AirMap Acquires Hangar Technology to Expand Airspace and Mission Automation to Developers and Enterprises Worldwide

Ben Marcus

It’s been roughly 4 years since AirMap was founded with the mission of enabling more drones to operate more flights and deliver more benefits to society. Since then, we’ve made tremendous progress in extending digital, mobile, and automated technologies for both airspace authorities and drone operators in order to safely integrate drones into the airspace.

One example of this is the FAA’s Low-Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC), which transformed a months-long paper waiver process into automated digital authorizations for commercial drone operations in U.S. controlled airspace. Today, LAANC has been extended to recreational operators and includes over 475 airports.

In another example, AirMap and Swiss air navigation services provider Skyguide are building an open national drone traffic management system for Switzerland utilizing automated, API-driven technologies like airspace authorization modeled after LAANC and real-time traffic monitoring for both manned and unmanned aircraft, powered by the AirMap UTM platform.

In addition to digitizing and automating airspace and drone traffic management for authorities, we’re really excited about re-envisioning how easier and automated access to low-altitude airspace can serve the enterprise. Across dozens of industries, drones are cutting equipment and man-hour costs, mitigate risks to workers, and significantly improving the quality of inspections. They help secure critical infrastructure and enable more reliable and efficient processes. Enterprise drone solutions bring a competitive edge for companies early to adopt.

Yet despite the compelling business case for drones, enterprises are still faced with mounting complexities in making drones part of their day-to-day operations. Enterprises need to consider airspace management, situational awareness, mission planning, compliance assurance, data capture, image processing, and more to ensure that their drone fleets are operating in a way that gets the job done safely, efficiently, and at scale.

Enterprises need UTM — they need to connect operators to real-time airspace information, to serve up automated authorization processes that make it easy for operators to get access to managed airspace, and to monitor conformance to approved flight plans. Enterprises also need high-precision flight automation and data capture, integrated with intelligent payload processing tools to manage the end-to-end workflow of planning, launching, gathering and analyzing the insights delivered by each drone mission. Finally, enterprises need a rich ecosystem of developers and solution providers that offer powerful and specific tools for each industry and use case. And they need all of this in the form of a solution that’s easy to consume.

That’s why AirMap has acquired Hangar Technology, a highly automated drone operations platform, integrating high-precision flight planning for infrastructure digitalization and applied data analytics within an end-to-end enterprise workflow. Hangar joins AirMap to extend both airspace and mission automation to enterprises and to third-party developers building the next generation of software products for commercial drones.

With this acquisition, we are investing in our customers by bringing enterprises and developers powerful APIs so that they can do more with drones. We’re also investing in our team, bringing on exceptional talent with industry-leading experience in serving the needs of enterprises.

And, of course, we’re also investing in the future of drones: complex, BVLOS, and autonomous operations powered by cutting-edge technologies and services, without ever sacrificing safety.

We’re excited to be building this future together with you, our customers and partners. Please join me in welcoming Hangar to AirMap.