The military has used drones to carry cargo and supplies since the first K-Max flights over Afghanistan in 2011. But integrating unmanned aircraft into commercial airspace has been a much bigger challenge. Weapons maker Northrop Grumman is working with NASA to develop the architecture to allow fleets of drone cargo jets to criss-cross America’s skies. 

It’s part of the Pathfinding for Airspace with Autonomous Vehicles project, which itself is part of NASA’s Air Traffic Management-eXploration, or ATM-X, effort. The goal isn’t to create a new cargo drone but to model what an entire network of cargo jets would look like and how they would operate alongside passenger and other crewed aircraft as part of the U.S. National Airspace System, the planes, airports, radars, etc., that operate in the country’s  airspace. 

“What we're doing this for is to implement an architecture and a framework that becomes the policy for how uncrewed 767s at FedEx and Amazon and everybody will do things,” said Richard Sullivan, Northrop’s vice president of program management.