By Bethany Lee | 2025-06-16

While NASA tends to be known for its work in outer space, much of what the organization does happens within our own atmosphere.

One such program working to improve life on our home planet is Air Traffic Management Exploration, or ATM-X, a NASA project that researches aviation devices from the Earth's surface to 18,288 meters above it, including drones, planes, helicopters, airships and even high-altitude balloons.

The program has been developing at NASA for over a decade, and it works closely with the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to monitor air traffic and accommodate the growing demand in aircraft.

For example, today's airplane pilots are required to communicate in real time with air traffic controllers to navigate the airport taxiway or else risk colliding into one of the many support vehicles or other planes on the runway.

With dozens of planes to manage, this process can take a long time -- as anyone who has been stuck on their plane for an hour after landing knows all too well.

One of ATM-X's projects is working to digitize the process, providing on-screen, turn-by-turn directions for pilots to follow after landing to avoid crashes. In May, NASA tested the software at its Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley through a partnership with Boeing.

"This project with Boeing lends credibility to the research being done across Ames," said Adam Yingling, autonomy researcher for ATM-X at NASA Ames.

Those kinds of innovations could mean big changes for airport employees and passengers alike, from reducing the workload of air traffic controllers to eliminating delays for travelers.

Programs within ATM-X

ATM-X includes a number of sub-projects. The Digital Information Platform project is developing software to track airspace traffic in a cloud-based system, much like a smartphone Global Positioning System app gives traffic updates on routes.

Another sub-project, Pathfinding for Airspace with Autonomous Vehicles, works on automating remote-controlled flights for aircraft without a pilot. And yet another, NAS Exploratory Concepts & Technologies, studies the highest altitude aircraft to improve disaster response and even delve into supersonic flight.

The newest initiative within ATM-X is UTM-BVLOS, or Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management Beyond-Visual-Line-of Sight, which kicked off at the Key Site in Dallas last August and is designed to improve the everyday use of drones.

Researchers within UTM-BVLOS want to create a better way to track and prioritize drone flights. Gita Hodell, public operator integration lead under UTM-BVLOS, gave an example in a NASA podcast episode:

Imagine someone makes a 911 call to get emergency medical treatments delivered through a Drone as First Responder program. At the same time, his or her neighbor orders a pizza to be delivered by drone.

"What you really don't want is for that pizza delivery drone to block the emergency first responder drone or slow it down in any way," Hodell said. "When we talk about air traffic management and how we organize the airspace, that's exactly what we're talking about."

UTM-BVLOS aims to manage such potential conflicts proactively, using planned flight trajectories and prioritization structures to streamline drone flights.

For the average citizen, these developments may not seem as exciting as sending astronauts to the Moon, but they could significantly affect day-to-day life on Earth.