Drone News: Amazon Loses Head of Ops, FAA UTM Field Test, Skyebrowse Pay-Per-Model, and New FRIA Map

Welcome to your weekly news update, we have 4 stories for you this week, Amazon loses Head of Safety and Flight operations, FAA and NASA conduct UTM Field Test, Skyebrowse introduces pay-per-model, and the FPVFC releases a FRIA map.

Your first story this week is Amazon, who keeps losing people. Sean Cassidy, the head of Safety, flight operations, and regulatory affairs has reportedly left the company. Cassidy, a former Alaska Airlines Pilot, joined Amazon in 2015 to assist Prime Air through the process of obtaining FAA approvals. Amazon received their Part 135 certificate in August of 2020, and deliveries began this year. Over the last year, amazon has had a number of lay-offs including one in January and has lost a number of key players. Amazon hasn’t released any statement or status on their deliveries in the past few months, but we’ll keep you updated if we see any updates. Next up this week is the FAA and NASA, who have conducted a UTM field test. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of unmanned traffic management, it’s a system that allows a UAS operator to reserve a portion of the airspace for a particular time. These “reservations” would assist with deconfliction between UAS traveling at or below 400’ in uncontrolled airspace. The test included flights of varying complexity levels, verifying standards, evaluating UTM systems, testing FAA integration with USS, and testing the real world application of all these systems working with ones another. Data collected from the UTM field test is expected to be used by policymakers to enable low-altitude operations, particularly those that will operate beyond line of sight. If you’d like to read the full report, we’ll add a link in the description! Third up this week is Skyebrowse, who is now offering a pay-per model version of their software! Models start at just $3 per model and vary based on the size of the video file. Pay per models will allow you to unlock features, such as download or measurements, that are not available in the “freemium” subscription plan. This works with older models, and we were able to use a model from 2021 and access these tools! Alright, and last up this week is a map of FRIAs! Due to the UAS Facility maps not containing information about FRIA, Alex Suarez has created a map that contains the locations of approved FRIAs. The map is color coded to differentiate between the 4 CBOs, and for FPVFC, FTCA, and STEMC FRIAs, has precise boundaries. Great job Alex! Alright, that’s all we’ve got, have a great week and we’ll see you on Monday for the live! Last week, I was on vacation and @wolfpack4694 asked the team if they would do a video talking about how mean I am. The thing is, I’m really not mean, so they had to make stuff up, and let’s just say they had a little too much fun with it. Take a look, enjoy! https://www.skyebrowse.com/blog/2023/12/12/introducing-pay-per-model https://www.faa.gov/uas/advanced_operations/traffic_management/UFT-Final-Report.pdf https://www.faa.gov/uas/research_development/traffic_management/field_test https://dronexl.co/2023/12/07/faa-nasa-utm-field-test/ https://dronexl.co/2023/12/12/prime-air-shakeup-cassidy-amazon-exit/ https://www.friamap.com/