Northern Plains UAS Test Site extends reach beyond home state
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
The Northern Plains UAS Test Site (NPUASTS), which has been at the forefront in making North Dakota a leader in the cause of advancing autonomous unmanned air mobility, is working to bring its solutions to other states across the U.S., Marketing Manager Victor Meza, said at the recent Xponential 2025 conference in Houston.
Meza said the Test Site is spreading the lessons learned through the operation of Vantis, the statewide network to enable UAS flights beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), to other jurisdictions far from North Dakota.
“We are in conversations with different states to start working with them to align their infrastructure in order to do something similar to Vantis in their states,” he said.
Under this expansion program, NPUASTS already has extended its operations to 18 states across the nation. To date, the Test Site has conducted more than 22,000 flights and secured more than 50 FAA certificates of authorization (COAs).
A recent agreement between the FAA and the state of North Dakota, allowing the state to use federal radar data, is expected to further NPUASTS’s ability to offer its services across the country, Meza said. The agreement, announcedlast October under the FAA’s Pathfinder program, marks the first-of-its-kind, government-to-government release of federal radar data. It allows Vantis to ingest the data, in order to advance the integration of UAS beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) operations into the National Airspace System (NAS).
“Right now, in North Dakota, we cover about 5,000 square miles in a BVLOS system, and this will open us up to 96,000 square miles of visibility to fly BVLOS,” Meza said. “As of right now, we have 10 times the amount of area of any other state or any other company that has a BVLOS system.”
One advantage that NPUASTS has gained in its work outside of North Dakota is the ability to teach UAS operators how to fly in a wide variety of geographic and metrological environments.
“Our clients have so many different scenarios in which they need to test their equipment,” he said. “Either it’s extreme heat or it needs to be in high altitude or something along those lines.”
Northern Plains has a nationwide COA, which allow for the operations of small UAS up to 1,200 feet above ground level, under an overarching Public Aircraft Operations framework. This allows the Test Site to oversee training missions in a wide variety of locations across the U.S.
“We can have a test site in any state and pretty much anywhere. So, if they want to fly in Nevada, we can find them a place to fly in Nevada, set up a test area for them, and then they can fly under our COA,” Meza said. “They don’t necessarily have to go through the whole waiver process and wait months to fly.”
For UAS operators who need to learn how to fly in extreme heat conditions, the NPUASTS can arrange for them to use a test site in New Mexico. If they need to test their UAVs in extreme cold conditions, they can be provided with a test site in Alaska, or in Vantage’s home state of North Dakota, which has its share of frigid temperatures.
“It just really depends on the scope of their testing that they want to do.”
With North Dakota being home to two large Air Force bases, Minot and Grand Forks, a major near-term goal of the NPUASTS is to incorporate Department of Defense (DOD) drone flights into the state’s civil BVLOS system and into the NAS.
“The Army National Guard is getting larger drones. So, as of right now, those large drones cannot fly in the national airspace. So, now with the federal radar data coming in through Vantage, they can be able to,” Meza said.
“And if we expand that out nationally, they could use our system to ferry their drones from one side of the country to the other without having to use chase planes, redundant detect-and-avoid systems and things like that,” he said. “So, they’ll really only need to have our iPad in front of their drone pilots to check out the airspace.”
NPUASTS is also one of the partners in Project ULTRA, a collaboration of federal, state and county entities and private businesses to prove out the feasibility of the DOD flying large cargo drones beyond the visual line of sight for long distances across the NAS to service far-flung military installations.
Project ULTRA has scheduled a series of demonstration flights for this summer, in which military cargo drones will carry payloads of up to 55 pounds for more than 60 miles from Grand Forks Air Force base to Cavalier Space Force Station and back.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies.
For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam.
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