An in-depth look at the research collaboration between NASA and the FAA since 2017 to write new US airspace rules for safely accommodating millions of drones
and maybe one day, people https://www.bloomberg.com/... @bw : If drone delivery becomes widespread, the sky could be filled with scores of drones. Go inside the massive undertaking to keep them from crashing into each other https://www.bloomberg.com/... @bw : NASA and the FAA are preparing to revolutionize air traffic control for the drone era https://www.bloomberg.com/... @business : If drone delivery is the future, it will require an unprecedented cooperation between government and industry to revolutionize air traffic control and keep the skies free of drone crashes https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @BW
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes a loop that opened in 2015, when Google, Amazon, Verizon and at least eleven other companies signed on to help NASA devise the first air-traffic control system for small, low-altitude drones. The FAA's parallel move that year to expand drone testing in urban areas and beyond operators' line of sight supplied the flight data those designs needed.
First-order effects
- Certified commercial operators such as DoorDash, which holds Part 135 air carrier certification for drone delivery, get the rulebook they need to scale beyond single-route demonstrations.
- The estimated 65 US drone software and AI startups covered earlier this year gain a fixed technical standard to build against instead of guessing at future airspace requirements.
Second-order effects
- The companies that co-designed the traffic-control research with NASA — Google, Amazon, Verizon among them — are positioned to sell the systems and services the new rules effectively mandate, turning regulatory expertise into market advantage.
- Adjacent commercial users such as drone journalists, who already face layered federal and local hurdles, inherit whatever access constraints the new framework hard-codes into low-altitude airspace.
Third-order effects
- Air traffic control is being restructured around automated coordination of machine-operated aircraft rather than human-piloted ones, a shift that would make the FAA's role as much systems certifier as controller.
- If the NASA-FAA model holds, government-industry co-authorship of infrastructure rules becomes the template for other domains where private fleets scale faster than regulators can write rules alone.
The trend: US low-altitude airspace is moving from case-by-case exemptions toward a jointly designed automated traffic-management regime built by NASA, the FAA, and the drone industry itself.