THE Civil Aviation Ministry has notified a traffic management framework for drones under which public and private third-party service providers will manage their movement in the airspace under 1,000 feet. Current air traffic management (ATM) systems have not been designed to handle the traffic from unmanned aircraft, the framework issued on October 24 stated. “Integration of unmanned aircraft in the Indian airspace using conventional means may require unmanned aircraft to be equipped with bulky and expensive hardware, which is neither feasible nor advisable,” it noted. This requires the creation of a separate, modern, primarily software-based, automated UAS (unmanned aircraft system) Traffic Management (UTM) system, it said, adding that such systems may subsequently be integrated into traditional ATM systems.

The integration of UTM and ATM will be important to continuously separate manned and unmanned aircraft from each other in the airspace. The framework allows third-party service providers to give services such as registration, flight planning, dynamic deconfliction and access to supplementary data like weather, terrain and position of manned aircraft. Also, a set of supplementary service providers will also be permitted under the framework to provide services such as insurance and data analytics to support the UTM ecosystem.

DigitalSky platform shall continue to be the interface for Government stakeholders to provide approvals and permissions to drone operators wherever required, according to rules. All drones (except Nano drones operating in green zone) shall be required to mandatorily share their real-time location through the network to Centre either directly or through third-party service providers, it mentioned.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/nation/govt-notifies-framework-for-traffic-management-of-drones-in-lower-airspace-329956