Percent of Aircraft Registered
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.
In FY22, the Aeronautics Division completed a thorough audit of all aircraft based at Massachusetts airports that were deemed to be billable entities. The Aeronautics Division registered 84 percent of these aircraft throughout the Commonwealth. 88% of these registrations were done electronically.
Number of Drone Missions, Flights, and Departments Utilizing Drones
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.
Last year, 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 FY22 there were 940 drone flights that supported a total of 347 missions. This data is collected through the Salesforce system.
Between FY21 and FY22, the MassDOT Drone team completed missions for 15 departments or agencies. They include:
- MassDOT Highway Division and District Offices 1-6
- MassDOT Office of Transportation Planning
- MassDOT Aeronautics Division
- MassDOT Shared Services
- MBTA (Maintenance Only)
- Massachusetts State House/Governor’s Office
- Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport)
- Massachusetts Emergency Management Association (MEMA)
- Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) & Department of Fisheries & Wildlife
- Department of Conservation & Recreation (DCR)
- MA School Board Authority (MSBA)
- Massachusetts Executive Office of Technology Services and Security
- Federal Aviation Administration
- National Transportation Safety Board
- US Coast Guard
