Silent Falcon UAS Technologies has announced that it has been granted an Airworthiness Statement by the Airworthiness & Flight Safety Review Board, part of the Ames Research Center division of NASA.
This Statement allows the Silent Falcon UAS (Unmanned Aircraft System) to participate in the NASA UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management) project headed up by the NASA Ames Research Center.
NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) are working together to identify ways to safely enable large-scale UAS operations in the low-altitude airspace. The growing number of UAS and commercial UAS applications has led to this critical project.
Silent Falcon participated in a series of practice runs and one scenario in preparation for the actual UTM flight tests, which will take place in Reno, Nevada. Silent Falcon, along with 11 other partners in the UTM program, will fly their aircraft in typical UAS scenarios. The tests will focus on the ability to alert and inform airspace users of potential dangers and conflicting situations that go BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) as well as within VLOS (Visual Line of Sight). Safety is of utmost importance and visual observers will be put in place to ensure aircraft stay on their designated paths and do not interfere with other aircraft in the area.
“We are extremely fortunate to be a part of this very important project – both in the actual flight operations, as well as the development of the UTM software. This project is extremely important to the UAS industry and is of particular interest to us as we manufacture a long range, long endurance fixed wing UAS that was designed for BVLOS applications. We are grateful to NASA for including us and we look forward to further participation as the project continues to move forward,” said John W. Brown, Silent Falcon UAS Technologies President & CEO.
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