Why Federal Radar Data is Important?

Beyond the Buzz Episode 21 – Why Federal Radar Data is Important  

March 19, 2026  

Erin Roesler: 

Hello and welcome to another episode of Beyond the Buzz. I’m here at the Hive in Grand Forks, North Dakota. My name is Erin Roesler. I am the deputy executive director for the Northern Plains UAS Test Site. Really excited about today’s conversation and topic. It’s a pretty big one. It’s building off of a lot of recent milestones that we’ve had here in North Dakota. And I’m really excited to be sharing this conversation with Nick Flom of Talis that has been an equal partner in all these milestones of late to discuss what is actually happening recently and how this ties into this bigger picture and this bigger problem that I think the whole country is encountering when it comes to airspace integration. 

So, you know, starting there, Nick, you and I have been in the middle of this for several years now. We just made this announcement on the Vantis Federal Radar Data Enclave as a massive milestone of activating that radar feed, activating that data. But what did we actually just announce? What does that mean? 

Nick Flom: 

I’m going to take a couple steps back here and I think like, you know, what radar data has been, what it is moving forward, and you know maybe trying to emphasize that this is actually a really big deal and like people actually have not had this type of access before. 

You know, I think that when we’ve looked at how do we access infrastructure that’s already been invested by the federal government, radar data, the first thing that we go is, hey, I want access to that. And the FAA said, you can, you know, you can get access to this. And so a lot of people have, we’ve seen different types of systems ingest FAA radar data in the past. If you do any type of flight tracking across the country, FlightAware, and you start like peeling it back a little bit and you go, “But is it real-time data?” 

Erin Roesler: 

Right? 

Nick Flom: 

No, we have a delay in that data. Is it all the data? Absolutely not. No. And what’s the big part that’s been missing all along is, it’s not the cooperative guys who are out there, not the ones who are participating as part of the letting people know that they’re out there. It’s a lot of the other users of the airspace that are perfectly legal to be out there flying that we’ve not been able to see in the past. And getting raw data in order to see everybody who’s out there, we haven’t seen that before, right? And that’s the hard part of who we, why we make all these investments in detect-and-avoid types of systems. It’s not for the participants. It’s for the those who are not participating completely legally. That’s a big deal. And being able to leverage this as part of this program is pretty amazing. 

So if the Vantis Federal Radar Data Enclave is not SWIM data, it’s not the FlightAware data, it’s not filtered, cooperative only, high latency, what is, like that one-sentence line, what is the Vantis Federal Radar Data Enclave? 

Erin Roesler: 

This is when I’m looking at a display that’s coming directly off of a federal radar. I see it all. 

Nick Flom: 

Yes. I don’t have a middleman anymore. And that’s, I’m not a controller. You’re not a controller. I’m not part of a three-letter agency that’s using this information for some other type of purpose that I might not know about. This is Erin and Nick who have an ability to see what’s happening in the airspace in ways that we have not seen before. 

Erin Roesler: 

Excellent. So, it’s live, you know, unfiltered, non-delayed radar data. Why does that matter? Why is that so unnecessary? I mean, it’s great data. Got it. But we also have ADS-B, we have Remote ID, we have T-CAST, now we have A-CAST, A-CAST for UAS, so A-CAST X and SU and all those things. Why does it matter that this radar data is so important? 

Nick Flom: 

So I think that this is, we talk about the United States having the most complex airspace in the world. And you know, if you dial into like what does that actually mean? It means that I can take off from an airport, let nobody know by the way, have no electrical system on board my airplane, fly 500 miles, land at another airport, never talk to a single person on the radio, never let the FAA know that I’m going to be up there flying. Not even let you know that I’m going to be up there flying. Even as a friend, I don’t even need to do a call ahead. And it’s perfectly legal within the regulations that we have put in there. Don’t have to transmit my position to anybody. I don’t need to tell anybody. I don’t need to talk to anybody. And I’ve still followed all the rules. 

Erin Roesler: 

Yep. 

Nick Flom: 

So if I’m out there and I’m not letting anybody know that I’m out there and now I’m a unmanned airplane who needs to deconflict from traffic in the airspace, how do they know that I’m out there? 

Erin Roesler: 

[snorts] That’s about the only reason, right? 

Nick Flom: 

That’s right. Yeah. So with all this technology we have, we still have a problem with not everyone is visible. There is, and legally so, like that’s a huge freedom that we have in the U.S. of being able to just fly in the NAS without those technologies. But I mean, we’ve had this conversation before: there’s safety additives of being cooperative or broadcasting location. You know, there are areas where it is required, so why not just make everyone cooperative if the technology is there? Why not make everyone cooperative? 

