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One drone. One simple question.

Can authorities trust what's in the sky?

Unverified

They can't even tell whose it is.

So the safe answer is no — and the rules stay restrictive.

The missing piece

Not a better drone. A way to prove whose it is.

An early attempt at that. Most of it isn't built yet.

Identify·Verify·Authorize·Monitor

01Where drones stall today

₹2.5T

India's projected drone market by 2030

38,575

drones nationwide with a verified ID today

The distance between those two numbers is trust.

Authorities can't see what's in the sky, so they can't trust it.

Drone compliance in both the US and India runs on paperwork and registration, not real-time field identification. Agencies have no reliable way to tell an authorized drone from an unauthorized one while it's actually in the air.

India's own attempt, Digital Sky, is fragmented across portals and leans on operator self-declaration — unreliable enough that DGCA began migrating drone services to eGCA in 2025. Remote ID broadcast isn't mandated until 2027.

So regulators choose between under-enforcement and blanket restriction. Those restrictions stalled two of my own drone projects, which is how I ended up here.

02What aviation did in 2010

Aviation already solved this once.

? ID · VERIFIED POSITION · 1s AGO

Before ADS-B, controllers relied on radar — an echo off an aircraft that could not say who it was. Slower, less accurate, less certain.

ADS-B changed the direction of the information. Each aircraft broadcasts its own verified position, once a second, and the ground simply listens.

The FAA mandated it in 2010 and gave the industry a decade to fit it. The lesson isn't the radio protocol — it's the order the four things happened in.

  1. Visibility
  2. Trust
  3. Regulation
  4. Growth

03What DATC actually is

DATC is a way to check whose drone that is — while it's still in the air.

  1. The drone

    Carries a module that reports its identity continuously, in flight.

  2. DATC

    Checks that identity and its permission against a live central record.

  3. The authority

    Sees what is actually flying — and can clear it, or ground it.

That's the whole idea. Everything below is how far it has actually got.

04How it works, in three parts

Give the drone an identity it reports in real time.

The same idea, applied to drones, in three parts.

  1. 01

    Verifiable identity

    A unique ID tied to owner, model and licence validity — checked electronically in flight, not once at registration.

  2. 02

    Live authorization

    Permission status updates from a central platform, instead of living in a record the operator controls and declares.

  3. 03

    Real-time intervention

    An authority can ground an active flight, rather than deny a permit beforehand or read a log afterwards.

05Built, and not built

This is early. Here's what's built and what isn't.

The authority approval dashboard: a pending registration showing computed thrust margin, endurance rating, payload utilization and wind risk, with structured denial reasons and approve or deny actions.
The authority dashboard. Safety metrics are computed from the submitted specification; denials carry a structured reason.
The drone registration form, collecting takeoff weight, payload, motor thrust, motor count, battery capacity, cruise power and wind tolerance.
Registration. The physical figures here are what the safety analysis runs on.
Built

Registration & safety analysis

A web form feeding a SQLite backend that scores thrust margin, endurance, wind risk and payload utilization automatically.

Built

Authority approval dashboard

A desktop app where an authority reviews pending registrations against those metrics and approves or denies with a structured reason.

Built

Encrypted licence credential

Approved drones get a Fernet-encrypted QR licence. The link it points to isn't hosted yet — a known gap, not a hidden one.

Preliminary

Physical module

Early experiments only: API calls, heartbeat, control logic over Wi-Fi. No long-range link. The plan is cellular; it isn't built.

Planned

Real-world testing

Nothing has flown. Performance under real conditions is unknown.

Two problems this doesn't solve

It only matters if authorities adopt it. Without regulatory integration, a verification layer nobody is obliged to check is just a concept.

It centralises sensitive data. Licensing and operator records in one place raises privacy and governance questions that would need answering — access controls, retention, legal basis — before any of this went near a real deployment.

06The ask

Fifteen minutes would help a lot.

Vihaan Mittal — Grade 9, Pathways School Gurgaon.

Email me

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