Why Drone Tracking Matters

Drones Are Everywhere. Oversight Is Nowhere.

The drone industry has grown faster than almost anyone expected. Drones are surveying infrastructure, delivering packages, supporting first responders, inspecting cell towers, and monitoring crops. The global drone market was valued at $73B in 2024 and is projected to reach $125B by 2028. In the US alone, the FAA has registered over 1 million drones, and commercial operations are expanding rapidly.

This growth is genuinely good. Drones are making industries more efficient, keeping people out of dangerous situations, and enabling capabilities that didn't exist ten years ago.

But growth without awareness and enforcement creates problems.

The Public Trust Problem

When a drone flies over your neighborhood, you have no way of knowing who's operating it, why it's there, or whether it's following the rules. That uncertainty has real consequences.

In late 2024, mysterious drone sightings across New Jersey triggered weeks of public anxiety, media frenzy, and political finger-pointing. Most of the "drones" turned out to be manned aircraft and stars, but the episode exposed something important: people have no visibility into what's flying overhead, and that lack of information breeds fear.

During the 2025 LA wildfires, unauthorized drones interfered with firefighting aircraft, forcing aerial operations to pause while lives and property were at stake. This is a direct consequence of having no system to monitor and enforce airspace rules at scale.

Some large technology companies have even lobbied to exempt their drone operations from broadcast requirements, arguing they shouldn't have to share information about their flights in our shared national airspace. Without monitoring infrastructure, there's no way to enforce accountability.

The Infrastructure Gap

The FAA recognized the need for drone tracking when it finalized the Remote ID rule in 2024, requiring all drones in the US to broadcast identifying information during flight. The EU and Japan have adopted similar requirements. Remote ID is designed to be the foundation of airspace awareness: a standard protocol that lets drones announce who they are, where they are, and where they're going.

The problem is that Remote ID only covers the broadcast side. Every drone has to transmit, but nobody built the receiver network to actually collect that data at scale. The infrastructure to listen simply doesn't exist.

This creates a strange situation. The regulation is in place. Drones are broadcasting. But the data goes unheard because there are no receivers deployed widely enough to capture it. Imagine requiring every car to have a license plate but not ever ticketing anyone for driving without it!

What the FAA Wants to Build (But Can't)

The FAA's long-term plan for managing drone traffic is called UAS Traffic Management, or UTM. Think of it as air traffic control for drones. UTM is a federated system that will connect data providers with drone operators to enable safe, coordinated flight at scale. Without it, large-scale commercial drone operations (delivery drones, autonomous inspection fleets, urban air mobility) simply can't happen.

In 2025, the FAA published its Drone Integration Concept of Operations, laying out its vision for the next decade of drone operations. A key component is what the FAA calls Automated Data Service Providers (ADSPs), private-sector companies certified to provide the data services that UTM depends on.

The FAA's Part 146 rulemaking establishes the certification framework for these ADSPs. This is the digital backbone of the FAA's new Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone rules, and it creates an explicit, federally defined role for companies that can provide drone tracking data at scale.

Here's the opportunity: the FAA has defined the need. They've created the regulatory framework. But the infrastructure to fill that role doesn't exist. And no one has a plan to build it at the scale the system requires.

That's the infrastructure gap FliteGrid is built to fill.