The NASA-sponsored Routine Autonomous Multi-Aircraft Operations (RAM-AO) Working Group—formerly known as the m:N Working Group— will hold a meeting on March 3 to 5 the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, to develop white papers and discuss the various challenges that are being explored by industry, academia, and by other working groups to enable multi-aircraft operations.
Aptima, Inc., under a NASA award, is leading these efforts, having facilitated the Working Group’s biannual meeting at NASA’s Langley Research Center in July 2025. An initial focus of the Working Group was to determine the ‘ideal’ or minimal number of human operators (m) that can safely and reliably oversee what will be growing numbers of autonomous aircraft (N) without cognitive overload, underload or compromised performance.
“We found through research that the ideal ratio of operators to aircraft is more complex than simply the number of unmanned aircraft to be managed,” said Dr. Samantha Emerson, Senior Scientist in Aptima’s Performance Augmentation Systems Division, and Principal Investigator for the contract under NASA’s Air Traffic Management and Safety (ATMS) Project.
“To determine the true limits to safely scaling autonomous operations in the national airspace you have to consider the aviation ecosystem as a whole, from the density and activity of intervening air traffic to the size of the area the operator is monitoring, and the role the human plays in that overall picture,” added Emerson.
To reach scale in many of these domains will require an operator to control multiple aircraft (1:N) or multiple pilots controlling multiple aircraft (m:N). During flight, for example, an operator may be challenged to hand-off vehicles at different times such as at take-off or landing, or due to mechanical failures or airspace density, all of which can lead to excessive workload that requires offloading of tasks or assets, according to an Aptima communication.
Progress on determining optional ratios was made during the 2025 bi-annual meeting . NASA Langley’s UAS and autonomy research laboratories are developing a concept of operations to scale from 1:1 (one operator, one vehicle) to 1:N (one operator, multiple vehicles) and m:N (many operators with varying roles, many vehicles) operations, focusing on risk mitigation. Research has indicated that communication requirements, rather than the sheer number of UAS, were found to be the primary drivers of performance and workload changes in this particular set of operations. A proposed new standard from ASTM, aims to provide a flexible framework for analyzing and implementing autonomy. The focus is on contextualizing the impact of autonomy on the role of the human versus the agent rather than relying on more rigid “levels” of autonomy.
The U.S. Army’s Aviation and Missile Center highlighted challenges in tactical aviation operations, including managing multiple systems in varied conditions with jamming and disruptions. They emphasized the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in human-machine interfaces, operating under the philosophy of “AI to do things right, so humans can do the right things”. The Army’s long-term vision aims for humans and agents to operate as peer-to-peer.
Ultimately, the Working Group seeks to identify and address barriers to enable routine, autonomous, multi-aircraft operations. These include:
- Interventions & Exceptions (I&E): This subgroup is developing modelling and simulation (M&S) methods to validate the safety of m:N operations. By quantifying and understanding how and when human operators might need to intervene, scenario simulations can be run thousands of times to determine how an operation results in safety issues. This will enable fleet operators a way to test the safety of their operations before applying for FAA certification.
- Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS): This subgroup is identifying regulatory gaps in autonomous, multi-aircraft operations, especially related to “Beyond Visual Line of Sight” (BVLOS) flight operation. While regulators are actively pushing forward new policies, rulemaking takes a long time, much longer than the rate at which technology changes. As such, the subgroup is working to provide policy makers with information on the latest technologies, emerging Advanced Air Mobility use cases, and other potential advances that may have exceeded the pace of development on new regulations.
- Scalable Remote Crew Design Considerations: This subgroup is focused on best practices for task allocation, roles, and handoffs among remote crew members in multi-aircraft operations. This includes lessons learned and potential solutions for the design of operator processes and procedures, OEM systems, and third-party service providers.
- m:N Validation and Verification: This subgroup is developing an evaluation framework with metrics for workload, system performance, and safety.
- System of Systems Design: This subgroup is defining baseline considerations for robust management in a fully integrated, non-segregated airspace.
“We’re looking for new members from industry, academia, and other branches of government—both in the U.S. and globally—to contribute to these new subgroups,” Dr. Emerson said. “By pulling together these various stakeholders, we hope to identify ways to reduce barriers that will not only pave the way for UAS operations at scale in the U.S., but also for the world at large.”
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(Image:NASA)