In 1935, a group of U.S. airlines joined forces to establish what is considered by many to be the first standardized air traffic control system.
Nearly a century later, the ATC system is primed for a revolution prompted by the influx of small uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, which are already taking on jobs from food delivery to crop spraying to policing.
“Now, we are looking at drones—hundreds, thousands of drones—and we don’t know how to handle this,” Jesper Skou, CEO and co-founder of Danish digital ATC provider SkyPuzzler, told FLYING.
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Skou spent about 15 years as an ATC in Denmark and Switzerland before moving into managerial air traffic management roles. He later served on the European Commission’s performance review body for the Single European Sky (SES) project, which seeks to harmonize about 30 European air navigation service providers.
Skou said aviation stakeholders in the 1930s contended with “more or less the same situation we are facing now.” ATC systems already face tremendous strain due to staffing shortages and outdated technology. As drone activity explodes, the FAA is now met with the arduous task of regulating communication between humans and aircraft that lack onboard pilots.
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Complicating matters is the agency’s desire to authorize routine beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) missions under its proposed Part 108. That means humans in charge of the airspace will need to deconflict the drones without putting eyes on them.
The FAA told FLYING that as of late July it has received no reports of fatalities or life-threatening injuries resulting from an accident involving a commercial drone.
There have, however, been reported incidents of delivery drones colliding with one another, as well as into power lines, pools, or apartment buildings. In early 2025, a civilian drone punched a fist-sized hole in an aerial firefighting aircraft, though the pilot landed with no reported injury to crewmembers.
However, the risk of more severe consequences rises as more UAVs enter the National Airspace System (NAS). Many models have exposed rotors and are heavy enough to inflict serious injury.
Simply put, the FAA and other regulators need a way to ensure drones do not cause a catastrophe. The solution, according to Skou and others, is the creation of a parallel ATC system tailored to aircraft without a pilot—“basically, a digital air traffic controller,” Skou said.
“In the U.S., it’s not the lack of ambition,” he said. “It’s not the lack of fancy drones. It’s not the lack of demand…I think it’s the lack of infrastructure.”
Regulatory Shift
In 2025, Airspace Link, a provider of uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) traffic management (UTM) services, told FLYING there were about 240 drone operators in the U.S. with BVLOS permissions. Part 108 could authorize thousands more.
The proposed rule would standardize BVLOS operations and permit commercial drone activities in controlled Class B, C, D, and E and uncontrolled Class G airspace. Pilots would not require a traditional airman certificate. Instead, they could apply for a Part 108 permit or certificate by showing compliance with FAA-approved, performance-based standards developed by industry.
In essence, Part 108 would greatly expand where drones could routinely fly. As FLYING has reported previously, groups such as the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) have reservations with the proposal.
“With all these new airspace users coming into the low-level airspace, it’s a huge challenge because the current air traffic control system cannot handle hundreds or thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles,” said Skou. “So we have to come up with a new solution.”
For the FAA, that remedy is UTM.
The agency envisions UTM being provided by automated data service providers (ADSPs). The FAA’s proposed Part 146 would certify ADSPs and classify them as air agencies akin to flight schools. Unlike a voice-based system, these entities would use automation and digitization to monitor for potential collisions and ensure drones follow their flight plans.
Still, UTM remains a concept that is not part of any formal FAA regulation. The agency is evaluating the framework in Dallas-Fort Worth, where several drone operators are conducting activities in shared airspace. But according to Skou, “if you really want to scale, you cannot base the [UTM] concept on the solution that they have for now.”
Beyond First-Come, First-Served
In Dallas-Fort Worth, drone operators face limitations that challenge the economic viability of their operations.
The FAA sets regulatory constraints and handles oversight. But operators are responsible for safety, coordinating activities among themselves and using visual observers or agency-approved detect and avoid (DAA) systems to manage the risk from crewed aircraft. They feed missions into a system that gives them unfettered access to a swath of airspace below 400 feet, barring other operators from flying at the same time. The model is first-come, first-served.
