aloft Today we are announcing the addition of native LAANC integration to our portfolio.
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Deep link integration is a significant new feature for the enterprise drone industry ecosystem. With these new APIs, aloft is removing barriers to entry for developers and users of apps for the commercial drone industry, such as the FAA’s Low Altitude Authentication and Notification Capability (LAANC).
LAANC was introduced in 2017 to automate previously time-consuming paper processes. With LAANC, drone operators can now get certified quickly and conveniently through a software app from an approved provider.
Aloft (formerly Kitty Hawk) has been an approved service provider since 2018 and has worked with the FAA to develop a free service. “B4UFly” App For recreational pilots. (Aloft has received no government funding, and commercialization of other products supports free use of the B4UFly app.) Aloft has become the leading provider of LAANC services in the country, with requests for Powering over 70%.
However, offering LAANC functionality to their customers has proven difficult for many providers of other enterprise drone applications. LAANC service providers must go through the FAA’s approval process. This process only happens periodically. Pilots had unstable connections and sometimes had to exit the app they were using to get LAANC approval and sign in to the new system. The tools announced today will enable enterprise drone application providers to deliver a seamless experience to their customers by offering LAANC services without proprietary rights, leveraging aloft’s LAANC, airspace and fleet management capabilities. It can be natively embedded in your own software. A “deep link” API eliminates the need for customers to sign-on to multiple applications for automated and efficient authentication.
In addition to leveraging aloft’s authority as an LAANC provider, app developers will leverage aloft’s robust and certified security framework, an increasingly important aspect of commercial drone solutions.
“This solution allows other companies to leverage the cybersecurity posture Aloft has achieved without going through the same process,” explains Aloft Founder and CTO Josh Ziering. Ziering said the API will also act as a concrete example of an unmanned traffic management (UTM) framework that is in development. “This is an amazing example of UTM as a ‘system of systems,’” he comments.
“Today, we are not just announcing a new tool. “The aviation industry is evolving rapidly, and unmanned aerial systems are a fundamental part of that change. We are enhancing the safety, compliance and efficiency of