Erin Roesler: 

You know, I think that we saw with the ADS-B rule when it initially came out that, for a lot of the country, it was going to solve that problem. We happen to be sitting in Grand Forks, North Dakota. If I’m a general aviation pilot, generally, our elevation here is not 1,000 ft. Very uncommon for me that I would ever fly a general aviation airplane above 10,000 ft. So, there’s my first trigger point: going above 10,000 ft. I have no desire to ever do that. If I want to go to the southeast to Minneapolis, it’s about 250 miles away. And I have to stay 30 miles away. By that point, it’s not that big of a deal for me to stay outside of their Mode Veil. If I start going west, I have a long way to fly before it even becomes, you know, before I hit another Mode or a Class C airspace. So, there’s really low incentive for me if I’m flying around the region as a general aviation pilot to spend money to equip where it is not a requirement. 

Nick Flom: 

Yeah. And a lot of the airspace around the country, it does look like this. And even with a mandate for ADS-B, we didn’t make it for everywhere. So the incentive is pretty low for me to make that investment. 

Erin Roesler: 

Yeah. And even if the investment, you know, we’ve seen the increase in technology of, you know, ADS-B can be as simple as swapping out a light on my airplane and now I’m cooperative, right? But it is a question that we’ve had over the years since ADS-B did become a mandate: are we actually solving any problems here? It has increased safety, but is it a requirement or is this just a theoretical issue? I think a year ago we, as a nation and the world, really realized that this isn’t a theoretical problem. It’s a real problem. And these technologies do have very valid safety impacts. And what I’m alluding to is what happened in DC at DCA: a horrific occurrence that technology definitely played a factor. And that’s even in a dense, highly managed, controlled environment: not every aircraft in that environment was cooperative or visible, which really shows that this is a problem. 

So you go back into the DCA, you look at that environment: that would be an area that, being cooperative, being broadcasting in your position, there’s always the exceptions to the rule. There’s a set of aircraft that might not maybe need to broadcast my position, but I don’t need to have an ability to receive that information. There’s always a little bit of a gap that’s there, and you know, aviation, we love our Swiss cheese kind of models, but like those holes are really big when you start looking at those, and they’re pretty easy to line up. 

Nick Flom: 

To line up. Yep. And you know, so it’s like another example: we’ve known, I mean, if you look at a lot of the papers that have been written out there, the unfortunate predictions of what this would look like, how it’s preventable even with just one part of the technology and ADS-B is part of it. We still have not taken those steps. And I think we’re trying. I think we’ve, you know, there are acts of Congress that are trying to push some of these things. And if I even talked to you about like the ROTOR Act, like you know, maybe describe that a little bit for people of how that plays into all of this. 

Erin Roesler: 

I, because you mentioned gap, and I think that gap of: we have these dense, highly controlled airspaces where probably a lot of the population thought everyone was cooperative. We didn’t realize these gaps, these holes in the Swiss cheese model. Those that were maybe more informed did, but probably to the broad general public didn’t see, didn’t know. So as happens in this country, and it was a good movement of: okay, well, what can we do to solve those gaps? And the ROTOR Act was one of those things that came out of that. That act really sought to mandate equipage in those environments, regardless of some of those different carveouts of different airspace users, aircraft that were exempt in certain scenarios, and said: nope, let’s acknowledge that it is dense enough, there’s a high enough risk. We really need everyone to be cooperative in those environments. And so that’s what the ROTOR Act really sought to do: was mandate equipage of some sort of technology, electronic conspicuity, to broadcast in those areas. 

What we’ve seen though in just the last recent months: that act failed. And from my perspective, I think it failed just because it still is the same debate that we have with ADS-B mandates. It puts the burden on the aircraft owner or operator or that company to equip, that has a financial burden. And there is still some considerations given to special airspace users that may be broadcasting, super visibly, to put it simply, right, in a very public forum: is it’s maybe not the right modality for ensuring that there’s a cooperative technology sharing of information and aircraft location. Are there other means to still broadcast my location but through a veiled sense where now it’s like, I’m calling out the military? Like, you know, there sometimes are military flights that they have national security missions and sensitivities around that that they shouldn’t be as broadcast known: that hey, there is a military aircraft flying this route this time of day, etc. Not to say that it can’t be again: when I’m saying veiled, it’s a aircraft and we don’t know the mission, the purpose, or that it’s a military duty-type mission set. Maybe that’s something that we need to look at, but that wasn’t in this act. It was entirely trying to leverage the existing technologies: ADS-B, T-CAST, etc., to solve and hopefully prevent something like DCA from happening again. Great. Wonderful. Again, it ultimately did fail for those reasons. I think we’ll see it resurface. In fact, we’ve probably already seen it resurface in the ALERT Act. But that ALERT Act is a little bit different. 

