| | AUGUST 20198CIOReviewIN MYOPINIONINTEGRATING DRONES INTO THE MOST COMPLEX AIRSPACE IN THE WORLD Every day, more than 2 million passengers and 50,000 tons of cargo fly on 27,000 commercial flights within 5 million square miles of U.S. airspace. At any given time, roughly 7,000 pilots are airborne in aircraft of different shapes and sizes. The airline industry helps drive $1.5 trillion in annual U.S. economic activity and supports more than 10 million U.S. jobs. Thanks to strong collaboration within the aviation community and decades of technological advancements, the United States enjoys the safest, most reliable, most efficient, most productive, and most complex, air transportation system in the world. The recent proliferation of inexpensive Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), also known as drones, has made the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) job of safety and efficiently managing the National Airspace System (NAS) even more complex. Reports of drones operating near airports and aircraft, and within restricted airspace increased more than 500 percent between 2014 and 2015. That's why we're moving at the speed of innovation to enable pilots in the air and drone operators on the ground to safety share the skies. We're ensuring drone operators know the `rules of the sky' and register their drones.Under Federal law, as of December 21, 2015 all owners of unmanned aircraft that weigh more than 0.55 pounds but less than 55 pounds are required to register to obtain a certificate and registration number (just like owners of manned aircraft). In just under 12 weeks, the FAA developed and released the small Unmanned Aircraft System Registration Service (sUASRS). To enable this registration process, and to simultaneously deliver training about how to safely operate a drone, we utilized development methodologies and a hosting solution that were relatively new to the FAA, but have now become business as usual. First, the sUASRS was iteratively designed using an Agile development methodology. This allowed us to lower the risk of rework and downstream changes, and also provided a quicker production release with lower investment as compared to a traditional "waterfall" development approach. Next, we implemented a DevOps methodology immediately after the initial production release. This allowed for the operation of the current version of the system while simultaneously working to rapidly release new value-added functionality. Each release was individually scoped, developed and tested, which By Sean S Torpey, Acting CIO & Deputy Assistant Administrator for Information Services, FAASean S TorpeyWe're moving at the speed of innovation to enable pilots in the air and drone operators on the ground to safety share the skies
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