In early July, Foundation Vice President, Technical, Mark Millam and I traveled to Blacksburg, Virginia, to visit the Virginia Tech Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership (MAAP), which is one of seven Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-designated unmanned aircraft system (UAS) test sites in the United States.
We spent much of the morning with MAAP Director Mark Blanks and Associate Director Thomas Jones and got a detailed briefing on the organization’s capabilities, which are extensive, and areas of focus, including beyond visual line of sight operations, airworthiness certification, UAS communications, airworthiness certification, and building safety cases for operations that extend beyond existing authorizations.
We also talked at length about the Department of Transportation/FAA UAS Integration Pilot Program, which is intended to bring together state and local governments and industry stakeholders to work on and accelerate safe drone integration.
At its core, MAAP is a research o…
