![]() ![]() Those flights will depart from Xwing’s hangar at Buchanan Field Airport in Concord, California, just northeast of San Francisco. To help answer these types of questions, Xwing-which is already conducting flight tests with experimental Cessna Grand Caravans modified with autonomous flight technology-will fly its remotely piloted aircraft into real fire traffic areas in Northern California in early 2023. “How will a large unmanned system with a remote pilot be able to actively integrate in that airspace? How will they sequence and manage that aircraft communicate with the remote operator, and how does the remote operator communicate with other aircraft?” These are questions that the FAA seeks to answer through this new partnership with Xwing. “In that scenario, you have a lot of different types of aircraft in a contained area, fixed-wing aircraft dropping fire suppressant, you have small unmanned systems doing airborne reconnaissance, you have helicopters there-lots of different aircraft operating together,” and those operations typically require manual coordination between the pilots and other personnel on the scene, Xwing’s vice president of commercialization and strategy, Jesse Kallman, told FutureFlight. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to participate in the agency’s Crosscutting Operations Strategy and Technical Assessment (COSTA) air traffic management research project, the company announced on December 1.Īs part of this project, Xwing will work together with the FAA and NASA, as well as partners at Alaska’s Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration, to study how remotely piloted aircraft can be safely integrated with the National Airspace System while flying in complex environments with flight restrictions, such as fire traffic areas where other aircraft are actively working to suppress wildfires. Xwing, a California-based company developing autonomous flight technology, has been contracted by the U.S.
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