Distant ID is designed to permit stakeholders to detect and track drones within the air – each mitigating the chance of unauthorized drones and allowing greater utilization of legitimate business operation. In a high stakes national security event just like the Super Bowl, Distant ID becomes a critical tool for the federal and native agencies accountable for keeping participants protected.
Pierce Aerospace, a Techstars-backed company, is a Distant ID service provider focused on practical and robust integration of Distant ID services into the drone ecosystem. Pierce Aerospace worked with the Department of Homeland Security and other federal, state, and native agencies to deploy Distant ID on the NFL’s Super Bowl LVII, in a successful test of Distant ID for operational support of a National Special Security Event. Pierce Aerospace deployed its Bluebird Distant ID Receivers and B1 Distant ID Beacons around State Farm Stadium to support airspace operations for NFL coordinated broadcast flights, a business drone swarm, and in support of law enforcement drone flights and operations.
“To our knowledge, this was the harshest stress test that Distant ID has seen thus far,” said Aaron Pierce, CEO of Pierce Aerospace. “Nearly 73,000 fans were inside that stadium. All with cell phones and other WiFi and Bluetooth emitting devices, a lot of whom were streaming or uploading photos and video through the halftime show. We’re completely happy to share that our engineers successfully detected and tracked our Distant ID beacons with phones contained in the stadium during this high-noise floor event.”
Pierce Aerospace provided its ASTM F3411-22 compliant B1 Distant ID beacons to pilots for FAA-approved business drone flights and law enforcement drone operations. Bluebird Distant ID Receivers were deployed across the stadium and used to successfully detect, track, and discover the equipped drones within the week leading as much as the Super Bowl and on game day. Using COPERS, a web-based situational awareness tool developed by KBR, Inc., local broadcast messages collected by the Pierce Aerospace’s Receiver Network and Distant ID data feeds were routed to COPERS for airspace activity monitoring. COPERS, which stands for Command Oversight or Personnel, Equipment, Response and Situation, was made available to federal and native law enforcement end users across security command elements to observe the Distant ID data feeds each on-site and remotely.
“We’ve been working with the Department of Defense since 2018 to take local broadcast Distant ID messages and network them to varied tiers of end users in DOD experimental events. It was exciting to take the institutional knowledge that we’ve developed over time and deploy it for the primary time in support of real-world national security operations on the Super Bowl,” said Pierce. “This was an operational test of Distant ID before officially rolling it out as an FAA regulatory requirement in September. I’m completely happy to share that this deployment emphasized ‘operational.’”
“Pierce Aerospace’s Distant ID products and their integration capabilities helped ease the Command and Control of the Super Bowl LVII Temporary Flight Restriction [TFR] when it got here to authorized vs unauthorized UAS operations,” said Greg Bean, Special Operations Security for the FAA. “We look ahead to the complete roll out of the FAA’s Distant ID rule in September 2023.”
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