For the last 120 years, traditional crewed aviation has been perfecting the safe mode of transportation we have today. At the beginning, it was a matter of improving the crude aircraft of the 1910’s, 1920’s and 1930’s. Eventually, with the launch of the Douglas DC3, air travel became a reality and not happenstance. The next three decades saw a rapid improvement in pilot training protocols and the move from piston engines to jets. Then, in the 1980’s and 1990’s, technological advances in weather forecasting completed the famous trifecta that today we know as Safety Management System (SMS). The last two decades have seen a consolidation of all these years of lessons learned into practical SMS’s used today by almost every pilot carrying passengers or cargo in the National Airspace System (NAS).

With the arrival of uncrewed aviation, or drones, in the early 2010s, a new era of aviation is here to help humanity improve processes and increase efficiencies, while reducing pollution and removing trucks from our congested roads. But the question that regulators such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) have for the industry is, “Are crewed SMS’s easily adaptable to drones and aircraft that do not carry passengers or pilots onboard?”

Unfortunately, the answer is “no.” Crewed aviation SMS’s main focus is the aircraft and its contents. In other words, by analyzing aircraft, pilot and the weather involved in any particular flight, the system is designed with only one objective: make sure the vessel and the passengers, cargo and crew arrive safely at its destination, or alternate.

There is nothing in current crewed SMS’s that addresses the safety of people on the ground. But that, precisely, is the primary concern for operators of small drones flying over populated areas.

In order to better understand how an SMS for uncrewed aviation might work, we reached out to Jeffrey Pattison, founder and President of Pattent LLC, a company which is developing a tool to expedite risk assessment in uncrewed aviation systems (UAS) flights. Jeff holds a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“What I did for my PhD studies was to focus on risk assessment of drone flights,” Jeff stated. “I wanted to establish the differences with current SMS systems used in traditional aviation and soon discovered that we needed a whole new approach that made emphasis on the ground infrastructure and how population density, time of day and many other factors affect the safety of each flight.”

Risk assessment for uncrewed aviation needs to be accurate, but it also needs to be fast and affordable in order to balance safety and economic viability. Otherwise, the industry faces an uncertain future.

“Our current product is called Route Scout, an API-based tool to assist with UAS risk assessment and route planning. Using patent-pending AI/ML technology, we combine a variety of datasets to identify high-risk areas that are most likely to result in an injury or fatalities,” Jeff said. “Our route planning solutions can easily find suitably safe routes based on the needs of our customers a few minutes before each flight.”

The reality of drone flights is that they will be relatively short, monitored by a remote pilot probably following tens of drones simultaneously. The profit margin per flight will be small, possibly in the cents/per flight range, so any tool that would increase costs substantially will be a non-starter.

“We set out to develop a realistic tool that would assess risk based on physics and different crash scenarios based on weight, altitude and speed of the drone,” Jeff explained. “This information will be combined with multiple data bases of ground information to perform various crash scenarios that would eventually provide the safest route given the time of day, weather and a few other parameters.”

When the conversation turned to the current version of the Pattent LLC technology and the future of the company, Jeff was candid.

“These are hard times for raising funds for uncrewed aviation technology, especially something that is not particularly flashy, but that will be absolutely necessary if we ever want to integrate crewed and uncrewed aviation in the NAS,” Jeff said flatly. “We are applying to grants from various organizations such as the FAA but also contacting venture capital (VCs) and individual investors. We believe in our technology and the need for it in the immediate future.”

Even though the need for risk assessment today is limited, given that we still live in a Part 107 world, as soon as the FAA publishes its much-anticipated Part 108 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), the race will be on to have all these components ready for the time when drones and piloted aircraft will share the NAS, efficiently and safely, thanks to risk assessments on both sides of the equation.