The moment Trevor Wischnewsky heard that drones were delivering pizza and sushi around his Texas neighborhood, his mind was made up. An RPIC is like an air traffic controller. But instead of airplanes, this new class of aviators tend to fleets of hexacopter drones that ferry cargo to homes and businesses within a three-mile radius.
Not only does he ensure the safe passage of FlyTrex’s parcels, but Wischnewsky coordinates traffic with a growing swarm of delivery drones dotting the skies over Dallas from competitors like Zipline, Amazon, and Alphabet’s Wing. Here’s what it takes to land the gig. When he applied to FlyTrex, Wischnewsky was in training to become a commercial pilot and flight instructor, and he was already certified by the Federal Aviation Administration as a drone pilot.
The company requires this credential, along with a weeks-long FAA-approved training course, to ensure that a pilot is prepared to take over a drone if need be. Though he doesn’t pilot the craft, Wischnewsky monitors the delivery process from FlyTrex’s operations center with the help of inputs from GPS, lasers, and a range of sensors. At first, the biggest challenge was trusting the technology.
The Dallas–Fort Worth area, though, is a testing ground for unmanned aircraft systems traffic management (UTM), a network that allows autonomous drones from FlyTrex and its competitors to share their coordinates in real time to help avoid collisions even beyond the pilot’s line of sight. Once Wischnewsky makes sure a drone is flight-ready, its path is unimpeded, and the weather conditions are clear, UTM takes care of the rest. At his busiest, Wischnewsky will have up to 10 drones on his watch at the same time.
Even with automation, keen situational awareness is required, and the most common hazard is the weather. Wischnewsky recalls a particularly stressful day: A drone had been in the air for only seconds when the wind picked up so suddenly that he had to intervene. He returned it safely, preventing an errant ice cream cake from hitting the sidewalk.
Eamon Whalen is a reporter and researcher based in San Francisco. A pastor and his wife created a cryptocurrency and hawked it in Christian communities. When it came crashing down, investors lost millions―and they were accused of fraud.
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