It’s all about the data. Data drives decision-making on both the front and back end of any operation. Decisions are only as good as the data upon which they are based. The more complete any given data set, the better.
These truisms inspired John Eberhardt III, Chief Technology Officer of ATA LLC, a data scientist with over 20 years’ experience in improving healthcare, commercial aviation, defense aviation, intelligence, and logistics, to imagine data solutions for the uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) industry. Through observation and industry discussion, he discovered data seams that needed to be bridged to enable safety of flight and began fixing them—literally and figuratively.
Eberhardt led ATA’s efforts to create the Flight Information Exchange, or FIX, a Supplemental Data Service Provider (SDSP) for drone operations. He also spearheaded the development of AirDEX™, the company’s SDSP platform, which aggregates relevant publicly available state and local data and publishes it to industry and the public end users.
In just under two years, ATA has made its mark. It has empowered state and regional governments, first in Virginia, and now across the country, to make UAS advisory and configuration data easily available to UAS Service Suppliers (USS) and UAS operators. In this interview, Eberhardt provides updates on how ATA has been helping to expand Virginia’s FIX program nationwide.
Topics: ATA LLC, Flight Information Exchange, FIX, Supplemental Data Service Provider, SDSP, UAS Traffic Management, UTM, AirDEX™, Virginia-FIX