Kittyhawk and FAA Launch New B4UFLY App

Today we’re releasing a brand new B4UFLY app in partnership with the FAA. This initial version of the new app is focused on the one thing every drone operator needs to do before every flight: check the airspace you want to fly in to know whether it’s safe to fly. Making this simple, fast and intuitive was our big goal as part of an ongoing mission to make drone flight of all kinds safe and reliable.

Here’s how FAA Executive Director Jay Merkle put it in the press release:

“B4UFLY is a hallmark of our commitment to ensuring drones are safely integrated into the NAS. Our partnership on B4UFLY with Kittyhawk represents the kind of public-private partnership that is essential to advance this burgeoning industry. As the skies become more crowded and UAS operations become more complex, basic airspace situational awareness, especially for the newest of fliers, will be essential,” said Jay Merkle, Executive Director, FAA UAS Integration Office.

B4UFLY is now powered by Kittyhawk Dynamic Airspace which is our patented airspace controller for managing real-time flight restrictions, authorizations, and guidance. It’s the core technology in all our products that enables us to build tools that are responsive in real-time to the real-world changes and complexity that is our National Airspace System (NAS).

It’s our belief that any solution, whether it’s for advanced operations, UTM, urban air mobility or Remote ID, requires programmatic data exchange with redundancies for safety, accuracy and security built in. The airspace we all share is too complex, too active and too variable to be reliant on out of date, proprietary or single-source data systems. All airspace must be dynamic for both manned and uncrewed aviation to continue to grow, integrate and maintain safety at all altitudes and for all aircraft types.

So in future updates to the B4UFLY app, we want to include additional functionality for weather, Remote ID and additional data layers for uses in public safety, natural disasters and emergency response.

Growing and Going New Places

We recently hit a milestone of 1 million flights and crossed 100,000 users at Kittyhawk. Whether you’re simply flying for fun or out inspecting power lines for work, Kittyhawk continues to scale with the drone industry and community at large. Our recent launch of recreational LAANC has brought many new drone pilots onto our platform. Welcome! Our enterprise customers use solutions like live streaming in emergency response situations. Stay safe!

This broad range of use cases along with B4UFLY gives us a unique position to build first-class software that brings more control to operators, program managers and fliers alike. Drones are amazing tools with immense capabilities in the hands of people empowered by software that takes risk out of the equation and makes flying safe, enjoyable and productive. We have a lot more in the pipeline for the second half of the year so stay tuned.

In the meantime, go use B4UFLY!