The Aeronautics Division serves a range of customers, with the bulk of the customer base primarily made up of aircraft owners. The aircraft registration program provides the division with data about the aircraft located at their facilities and their owners. All airworthy aircraft that are based in Massachusetts or temporarily located in Massachusetts for 60 or more days (per calendar year) must be registered with both the Aeronautics Division and the airport manager of their Massachusetts based airport. The Aeronautics Division registered 99% of these aircraft deemed billable entities throughout the Commonwealth. 90% of these registrations were done electronically.
The Aeronautics Division oversees the MassDOT Drone Program. The mission of the Drone Program is to facilitate the adoption of drones across MassDOT in a manner that is safe, cost-effective, and secure, and to incentivize applied research to solve drone challenges. Drones have a wide variety of applications for transportation including construction site imagery, asset management, inspections, and incident response. In the future, drones are expected to improve safety, reduce task times, improve the quality of data, and reduce cost.
In the last several years, the Drone Program set context measures (performance measures with no current targets) for three key areas of statewide drone performance. The first two measures are the number of missions completed and the number of drone flights completed. The purpose of a drone flight project is defined as the mission, for example, a mission could be to assess the condition of a bridge. Drone flights are the individual number of flights flown as part of a mission. In FY23 there were 952 drone flights that supported a total of 358 missions, both slight increases from FY22.
The third measure is the number of departments utilizing drones. Between FY21 and FY22, the MassDOT Drone team completed missions for 15 departments or agencies. They include:
