By: Juan Plaza, Autonomy Global Ambassador – Operations Safety
For more than a century, the National Airspace System (NAS) has been shaped by the assumption that people fly, monitor and separate aircraft. Even as automation crept into cockpits and control towers, humans remained the central node in the safety architecture. But the airspace of tomorrow will not look like the one we inherited. It will be denser, more diverse and increasingly autonomous. It will be populated by small delivery drones and electric air taxis to high-altitude platforms that will share the sky with traditional air carriers. It’s not a matter of if this transformation will happen. The conversation must shift to how to keep it safe when it does. Enter the concept of the In-Time Aviation Safety Management System, or IASMS.
IASMS As The Nervous System of the Future NAS
NASA developed the IASMS framework through its System-Wide Safety Project. Advanced by companies like ResilienX, IASMS represents a fundamental rethinking of how to assure safety in a world where humans are no longer the sole guardians of situational awareness. Instead of relying on periodic assessments, manual oversight or post-event analysis, IASMS envisions a continuously aware safety ecosystem that monitors its own health, detects anomalies as they emerge and prepares to mitigate risks before they escalate into hazards. It is, in many ways, the nervous system of the future NAS.
At its core, IASMS builds on the philosophy of In-Time System-Wide Safety Assurance (ISSA), NASA’s blueprint for a safety architecture that can keep pace with autonomy and complexity. Traditional Safety Management Systems (SMS) remain essential, but were never designed for an environment where thousands of uncrewed aircraft may be operating simultaneously, where digital services play as critical a role as physical infrastructure,and where the speed of decision-making must match the tempo of automated flight. IASMS extends SMS into real time by transforming safety from a reactive process into a living, adaptive capability.
The Three IASMS Pillars and the Difference From Traditional Models
The first pillar of IASMS involves continuous monitoring. In the future NAS, safety depends not only on the aircraft themselves but on the integrity of the entire ecosystem surrounding them. Navigation signals, surveillance feeds, weather data, communications links, aircraft health information, Uncrewed Traffic Management (UTM) and Detect and Avoid (DAA) services and even the performance of ground-based sensors all become part of the safety picture. IASMS treats these elements as interconnected components whose health must be tracked constantly. A subtle drift in a sensor, a momentary degradation in GPS accuracy or a latency spike in a command-and-control (C2) link may seem minor in isolation. However, in a tightly coupled autonomous environment, such anomalies can cascade quickly. IASMS aims to detect these issues early, long before they become operationally significant.
As part of monitoring, IASMS begins to distinguish itself from traditional safety models with detection. Instead of waiting for a human operator to notice something amiss, IASMS uses analytics, predictive modeling and machine learning to identify patterns that may indicate emerging risks. This is essential in environments where aircraft may be operating beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), where human oversight is distributed across multiple systems or where the sheer volume of data exceeds human capacity to process it. NASA designed the system to recognize hazards as well as novel combinations of factors that could lead to unsafe conditions. In a sense, IASMS always looks around the corner.
But detection alone is not enough. The true power of IASMS lies in its other two pillars, the ability to assess and mitigate risks in time to prevent incidents. Once the system identifies an anomaly, it evaluates its severity, potential impact on different operations and the appropriate response. That response may involve rerouting an aircraft, adjusting separation, triggering a contingency procedure, alerting an operator or initiating a graceful degradation mode.
These actions must be triggered quickly enough to preserve safety even in high-density or autonomous operations where human reaction time may be insufficient. IASMS is not designed to replace human judgment but rather to augment it. It ensures that the system remains resilient even when humans supervise from a distance.
Inside ISSA — The Architecture Behind the Future of Aviation Safety
Long before IASMS became the operational buzzword of advanced aviation, NASA had already been sketching the blueprint for a new kind of safety architecture. They called it In-Time System-Wide Safety Assurance, or ISSA, (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190032480/downloads/20190032480.pdf) and it represents one of the most ambitious shifts in safety thinking since the introduction of SMS itself.
ISSA starts from a simple but profound observation: the future NAS will be too fast, too dense, and too interconnected for traditional, human-centered safety models to keep up. As autonomy expands and digital services become as critical as runways and radars, safety can no longer be something assessed periodically or after the fact. It must be something the system does continuously, automatically, and intelligently.
At its heart, ISSA is a framework for giving the airspace a kind of situational awareness of its own. It envisions a network of aircraft, services, sensors, and operators that are constantly sharing data about their health, performance, and environment. This data is analyzed in real time to detect anomalies, predict emerging risks, and recommend or initiate mitigations before those risks turn into incidents. In other words, ISSA is the philosophy that safety must happen “in time,” not “after the fact.”
What makes ISSA particularly forward-leaning is its system-wide perspective. Instead of treating each aircraft or operator as an isolated entity, ISSA recognizes that safety in modern aviation depends on the integrity of the entire ecosystem. A glitch in a weather feed, a latency spike in a UTM service, or a subtle drift in a navigation sensor can have ripple effects across multiple operations. ISSA is designed to catch those ripples early, understand their implications, and help the system adapt.
