Boeing Drone Flight Planning

Project Objective

Charting and flight planning are major parts of Boeing/Jeppesens digital portfolio and when we caught wind of an opportunity to be part of the initial project with the FAA to develop a flight planning system for commercial drones we jumped on it. With the massive rise in Drones the FAA needed a way for commercial drone pilots to submit flight plans that are currently within the No-Fly zones around airports and other key locations and events.

Design Solution

I joined this project in the early proof of concept phase and our goal was to define key use cases and approaches for meeting the FAA requirements for the LAANC (Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability) initiative. Some of our key goals were:

• allowing owner/operators to easily understand where they could fly without filing a flight plan
• creating a simple and streamlined approach for submitting commercial flight plans
• proving conditional approval immediately based on FAA regulations and weather conditions
• being able to withdraw approvals if there are changes to airspace conditions (e.g. temporary no/fly zones based on events or other aviation activity).

Results

As part of this project we developed both a web-app as well as an iPad app to allow pilots to submit an manage flight plans, manage their drone registrations, identify if other flight plans have been filed for their area. We also developed a new crowd-sourced approach to providing low-altitude objects and obstructions to allow us to build a more detailed and up-to date low-altitude aviation charts.

This was step on towards building a flight planning tool that allow for programatic drone flight plans and is a vital step towards enabling commercial drone-based delivery services.