Remote ID

Remote ID is the regulatory foundation that FliteGrid is built on. Understanding what it is, why it matters, and why it's hard to receive at scale is key to understanding the FliteGrid opportunity.

What Is Remote ID?

Remote ID is a set of regulations requiring drones to broadcast identifying information during flight. The FAA calls it "a digital license plate" for drones. When a drone is airborne, it must continuously transmit data including:

• UAS ID — A unique identifier for the drone (serial number)

• Drone location — Real-time latitude, longitude, and altitude

• Drone speed — Current velocity

• Pilot location — The ground position of the operator

• Timestamp — When the data was generated

This data is broadcast over the air using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, making it receivable by anyone with the right hardware and software within range.

The Regulatory Timeline

United States: The FAA's Remote ID rule went into effect on March 16, 2024. All drones operating in US airspace weighing more than 250 grams must broadcast Remote ID. This applies to both recreational and commercial operators.

European Union: The EU adopted similar Remote ID requirements through its U-space regulatory framework, with implementation timelines varying by member state.

Japan: Japan was an early adopter of Remote ID requirements, with regulations in effect as part of its drone registration and flight management system.

Remote ID is not optional. In the US, EU, and Japan, it's federal law, enforceable today.

Why Remote ID Is Hard to Scale

On the surface, Remote ID seems straightforward: drones broadcast, receivers listen. In practice, several factors make it significantly harder to receive Remote ID data at scale than most people realize.

Multiple protocol variants. Remote ID doesn't use a single broadcast method. The ASTM F3411 standard (the technical specification behind Remote ID) defines four different broadcast protocols: Bluetooth 4 Legacy Advertising, Bluetooth 5 Long Range, Wi-Fi Beacon (NAN), and Wi-Fi Aware. Different drones use different protocols, and many use more than one. A receiver that only handles Bluetooth 4 will miss drones broadcasting on Wi-Fi NAN, and vice versa. Building a receiver that handles all variants correctly is a nontrivial engineering challenge.

Short range. Remote ID broadcasts are designed to be received at relatively short distances, typically a few hundred meters to about a kilometer depending on protocol, antenna configuration, terrain, and environmental conditions. Covering even a single city requires many receivers spread across the area. Covering the entire country requires a fundamentally distributed deployment strategy.

Mobile phone limitations. You might expect that the billions of smartphones in the world could serve as receivers. In reality, most can't. iOS devices do not support the Wi-Fi NAN protocol required for some Remote ID broadcasts due to operating system limitations. Even on Android, support varies by device model and OS version, and background reception is unreliable. Phones are not a viable backbone for large-scale Remote ID data collection.

Compliance problems. Just because the rule requires Remote ID doesn't mean every drone actually complies correctly. When the Remote ID mandate took effect, SkySafe conducted one of the few independent analyses of major drone manufacturers' compliance and found that most had not correctly implemented the standard. Some broadcasts were malformed, some were incomplete, and some were simply missing. A nationwide network of validated receivers helps identify and push for better compliance across the industry.

What the Data Is Good For

Remote ID data is the foundational layer for nearly every use case in drone airspace management:

Real-time awareness. Knowing what drones are flying, where, and who's operating them. This is the core requirement for every customer segment, from airports to law enforcement to critical infrastructure.

Historical analysis. Over time, flight records build a dataset of drone traffic patterns that can inform airspace planning, regulatory policy, and operational decisions.

Compliance monitoring. Identifying drones that aren't broadcasting correctly, or aren't broadcasting at all, helps regulators and operators enforce the rules.

UAS Traffic Management (UTM). The FAA's vision for UTM depends on having a comprehensive picture of drone activity. Remote ID is the raw data that feeds into the system. Without receivers collecting that data at scale, UTM can't function.

AI training data. As autonomous drone operations scale, the ability to train AI systems on real-world airspace data becomes increasingly valuable. FliteGrid's nationwide dataset represents a training resource that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Why FliteGrid

SkySafe has been receiving and processing Remote ID data since before the mandate took effect. The company has validated receiver software for all protocol variants, a production cloud platform for processing the data at scale, and a customer base that's already paying for the output.

What SkySafe hasn't had is a way to rapidly deploy receivers everywhere they're needed. FliteGrid solves that problem by putting sensors in the hands of a distributed community of operators, covering airspace that a centralized deployment could never reach efficiently.