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Evaluating the Impact of Unrestricted Operation of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in the National Airspace System

Metadata Updated: April 10, 2025

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) can be used for scientific, emergency management, and defense missions, among others. The existing federal air regulations, procedures, and technologies do not allow routine UAS access to the National Airspace System (NAS), with the UAS being flown primarily within restricted airspaces. The current Certificate of Waiver of Authorization (COA) process requirement for UAS operations in the NAS are extremely resource intensive, lengthy, and often lacks the flexibility to meet the full mission needs. As the number of UAS operations increases, new methodologies will be needed to enable their safe and routine access to both restricted and unrestricted airspace in the NAS. This paper focuses on gaining a better understanding of growth of NAS usage in near-term NAS UAS demand in that airspace, and an assessment of the impact of unrestricted UAS deployment in the NAS that may facilitate the development of enabling methodologies. Using software simulations for demand growth generation and NAS operations the impact of UAS integration into the NextGen NAS is simulated to analyze its impact on the delay, congestion, loss of separation conflicts, fuel burn, and noise level. Our analyses show that while there is a slight increase in these factors due to additional UAS flight, this increase is minimal compared to the levels caused by the increase of commercial traffic alone.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date November 12, 2020
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2025
Data Update Frequency irregular

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date November 12, 2020
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2025
Publisher Dashlink
Maintainer
Identifier DASHLINK_847
Data First Published 2013-12-11
Data Last Modified 2025-03-31
Public Access Level public
Data Update Frequency irregular
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id ed51a2ea-3095-40a5-b9ac-d14e3bf53e88
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://c3.nasa.gov/dashlink/resources/847/
Program Code 026:029
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 655513df836791d9617d028636398119f44c22c1f922f6dfc176432379898d71
Source Schema Version 1.1

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