AN ‘ATC FOR DRONES’: After decades of experience in the telecommunications sector, Wheeler is turning (some of) his attention to drones. Wheeler, who was FCC chairman during the Obama administration, recently joined the board of AirMap, which is building a platform for drone air traffic management. He linked up with MT recently to talk tech and the future of airspace:
“There needs to be, for want of a better description, an ATC for drones,” Wheeler said, referring to an air traffic control system like the one that currently guides airplanes through the sky. The technology exists, he added, to “marry digital identification of the vehicle with GPS location information and connect it to each other and to algorithms in the cloud with RF [radio frequency]. That ought to be a technology that is open to all and is interconnected, just like the internet is an interconnection of dissimilar networks using a common protocol.”