Nick Flom: 

Yeah. And one of the challenges I think, even with the ALERT Act, because we’re not, that it’s a research project, but it’s a little bit more of like: hey, what else could we do out there? We’re in process right now, and it’s got that one-year has a five years before we like even start making decisions around it. We are going through right now with the brand new ATC system. Today, we’re trying to solve: we’re trying to make our airspace safer today, not have discussions about what other things could happen in the future. So, we’re starting to see that maybe some of these acts, some of these different ways of doing things aren’t fast enough, aren’t prescriptive enough in order to actually meet the requirements of airspace safety for everybody. 

Erin Roesler: 

Yeah. And so both the ROTOR and the ALERT Act, and even the big brand new beautiful ATC system that’s, those are all big aviation, big NAS changes, you know, overhauling and changing and making requirements for all NAS users. But if we pull it back to UAS, because that’s what we’re here to talk about, we see that this conversation is very alive and well there as well. You know, this last fall we had the NPRM for Part 108 and Part 146. Great. Wonderful. Everyone entered the comments. Comment period closed. We were expecting final rule, you know, real fast. However, they reopened for comments. In particular around the subject that was electronic conspicuity. It’s the same topic, little bit different name, but it is: how do you make people visible in the national airspace? So, I know you looked at that, I looked at it. You want to just kind of explain what we saw in those questions that the FAA came up with? 

Nick Flom: 

A big part is like a definition. Yeah. Like, what is going to be what’s considered? And I think when we start going down the list of like what can be considered, the immediate next discussion out of that is: is it enough, and is it going to meet, is it meeting deconfliction-type requirements? Is it meeting broadcasting of just letting you know that I’m here-type information? And then what level of equipage for all users: is it going to be manageable? Is it something that we can even do? Do we need to put these types of burdens on when we’re kind of now starting to pick and choose who we’re going to burden for some of these different conspicuity or participating-type requirements. I’m now going to have a drone do it, but I’m still my traditional aviation does not need to do it. My level is a little bit different for each type of users. The airspaces are going to be a little bit different of when I need to, when I don’t need to. And I think that that actually, like you go back to the Swiss cheese of it all, we’re just going to find another set of big holes out of all this when we have the vagueness around what a requirement is or what a definition is or what the requirement needs to be. We’re going to find those areas where it’s ultra safe, where everyone’s good, everyone’s participating, and then we’re going to find some of these areas where we’re going to slip through the cracks, and we don’t want to be slipping through the cracks. 

Erin Roesler: 

Right. [snorts] Right. What’s interesting to me in reviewing the comments that came from well the first round of comments in the NPRM but now the second round of comments with the electronic conspicuity: there isn’t consensus. Right. The same way the ROTOR Act and the ALERT Act are getting debated upon about how you approach this through the existing airspace users in all of aviation, you’re seeing that same debate in UAS as well: that not everyone is in agreement to what is proper electronic conspicuity, what is the proper deconfliction services, detect-and-avoid. And I think just this last week we saw some pretty big headlines come out about those disagreements on what is the right approach ahead. 

Nick Flom: 

Yeah. I think that discussions that are happening between trade organizations like the Commercial Drone Alliance and then we have members within that like Amazon who are seeing you know potentially not direct alignment. I think that aviation safety, everyone’s in alignment there. How you meet it is where the alignment starts to get a little bit more mismatched. Myself as a general aviation pilot, I think that aviation safety can do just fine without me having to broadcast my position when I’m flying in low-altitude airspace away from busy airports. You might have a completely different vantage point of that, and we’re gonna start to see what is that scale of appropriate amount of requirements that also has an added cost of: what’s the cost? 

Erin Roesler: 

Yeah. And that’s always going to play a consideration of: aviation safety has no cost, you know, that you can put a price tag on. But the reality is that there’s a balance. 

Nick Flom: 

There’s a point. Yeah. It goes back to that acceptable level of risk, right? Rather than that starts measuring a little bit more. And that always was a term that resonated with me when you’re having these conversations: because you acknowledge that you can always be more safe. You can always add more layers. You can always have more redundancies. But again, within the environment, what is that acceptable level of risk? And you said it already: like there are airspace environments where maybe you don’t need full redundancies, but maybe there are airspace environments where even double redundancy is not sufficient enough. It’s hard to have a one-size-fits-all to this solution. That’s why I think, in my opinion, that’s why the ROTOR Act and ALERT Act are struggling and having issues. That’s why we see the movement of a new air traffic system. And that’s why we see some of the debate that’s happening around electronic conspicuity. 

