and approvals. We’re close to the next rulemaking enabling beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) to further expand how we can use the technologies, again within defined operating conditions and approvals.
But what will it take to normalize low-altitude drone operations? It’s going to take state-level decision-makers and industry to think seriously about the rest of the equation, which includes the operating environment, the customers, the business model and the people who will deliver the service. In other words, it will require operational readiness.
The Meaning Of “Operational Readiness”
The U.S. Code defines operational readiness as, “The capability of an organization, an asset, a system, or equipment to perform the missions or functions for which it is organized or designed.” To paraphrase, it’s when you’re capable of carrying out the mission as intended.
Today, we have mature drone platforms and supporting technologies. To carry out the myriad of drone missions as intended, the other pieces must also be in place. Operational readiness occurs at the point when that integration has been achieved.
On October 5th, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced $12 million in awards to 19 companies under its Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) Program. Testing through FAA-designated UAS Test Sites will add evidence to support operational readiness. Teams should use these opportunities to answer operating questions and refine existing service environments to support the whole ecosystem. Here’s how to do that.
Build Out Your Operating Environment
Establish the route, operating hours, drone platform, staffing, and required approvals. Assign responsibility for weather decisions, maintenance, in-flight emergencies, communications, and coordination with FAA and other airspace users. Determine who can delay or stop a flight and who responds to a mission failure.
These are basic requirements any Part 121 Aircraft Dispatcher considers hours before the pilots show up to fly. Every flight starts with planning and continues through flight completion, records and review. Each part of the operation needs a decision-maker, who by default, becomes part of that flight’s operational team.
This discipline applies to drones and Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). An operator can build passenger or cargo services around customer demand, using approved aircraft suited to each mission, adding new aircraft (i.e., electric vertical take-off and landing platforms (eVTOLs)) as approvals and readiness allow. Scheduling, ground connections, airport access, and customer care all need owners. Repeating service builds both the demand consistency and the operating knowledge needed to expand. As the FAA continues to say, we need to “learn by doing.”
Learn By Doing and Give the FAA Usable Evidence
Routine operations show how a system performs across changing conditions. Operators can record weather effects at the altitudes flown, communications performance along the route and the workload involved in coordinating with airports and public safety agencies. They can document delays, interruptions and the response to each event.
The FAA needs evidence it can assess, and we need to rethink how we approach reporting. Operators and researchers should work with the agency to define the questions, measurements and reporting methods early on without fear of penalty. In my experience, fear of the unknown remains one of the biggest reasons the drone community doesn’t share well with the FAA.
I’ve worked across FAA programs where procedures and coordination were central to the operation. That experience still shapes the questions we need to ask:
- What decision will this evidence support?
- Who needs to use it?
- What do they need to understand about how it was collected?
A useful record explains the operating conditions, the result and the limits of what the data supports. The FAA can act meaningfully on intelligence from useful records by shaping requirements for procedures, standards, policy and approvals.
Assign Responsibilities Across the Operating Environment
State governments pick up on the federal engagement handoff by developing operationalizing strategies across transportation, economic development, public safety, emergency management, utilities, medical centers, airports and universities by bringing them all into the same state-level planning process.
Each stakeholder has a unique lens, mission needs and role in supporting the overall strategy. The FAA retains responsibility for federal aviation safety and airspace. Operators remain responsible for establishing market demand and delivering their services safely within their approvals.
For their part, Public safety agencies need enabling regulation and services that fit their staffing, dispatch procedures, budgets, and response authority. A drone-as-first-responder (DFR) program needs clear launch decisions, coordination with crewed responders and rules for sharing mission-appropriate imagery. Agencies must establish data access, communications coverage, and responsibility for maintaining that picture. Exercises can test coordination over mesh networks and access controls built upon the open-source Team Awareness Kit (TAK), which currently provides public safety situational awareness across the country.
An FAA-designated UAS Test Site can help organize testing and evidence collection. A state-supported test environment can help participants work through local coordination. The resulting plans should define how services will expand to additional locations and how each location will meet the operating requirements.
A state program accelerates toward revenue generation when those responsibilities are clear and the participants agree on what they will share. That may include communications infrastructure, operational data, emergency procedures, and maintenance and sustainment funding. A state program is the gateway to sustained revenue operations once federal programs expire.
Prepare Your People to Deliver the Service
Workforce development belongs in the operating plan. Identify the skills needed for flight operations, maintenance, dispatch, data management and emergency coordination. Universities, community colleges, career and technical education (CTE) schools, tech parks and innovation centers, when partnered with employers, can build stacked credentialing pathways. These include successive credentials that develop and demonstrate skills for defined roles. Each credential should include practical assessment and a clear connection to internship programs and employment.
University-led research parks can bring researchers, operators, suppliers, employers and students together around working services. Paid placements and supervised fieldwork can connect research to operating procedures, system integration and sustainment. Employers define job requirements, educators build learning pathways and operators assess performance in the field.
Build a Business Model That Sustains the Operation
Available aircraft and supporting systems give teams a practical starting point. Readiness depends on the intended service, operating conditions, approvals and the combined systems’ performance.
The business case deserves the same attention as the operational mission planning. Identify the paying customer, demand and cost per completed job. Include staffing, training, insurance, maintenance, communications, infrastructure and interrupted service.
Grant funding can support early testing and startup costs, but continued operations require committed revenue or an ongoing budget. Public safety services need an agency funding plan that covers staffing, equipment replacement and continued readiness.
Teams can measure progress through graduate retention, hiring metrics, completed jobs, service reliability, new-hire training costs, customer demand and operating costs. Those measures help determine what is ready to expand and what needs more work.
You may not realize it, but these key performance indicators (KPI) are all valuable reporting points for the FAA when measuring operational readiness. Imagine the intelligence each state gains, and the opportunity to collectively shape national enabling policy and actionable appropriations because of it.
Use Simulation to Prepare for Live Operations
Simulation can help a team examine the route, coordination procedures, weather limits, and responses to system failures before live testing. A digital twin, a computer model of the proposed operating environment, can support that work.
Define what the model represents, how you’ll check its accuracy and which findings need live validation. The responsible authority determines how simulation evidence contributes to approval. Live operations provide actual performance data.
Eventually, I envision a future where we benefit from AI-based digital twins as preflight intent-planning services. This will reduce a certain level of uncertainty and assist with tactical deconfliction while improving systemic predictability.
Make Operational Readiness Real
For my clients standing up a regional or state-level ecosystem, I ask the team to define four things in as much detail as possible:
- the environment where the service will operate
- the customer who needs it
- the business model that will sustain it and
- the people responsible for delivering it.
Assign an operational readiness owner, establish required approvals and agree on service performance measures. Use each approved operation to build the knowledge and repeatable practices the team needs to sustain and expand the service.
Track progress with measurable milestones and compile your successes into a regional- or state-level economic performance narrative. Then tell the FAA about it in a way that’s actionable for them.
In doing so, you help them better understand how their public-private-partnership programs evolve once test-environment restrictions are lifted, and whether existing regulations are meeting their intended effect. The result can be a new rule that truly opens up the low-altitude economy in a meaningful, safe and profitable way. And all because your operational readiness processes contributed to national best practices.