“That could be Google Wing saying, ‘OK, we are going to fly these missions now,’ which means that they will occupy the airspace,” Skou said.
Similar evaluations are active in 11 other U.S. states under the FAA’s UTM Operational Evaluation. The agency developed a Near-Term Approval Process that it has used to expedite the approval of 11 UTM service providers. It told FLYING that drone operators participating in the campaign have used these to conduct more than 1 million flights in 2026 alone. Some of the operators, including Zipline, Wing, DroneUp, and Flytrex, even provide their own UTM services.
European regulators have taken a different strategy. Whereas the FAA established UTM pilot programs before codifying a system, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) since 2021 has relied on a formal regulation called U-space. The FAA’s UTM framework would permit drone operations just about anywhere. But EASA regulations require European Union member states to designate specific portions of airspace as U-space. Operators flying in those zones must be certified U-space operators, and they obtain flight data from a central, government-appointed body rather than one another. Skou contrasted U-space with the FAA’s “federated and performance-based” UTM system. However, both suffer the same shortcomings.
About 90 drone operators are conducting routine activities—from logistics to offshore inspection—at the Port of Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port near Rotterdam The Hague Airport (EHRD). To accommodate them, the port developed an airspace management system under the U-space framework, cordoning off individual operators into “closed areas or corridors,” Skou said.
As in Dallas-Fort Worth, drone operators in Rotterdam must wait for UAVs to vacate the designated airspace before lifting off.
Another issue with this predeparture deconfliction, as Skou called it, is safety. With only a handful of operators, UTM providers might be able to manage if a drone deviates from its planned path due to battery issues, weather, or avoiding another aircraft. But responding to contingencies becomes more complex with 10, 20, or 100 operators sharing the same airspace, as the FAA envisions.
That is where real-time deconfliction could help.
SkyPuzzler is integrating its drone conflict resolution platform into Thales’ UTM system. Skou said the platform monitors drone flights using data from UTM providers, feeding them into an algorithm to detect and resolve conflicts through digital notifications.
In short, it assumes the same responsibilities a human controller would, while Thales handles other UTM tasks such as approving flight plans.
“[ATCs are] saying, ‘American Airlines, turn left or turn right.’” Skou said. “We will provide the UTM system or the drone operator with a conflict resolution, which means you have to turn right, left, go up, down—whatever the solution is.”
That sort of solution is exactly what the FAA is working toward.
Proactive Safety
NASA’s In-Time Aviation Safety Management System (IASMS), covered in FLYING’s July 2025 issue, provides a blueprint of the services that Part 146 ADSPs would need to provide. IASMS is designed to go beyond real-time alerts, using continuous monitoring to flag potential hazards before they happen.
The space agency for years has helped the FAA study drones. Its efforts spurred the creation of the regulator’s Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC)—a fixture of modern UAS operations.
Now, the agency is developing the Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories (SMART) platform, which is intended to predict airspace conditions months in advance. Trials of SMART are planned to begin in September.
According to Skou, the FAA is already doing at least one thing right. He prefers the American UTM model over European U-space due to its superior flexibility for drone operators. But there is more work to be done.
One challenge will be data collection. Skou said SkyPuzzler can deconflict both crewed and uncrewed aircraft, but only if their operators provide positioning data. For that reason, the platform is designed mainly for operations outside airports, he said.
The FAA could solve this by requiring Part 146 ADSPs to maintain data on both uncrewed and crewed aircraft. The agency already requires registered drones to be equipped with remote identification systems that broadcast information such as position, speed, and altitude.
But as ALPA and other pilots noted in their comments on the Part 108 proposal, installing ADS-B systems for crewed aircraft is expensive, and electronic conspicuity systems are not yet approved as alternatives. The FAA’s proposal places the burden on drones to detect and avoid crewed aircraft not broadcasting their position and restricts UAS that are incapable of doing so.
However, as long as some aircraft are non-conspicuous, the potential for collisions with crewed aircraft remains to be addressed.
This feature first appeared in the September Issue 974 of the FLYING print edition.