Small UAS Demand Estimation

Abstract

Under the UAS Traffic Management (UTM) program, NASA is investigating procedures to enable routine small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) operations. Whereas safety and operations studies under UTM require sUAS trajectories, only a few sUAS flights are currently operational under permission from the FAA. Consequently, there are no large datasets of sUAS flight trajectories to conduct high fidelity simulations and analyses to understand different aspects of sUAS operations: regulations, safety, security, business models, risk, etc. To this end, demand for sUAS missions was estimated using socio-economic analysis and subject matter expert input. This paper describes the methodology, the demand estimates of two example applications of sUAS, and a case study to demonstrate the utility of the estimates.