Giving the public a perspective into Unmanned Aircraft Systems' operations

NASA is currently engaged in research to safely enable large-scale commercial applications of small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in low altitude airspace. This research effort, referred to as UAS Traffic Management (UTM), encompasses the concepts and technologies needed to accommodate the projected demand of UAS operating in the national airspace. One aspect related to the successful implementation of UTM in the future is public acceptance. UTM transparency will heavily influence this acceptance, and a public portal will provide much of that transparency through ease of access to information about the operations - mainly why and where such operations are taking place. Related concerns to the public are individual privacy, security, and accountability of the operators. Providing the aforementioned information about operations can mitigate these concerns, but a balance will have to be achieved between the need for transparency from the public and the privacy of the operators. The proper balance and the needs of the various UTM stakeholders with regard to information access is being explored through the development and testing of a public portal alongside NASA's development and flight testing of the UTM system. Additionally, various approaches to the display of information and user interfaces were surveyed through the development of different instantiations of a public portal by multiple UTM industry partners across different test sites.