Airspace Operations Lab @ NASA Ames

The Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) research project has been developing and testing concept ideas for enabling small UAS (sUAS) operations in low-altitude airspace (ground to 400 feet). To do this, NASA has organized a series of flight test demonstrations. Technical Capability Level-4 (TCL4) flight tests were conducted at a Nevada, USA test site, during June 2019 and a Texas test site during August. The Nevada testing resulted in over 300 datacollection flights using eight live rotorcraft, 15 simulated vehicles, involving six flight crews, and five UAS Service Suppliers (USS). The TCL4 approach was designed to demonstrate five scenarios that set up five diverse sets of UAS events and activities. The Nevada test site focused on three of these scenarios: an incoming weather front, a concert event with an incident requiring an emergency response, and a scenario where multiple sUAS vehicles experienced Communication, Navigation, and Surveillance (CNS) issues. Each of the three scenarios run at the Nevada test site consisted of three phases. Each phase was executed three times, creating a total of nine missions per UAS scenario. This document presents data collected from participants during the TCL4-Nevada June flight test that provides information about how much and how well operators were able to make use of UTM functions and information, with the goal of exploring minimum information requirements and/or best practices in TCL4 operations. The driving enquiry was: how do UTM tools and features support (human) operators leading to safe and effective conduct of large-scale, beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) sUAS operations in "urban canyon" environments? As with the data collected during previous similar tests (e.g., TCL3, Martin, et al., 2019), the quality of the UTM information exchanged, and the meaningfulness, and therefore usefulness, of this information, were all focal points of the questions asked and the data collected. The results aligned with five human-system attributes to indicate that UTM provided information that contributed to users' ability to operate safely and effectively within UTM operations, but that information was not always complete and was sometimes unclear to the operators.