NASA’s work on ISSA also acknowledges that humans will remain part of the safety loop, but their role will evolve. As autonomy increases, operators will shift from hands-on control to supervisory oversight, and ISSA provides the tools to support that transition. It gives humans better information, earlier warnings, and clearer insight into system health, allowing them to intervene strategically rather than reactively.
If IASMS is the deployable, operational layer,m then ISSA is the conceptual foundation that makes it all coherent. It is the intellectual scaffolding behind the idea that safety must be predictive, distributed, and adaptive. And as the NAS moves toward a future defined by electric air taxis, high-density drone corridors, and increasingly autonomous aircraft, ISSA is the quiet force ensuring that innovation doesn’t outrun safety.
Mixed Performance Airspace Demands Universal Safe Performance
The importance of IASMS becomes clear when considering the challenge of integrating crewed and uncrewed aviation. The future NAS will be a mixed-performance environment, with aircraft of vastly different sizes, speeds and capabilities sharing the same airspace. Small drones may be flying at low altitudes at relatively slow speeds while electric air taxis may be conducting point-to-point passenger operations and traditional airliners will continue to dominate higher altitudes and long-distance routes. Each category brings its own operational constraints and safety considerations. IASMS provides a unifying safety layer that can adapt to this diversity and ensure that the system remains coherent even as new entrants proliferate.
With the impending implementation of Part 108 and the proliferation and massification of BVLOS flights, autonomy could add another layer of complexity. As aircraft become more capable of managing their own flight paths, humans shift from direct control to supervisory roles. This transition offers enormous benefits in terms of efficiency and scalability, but also introduces new risks. As operators may have less direct situational awareness, the system must be able to compensate for the reduced human presence. IASMS fills this gap by providing real-time insight into system health and by automating responses to emerging risks. It ensures that autonomy does not come at the expense of safety.
Public acceptance is another critical factor for AAM. The industry’s potential success depends on the public’s confidence that new aircraft and new operational models will operate as safely as the aviation system they already trust. IASMS offers a transparent, data-driven approach to safety that can help build that confidence.
Regulators, too, need assurance that new entrants will not degrade system-wide safety. IASMS provides the tools to demonstrate compliance, validate performance and maintain oversight in a rapidly evolving environment.
Overcoming Hurdles to Full Implementation
Yet the path to full IASMS implementation is not without challenges. One of the most significant involves data integration. IASMS relies on continuous data flows from a wide range of sources, each with its own standards, interfaces and performance characteristics. Achieving seamless interoperability requires industry-wide coordination, standardized data formats and robust agreements for data sharing. Without these three components, the system risks fragmentation, with safety assurance limited by the weakest link in the chain.
Cybersecurity presents another formidable issue. As safety becomes increasingly dependent on digital infrastructure, the system must be resilient to threats such as spoofing, data corruption, service outages and malicious interference. IASMS must not only detect anomalies caused by technical failures but also distinguish them from intentional attacks. Building this level of resilience requires sophisticated detection capabilities, secure architectures and continuous vigilance.
Human factors will also play a crucial role. Introducing IASMS changes the way operators interact with the system, shifting their responsibilities and altering their relationship with automation. Let us keep in mind that we are dealing with 70 years of doing things in one way (radar & voice commands) and change is never easy. Ensuring that operators trust the system, understand its outputs and remain engaged without becoming overly reliant on automation remains essential. Training, interface design and organizational culture all influence effective IASMS adoption.
Regulatory frameworks must evolve as well. IASMS represents a new category of safety-critical infrastructure, one that spans multiple systems, services and operational domains. Regulators must determine how to certify IASMS components, how to validate predictive safety models and how to oversee distributed safety architectures. While these questions are complex, the answers will shape the trajectory of advanced aviation for decades.
Finally, there is the matter of cost and adoption. Implementing IASMS requires investment in sensors, analytics, software, training and organizational change. Smaller operators may struggle to adopt these capabilities without clear incentives or regulatory requirements. Achieving widespread adoption will require alignment across industry, government and technology providers.
The Ground Swell For Airborne Safety
Despite these challenges, the momentum behind IASMS continues to grow. As the aviation community prepares for a future defined by autonomy, diversity and scale, IASMS offers a path to maintain, and even enhance, the safety performance that has long been the hallmark of aviation. It will not replace traditional safety systems but instead evolve them to meet the demands of emerging aviation.
In the end, IASMS provides more than a technical framework. It serves as a philosophy of safety that recognizes the interconnectedness of modern aviation and the need for systems that can think, adapt and respond in real time. It will make the next generation of flights possible. And as the NAS continues its evolution, IASMS will provide the invisible architecture that guarantees innovation and safety advance…together.