Notify & Fly: Aloft Launches New Capability for B4UFly App

by DRONELIFE Staff Writer Ian M. Crosby

Aloft (formerly Kittyhawk) has announced today the introduction of the new Notify & Fly feature for FAA’s B4UFLY app on iOS and Android. The new feature, live in the app today, provides users with a simple and easy way to let other drone pilots know that they are flying in the area. By anonymously submitting via the app, users are able to notify the largest audience of other drone pilots of their presence in the area.

Whether in the hands of hobbyists, commercial pilots or first responders, utilizing Notify & Fly will contribute to the overall safe integration of drones into the national airspace by increasing situational awareness, without sacrificing privacy.

Aloft’s work on B4UFLY over the last two years has informed their thinking into how drone pilots want to engage with the airspace and its many stakeholders. Since the relaunch of the app in August of 2019, they have since powered over 13 million searches of the airspace and are now averaging approximately 800K searches per month. The app also sees thousands of crowdsourced submissions every month, half of which are users looking to announce their flight intention. In the initial Web-only test of the Notify & Fly feature, more than 200 submissions were received in a limited testing period.

“Time and again, we’ve seen a huge unmet need among the vast majority of safety conscious drone pilots to proactively communicate their intentions on behalf of a safer airspace,” wrote Jon Hegrenes, Aloft’s CEO. “Notify & Fly is a major step forward to solving this problem.”

To make use of the new Notify & Fly feature, users need only update the B4UFLY app on their phone. Navigating to the main map screen will display the Notify & Fly icon. From there, users have the ability to choose whether they are flying as a commercial operator, recreational pilot or first responder.

More information on how to use Notify & Fly can be found in the video here.

Ian attended Dominican University of California, where he received a BA in English in 2019. With a lifelong passion for writing and storytelling and a keen interest in technology, he is now contributing to DroneLife as a staff writer.