You know, when you start thinking about like, even when ADS-B was deployed across the U.S., what it really started to mimic was: what is our current radar coverage? You know, they didn’t put sensors all around the country; there’s a lot of gaps in coverage, which you’d consider gaps in radar coverage. If you are an instrument-rated pilot, there’s some checkpoints that you have to let air traffic control know that you’ve gone over because they might not be able to see you. Which is wild as well: that verbal communication is still a part of our deconfliction. And we have update rates of radars that vary: some are 4 seconds, some are 12 seconds. ADS-B is generally at one hertz. So like, we even within these systems, we’re trying to, even in a single environment, and we’re trying to always get incrementally better. Is 1 second enough? Is it: do we need to alert faster than that? That’s in the areas that we already have control over. Now we’re trying to go into different parts of the country that never have had that type of capability and never had that type of technology deployed. And we’re now trying to go: zero was good before. What’s good enough now? And I think that that’s going to be a challenge. 

Erin Roesler: 

Yeah, that’s all the answers to why is this so hard, right? The technology is there. It’s not a gap in the technology. It’s a gap in so many other aspects. What again: being the cost, the redundancy, is it appropriate, acceptable level of risk, is it enough? You know, those are the things that make it hard and a challenge. But if we circle all the way back: okay, so back to the announcement on Vantis Federal Radar Data Enclave, why does that matter with all [of] this? I mean, obviously it’s a conversation that’s happening within traditional aviation. It’s a conversation that’s happening in UAS policy with the NPRM. It’s a conversation that’s happening in Vantis and in rolling out infrastructure support. Why does radar data matter? 

Nick Flom: 

So I think if we there’s a couple different components. I think one is that like we are going to have non-participating, non-cooperative participants in the airspace, and we’re great with that. So we need a mechanism in order to deconflict against them, and I don’t want to put undo burden on them. Maybe new entrants need to have that. But we also have an investment that’s been made by the federal government that provides a means to visualize these non-participants through radar. By not having access to that, that means a redundant system needs to be put in place in order to mirror what the federal government’s already invested. We’re talking about trying, like you said, we’re trying to get aviation safe at an appropriate cost where sometimes the appropriate cost, even for an ADS-B receiver, is too much. Trying to equip the country in a way that can see non-participants, it’s a non-starter. The fact that we have this information available and now we’re seeing it become available to other users: absolutely incredible. I mean, that’s been the differentiator I think of all this. We’ve tried to make do with using some of this data even in a situational awareness standpoint with only cooperatives or situational awareness knowing that there’s maybe a delay. But getting that raw, real-time information, aviation safety just increased. 

Erin Roesler: 

Yeah, exactly. I, this is a conversation I love of connecting all these different pieces, because this is why this milestone announcement was such a big deal for me: is seeing how this plays into this bigger movement, this bigger piece of the puzzle. And my key takeaway every time I have this conversation is: we’re not wanting something to be perfect, but we’re looking at the environment, the national airspace system that we have today, and we’re building within that reality where we can implement a solution that enables, in this case, beyond visualized site for UAS to happen. Acknowledging that down the road, we might see ROTOR Act 2.0, we might see a new ALERT Act. We might have an air traffic system that fixes all of this. Right? Great. That’s not here today. How do we build systems that work with the environment that we have today? And that’s what this does. That’s what this milestone accomplishes for us: enabling within the environment that is today’s reality. My takeaway, your takeaway? 

Nick Flom: 

I think it’s like: this is an incredible partnership with the federal government. I mean, this is like an opportunity where it’s not one-sided anymore: that we’re not withholding information that could actually be beneficial for other users. I don’t see us ever having a requirement on FAA controllers to do the deconfliction between unmanned aircraft and manned airplanes in all environments. 

Erin Roesler: 

Yes. Yeah. 

Nick Flom: 

So if we’re not going to, that’s an unrealistic expectation. Which would mean that they have the responsibility of holding all of that information and being the only ones to use it. By sharing this information, it gives us one more step that we can still enable these advanced UAS operations, maintain aviation safety in a way that we haven’t otherwise at a really cost-effective. We’re taking costs off of the table in some ways of equipage and some of those other things that sometimes become the core root of why like a ROTOR Act or an ALERT Act or some of these other types of mandates have had challenges in the past. 

Erin Roesler: 

Yeah. Exactly. 

Well, thank you so much for the conversation. I hope our audience learned a little bit of something tying all the different pieces together. It’s a lot of really fun thought exercises when you take a step back from the day-to-day of trying to solve problems and build solutions to seeing how it fits in that bigger picture. So, Nick, thanks for joining me. Thank you everyone for tuning in today. This was another episode of, you know, Beyond the Buzz. Again, my name is Erin, here with the Northern Plains UAS site located here in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I want to thank again our partner at the Hive for hosting us on our webinar series, and please tune in, join us next month.