Crown serves as the technical lead for the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s participation in the Federal Aviation’s Administration Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Integration Pilot Program (IPP) – recognized as one of the most successful of the nine IPP initiatives.
Crown’s contributions have led to pathfinding, first-of-a-kind accomplishments:
Crown’s knowledge of UAS technology and regulations informs every aspect of the NCDOT's IPP initiatives. We coordinate activities of the partnership team and provide expert advice on technical challenges. We serve in an interface role with FAA regulatory teams for airworthiness, aircraft and operations certification, flight standards and airspace integration.
Our contributions bring significant, immediate benefits to NCDOT. Among them, we crafted concepts of operation for three routine, revenue medical delivery routes in North Carolina in partnership with NCDOT, FAA and industry partners UPS, Matternet, Zipline and Flytrex. The first, launched in March 2019, established the nation’s first UAS-based, FAA-approved medical package delivery services by UPS across the WakeMed Health & Hospitals in Raleigh, which now transports 1,200+ samples monthly.
Our work with NCDOT also includes:
Crown drew on these innovations to help NCDOT mobilize UAS for state emergency functions. We helped gain FAA approval for complex night-time emergency operations for Highway Patrol drug enforcement. And when Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina in 2018, Crown performed Class G and D airspace risk analyses to obtain emergency certificates of operation and conducted related airspace and aeronautical information management.
Equally significant are Crown’s contributions to North Carolina’s broader vision of deploying statewide advanced air mobility by planning use cases based on technology readiness and integrating them into a comprehensive UAS traffic management system.
Toward that end, the Crown team: