What’s New in LAANC 4.0?
August 19, 2020
|By Kevin Teen
Below is a rundown of new features, capabilities, and notable changes to the new LAANC system.
New features in Air Control:
- Request on behalf of another user on the account, so managers of a drone program can request for her team’s behalf to optimize for team management and compliance.
- Users on the web can edit authorizations and change key information versus before needing to cancel and resubmit.
- Also note, Air Control supports only commercial (Part 107) authorizations.
New Capabilities Across the Kittyhawk Platform:
- More access to airspace.
- Users can have up to three overlapping authorizations within 100 miles.
- Before users could not have any overlapping authorizations.
- This will help users plan out their day and have authorization across more areas and more time.
- Each authorization can span 10 miles.
- Before this was limited 1 mile.
- So not just more authorizations, but more area.
- Users can have up to three overlapping authorizations within 100 miles.
- More detailed LAANC information.
- Airports have more detailed metadata that will mean more authorizations at more airports (whereas before there were often metadata conflicts).
- LAANC grids specific when further coordination is available or not (to help with planning and understanding what ceilings you can fly to).
- Part-time airports now help users understand when LAANC may or may not be required (e.g. if controlled airspace reverts to uncontrolled airspace at 5pm).
- New map styles.
- There’s now a new combined layer that has merged UASFM (facility grids) with controlled airspace to help give users a clearer understanding of when/where LAANC is needed or not.
- More user controls.
- Users can “close” operations.
- Before you couldn’t change or cancel an authorization once it was active. So if you had an authorization that ran from 10 am-2 pm and you were done at 11 am, you couldn’t do anything with that existing authorization.
- Now you can “close” that authorization to end earlier, and thus go create additional authorizations if needed.
- Users can “close” operations.
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