Delivery Drone Air Traffic Controller Becomes a New Job in Dallas Skies

Wischnewsky does not pilot the craft. From FlyTrex’s operations center, he monitors the delivery process with inputs from GPS, lasers and a range of sensors. He ensures the safe passage of FlyTrex parcels and coordinates traffic with a growing swarm of delivery drones over Dallas from competitors including Zipline, Amazon and Alphabet’s Wing.

When he applied to FlyTrex, Wischnewsky was training to become a commercial pilot and flight instructor, and he was already certified by the Federal Aviation Administration as a drone pilot. MIT Technology Review reports that the company requires this credential, along with a weeks-long FAA-approved training course, to ensure a pilot is prepared to take over a drone if need be.

The Dallas–Fort Worth area is a testing ground for unmanned aircraft systems traffic management, or UTM, a network that allows autonomous drones from FlyTrex and its competitors to share their coordinates in real time and help avoid collisions beyond the pilot’s line of sight. Once Wischnewsky confirms that a drone is flight-ready, its path is unimpeded and weather conditions are clear, UTM takes care of the rest. At first, he said, the biggest challenge was trusting the technology. “On the manned-aircraft side, they tell you ‘Don’t trust the automation,’” he said.

At his busiest, Wischnewsky has up to 10 drones on his watch at the same time. “You’re there as a safety net,” he said. Even with automation, keen situational awareness is required, and the most common hazard is weather. He recalled a particularly stressful day when a drone had been in the air for only seconds before the wind picked up so suddenly that he had to intervene. He returned it safely, preventing an errant ice cream cake from hitting the sidewalk.