FAA Partners with Kittyhawk in Public-Private Partnership to Update B4UFLY Drone App

Republished with permission, post by Joshua Ziering, Kittyhawk founder.

Today, Kittyhawk is announcing an exclusive public-private partnership to rejuvenate and lead development of the FAA’s B4UFLY mobile application using Kittyhawk’s Platform to power the safe and compliant flying experience for millions of U.S.-based users. B4UFLY is a free app that helps drone operators operate compliantly with FAA rules and regulations.

We are truly honored the FAA selected Kittyhawk, and I feel this acknowledges our leadership in drone technology and product development. I wanted to share a little bit about why we’re excited about it and how we’ll be executing on this opportunity.

As an approved UAS Service Supplier that’s able to programatically offer authorizations for commercial operators to fly in controlled airspace via the FAA’s LAANC program, we understand the importance of delivering the correct information at the right time. One of our key learnings from the LAANC onboarding process was that the capability to source airspace data from the FAA directly, creates opportunity to vastly improve flying experiences for all kinds of operators.

Our primary focus at Kittyhawk is safety. We know that the future of a successful integration of drones into the National Airspace (NAS) depends upon a strong foundation of safety. This means giving pilots the information they need in a precise, reliable and concise format. Kittyhawk will be leveraging the power of our recently released​ ​Dynamic AirspaceTM product to power the new and improved B4UFLY mobile app.

Over the past four years, Kittyhawk has helped power over 500,000 safe and compliant commercial drone flights in the United States. We’ve served tens of millions of requests for airspace information through our application to help commercial and hobbyist operators alike. We’ve helped scale and power the largest teams of commercial operators in the world, and now we’re looking forward to leveraging that capability to continually improve B4UFLY.

The careful observer might ask why we’ve chosen to work on B4UFLY when Kittyhawk’s focus is purely enterprise solutions. We believe that Kittyhawk needs to be building our industry alongside of our company. Our goal is for our enterprise customers to be flying as much as possible. Flights don’t happen easier or more frequently when negligent operators are shutting down airports, breaching Presidential TFR’s, or endangering our national security.

Together with the FAA, we want to turn B4UFLY into a best-in-class solution for understanding the airspace operators are utilizing. We want to make it easy to understand where you can and can’t fly, and together with community-based organizations like the AMA, continue to support the next generation of aviation innovators to fly safely and responsibly.

We’re already working on the next version of B4UFLY, and look forward to using our expertise as a fast moving start up with laser-like focus on safety and quality to bring reliable, easy to understand information about where operators can fly to help make the NAS safer for everyone. As features like Remote Identification and the implementation of a UTM system come to fruition, Kittyhawk stands ready to help enterprises and hobbyists alike safely access the NAS.

We know that the future of drones is bright and look forward to doing our share to help that future arrive just a little bit faster.