As the United States braces for more natural disasters, NASA and private industry are looking to a future national airspace that can manage crewed aircraft and autonomous drones together. Yet, hurdles remain before the technology and policy are aligned, said drone and aviation safety experts, speaking on the “Revolutionizing Disaster Relief” panel at the 2025 AIAA AVIATION Forum in July.
Min Xue, aerospace research engineer at NASA Ames Research Center, highlighted the economic toll of natural disasters in the United States, which for wildfires alone exceeds $100 billion every year, he noted. The five-year average cost to suppress fires is about $2 billion. This year alone there have been nearly 42,000 wildfire incidents and over 3.4 million acres burned, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.
Not surprisingly, major air framers like Airbus are rolling out drone fleets designed to respond to wildfire and other emergencies; however, they can’t safely deploy if the U.S. airspace isn’t able to track the increasing numbers of drones operating at low altitude.
Impending Airspace Crisis
“We have an impending crisis with drones in the national airspace — there is no common operating picture,” said Andy Thurling, VP of Airspace Innovation at DroneUp, a Virginia-based autonomous drone company that intends to integrate advanced autonomy into the national airspace.
Xue concurred, observing that current tools are insufficient for managing 24/7 aerial operations. “Air traffic controllers don’t have the tools to see or manage drones, especially in poor visibility. We need new systems to support both cooperative and non-cooperative aircraft, and to ensure autonomous firefighting vehicles can safely operate alongside [crewed] aircraft.”
On any given day, approximately 8,500 drones are estimated to fly over U.S. airspace, but many are not broadcasting identifying information such as location, altitude, velocity, and location, despite the FAA’s Remote Identification rule, which went into effect in March 2024 to include all drones flown for recreation, business, or public safety.
Compliance, Not Technology, Is the Issue
Thurling considers the issue fundamentally a compliance problem. “People are not flying with their remote ID and they are not sticking to altitude restrictions.”
The drone expert said even instituting a Temporary Flight Restriction, or TFR, over an area experiencing an emergency, can’t address the problem. “The TFR doesn’t stop drones from interfering with water bombers or helicopters responding to disasters. If we can’t tell the good drones from the bad, we risk grounding critical response aircraft,” he said.
DroneUp’s Founder and CEO Tom Walker testified in July before the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Transportation and Maritime Security about the risks of unauthorized drone use. Walker stated that last year, drones accounted for nearly two-thirds of all reported near mid-air collisions at the nation’s busiest airports, citing analysis by the Associated Press and NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System.
DroneUp advocates for a national framework that combines top-down policy with ground-up technological innovation. “With millions of drones flying, we need something more automated—machine-to-machine communication that ensures only appropriately authorized drones are in the airspace,” Thurling argued.
DroneUp leverages AI autonomy and Part 135 certification to close critical gaps in airspace integration and defense, delivering real-time deconfliction and coordinated operations. While “the technology has mostly been demonstrated, policies need to catch up,” Thurling said, stressing the importance of training for law enforcement to enforce drone regulations.
NASA’s ACERO Project and Safety Demonstrators
Looking at how NASA is addressing aviation autonomy and natural disasters, session panelists highlighted two key agency initiatives: the Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations (ACERO) project and NASA’s System-wide Safety Project Safety Demonstrator Series.
“We want to enable aerial operations 24 hours a day, even when visibility is poor due to smoke or weather,” explained Xue, who serves as project manager for ACERO.
Tested in real-world scenarios in Salinas, California, the ACERO system integrates multiple data sources—wind, terrain, hazards, and more—to provide situational awareness for both crewed and uncrewed aircraft.
The test in Salinas, an area historically affected by forest fires, included participants from CALFIRE, Joby Aviation, and local firefighters. It used two drones that flew between a private ranch and the Salinas Area Modelers’ Portable Airspace Management System, or PAMS. From 100 miles away, PAMS could exchange information in real time with ground control station to the information to the Forelight pilot app, said Xue.
“The most difficult challenge was connectivity— we might not have internet at all, so how can we enable connectivity?” asked Xue, indicating that lessons from the testing will help make the airspace function more flexibly during disasters.
Another NASA expert, Natasha Neogi, senior technologist for Assured Intelligence Flight Systems at NASA Langley Research Center, highlighted the need for advanced safety management systems that can proactively mitigate risks, especially as operations become more automated and less reliant on human pilots.
That’s the goal behind NASA’s System-wide Safety Project Safety Demonstrator Series: to test new technologies in progressively more challenging operational domains—from rural firefighting to urban hurricane recovery. This first-of-its kind system-wide safety framework supports increasingly autonomous, complex airspace operations, said Neogi.
NASA is deploying four demonstrators, but the NASA safety expert focused on the first two – wildfire fighting that rolled out in FY 2023, and hurricane relief and recovery that will deploy in FY 2027. “The goal is to create a global picture of situational awareness showing both crewed and autonomous systems and actions to mitigate risks,” she said.
The effort originated in 2018 when the National Academies called up NASA to work with the FAA, industry, and academia to create an advanced safety management system concept. “The entire mediation, safety management system is looking to reduce operational risk. We’re identifying…hazards and finding services and capabilities to drive down risk,” Neogi said.
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Transferring Technology to the Front Lines
A recurring theme throughout the panel was the importance of tech transfer. “We’re not just developing systems in the lab; our goal is to have them used by the firefighting community. After each round of flight tests, we incorporate feedback from real users to improve the system,” Xue said of NASA’s multi-stage approach to testing and deploying the ACERO system with firefighting agencies.
Neogi shared a success story involving “ODIN-Fire,” an open-source tool that helps rural fire departments integrate satellite and ground-based data for early fire detection. She said the tool — in partnership with Delphire Inc., the U.S. Forest Service, and San Diego County Fire — has already helped detect and respond to fires more effectively in rural areas of California.
Safety during aerial firefighting operations was another hot topic. Panelists emphasized the need for real-time information sharing, robust standards and procedures, and the gradual shift from human-centric to more automated, information-driven safety management.
“We want to move some of the burden from humans to information systems that can synthesize data and present it to decision makers,” Neogi noted.
The role of digitization and secure communication also was discussed. Panelists Xue and Thurling agreed that digitalization is essential for faster, more reliable data sharing, but it must be secure and trustworthy.
“We need to be really careful—garbage in, garbage out,” Thurling cautioned, highlighting the importance of data integrity in automated systems.
Finally, the audience asked about NASA’s broader plans for developing airspace management technologies. Xue reiterated NASA’s multi-stage approach, involving iterative flight tests and close collaboration with end users to ensure the technology meets real-world needs. The experts agreed that the future of disaster response will depend on close collaboration between technologists, policymakers, and first responders.
Calling All Innovators: Still Time to Enter the GoAERO Prize
Nidhi Chaudhary, head of Prizing for the GoAERO Prize, rounded out the Aviation: Revolutionizing Disaster Relief panel by providing an update on the GoAERO Prize, a global competition to build the world’s first-ever autonomy-enabled Emergency Response Flyer.
The three-year, $2 million competition has entered its second phase, with the goal “to inspire teams to build safe, portable, and nearly autonomous emergency response flyers capable of operating in challenging environments.”
Chaudhary emphasized the real-world need for such technology, given the shortage of Emergency Management Services (EMS), noting that 4.5 million people in the United States live in ambulance deserts, and the increasing number of disasters affecting communities globally.
The competition has already attracted over 200 teams from 85 countries, ranging from university students to seasoned professionals. “We hope that a prize like this can encourage innovation where it’s needed most,” Chaudhary added, highlighting support of major partners like NASA, Boeing, and RTX. “We’re pushing innovation and exciting a new generation to bring their expertise and passion to this industry,”
Chaudhary said that interested aerospace inventors can still join the competition. Direct questions to: [email protected].
