We recently connected with Abigail “Abby” Smith, Chief Operating Officer at AX Enterprize to discuss trust as the foundation for global UTM.
If you can dream it, you can drone it. And if you drone it, UTM is a critical part of that dream.
Abigail “Abby” Smith, Chief Operating Officer at AX Enterprize
What kind of services/products does your organization provide?
At AX Enterprize, we believe that trust is earned through operational experience, collaboration, and interoperability. Technology is essential—but technology alone will not create the confidence needed for autonomous aviation to become part of everyday life.
That philosophy has guided our company since 2011. Since joining the UTM community in 2016, we have focused on one objective: helping build the trusted digital infrastructure that enables autonomous aviation to integrate safely into the National Airspace System while supporting global interoperability.
AX has spent nearly a decade maturing the CLUE-X™ Airspace Intelligence Suite, an integrated operational ecosystem that helps organizations understand, manage, and coordinate increasingly complex airspace.
Rather than developing isolated software applications, we have focused on integrating the capabilities required for safe, scalable operations.
Those capabilities include SAFIRE-X™ Air Domain Awareness, which fuses cooperative and non-cooperative aircraft, radar, ADS-B, Remote ID, weather intelligence, and other surveillance sources into a common operational picture. CLUE-X™ UTM provides strategic deconfliction, flight planning, conformance monitoring, and collaborative airspace management that supports routine BVLOS operations. AeroInSite™ delivers operational analytics, mission replay, compliance reporting, and after-action review, while DART™ applies algorithmic threat analysis to identify operational anomalies and improve decision-making. Our entire ecosystem is built on a sensor-agnostic architecture, enabling organizations to integrate existing and emerging surveillance technologies without proprietary constraints. For us, technology is not the destination. Trusted operations are.
One of the greatest advantages of operating the FAA-designated New York UAS Test Site is the opportunity to validate concepts under real operational conditions. Working alongside regulators, manufacturers, researchers, UTM Service Providers, public safety agencies, and commercial operators continually reinforces an important lesson: operational experience improves both technology and policy.
That perspective is equally important in our role as an FAA-approved NTAP UTM Service Provider. Becoming an approved USS represented more than a technical milestone. It demonstrated our ability to provide operational UTM services within the FAA’s evolving framework for routine BVLOS operations. That experience continually informs how we think about scalability, interoperability, and operational readiness.
AX has long supported the development of the Drone Remote Identification Protocol (DRIP) and secure Remote ID architectures because we believe that trusted digital identity is foundational to scalable UTM. Authenticated identities, privacy-preserving Single Session IDs, protection against spoofing, and trusted information exchange enable regulators, operators, and service providers to exchange information with confidence while protecting legitimate operational confidentiality. Routine BVLOS operations will ultimately depend upon that confidence.
What role does your company play within GUTMA?
Today, AX serves as an FAA-approved UTM Service Provider (USS) through the FAA’s Near Term Approval Process (NTAP), operates the FAA-designated New York UAS Test Site at Oneida County, actively participates in the U.S. Shared Airspace Consortium (SASG), and has successfully demonstrated interoperability through the InterUSS ecosystem. Together, these roles provide practical operational experience that spans engineering, standards, policy, and real-world operations—experience we are excited to bring to the GUTMA community.
Our participation in the U.S. Shared Airspace Consortium extends that perspective further. Shared airspace cannot be enabled through isolated systems or proprietary approaches. It requires common governance, interoperable services, and trusted collaboration among government and industry. Those same principles are at the heart of GUTMA’s mission.
Aviation has always been an international enterprise. Aircraft cross borders. Information crosses borders. Increasingly, digital services must do the same. GUTMA provides an important forum where regulators, Air Navigation Service Providers, UTM Service Providers, manufacturers, researchers, and operators work together to solve challenges that no single organization—or nation—can solve independently.
For AX, joining GUTMA is a natural extension of the collaborative approach that already guides our work within the FAA, the U.S. Shared Airspace Consortium, and the InterUSS community. We look forward to contributing operational experience from the United States while learning from organizations advancing UTM worldwide.
We are proud to join GUTMA because we believe the future of autonomous aviation will be built through trusted partnerships, operational collaboration, and a shared commitment to interoperability. Because technology enables autonomy. Trust enables adoption. Collaboration enables scale.
From your perspective, what are the current biggest industry challenges?
Around the world, aviation is entering one of the most significant transformations since the introduction of satellite navigation. Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), autonomous logistics, and increasingly digital airspace services are moving from demonstration to routine operations.
The question is no longer whether these technologies are possible.
The question is how our industry will build the trust necessary to scale them safely, securely, and interoperably across jurisdictions, operators, and national borders.
The next decade of aviation will be defined less by individual technologies than by the industry’s ability to build trusted, interoperable digital infrastructure. As an FAA-approved NTAP UTM Service Provider, operator of the FAA-designated New York UAS Test Site at Oneida County, active participant in the U.S. Shared Airspace Consortium, and contributor to the InterUSS ecosystem, AX Enterprize is committed to helping bridge operational experience with international collaboration.
The aviation community has solved difficult challenges before: we standardized navigation, we standardized communications, and we standardized safety. The next challenge is building a trusted digital airspace. That challenge belongs to all of us.
About Abigail “Abby” Smith
Abigail “Abby” Smith serves as Chief Operating Officer of AX Enterprize, where she leads the company’s growth across civil aviation, government, and commercial markets. A recent inductee into the Hall of Fame for Women in Emerging Aviation Technologies, Abby brings more than 35 years of aviation leadership, including multiple Senior Executive Service positions with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Throughout her career, she has helped shape national policy for UAS integration, aviation security, air traffic modernization, Safety Management Systems, and workforce development. Today, she combines that experience with private-sector innovation to advance the safe, secure, and scalable integration of autonomous aviation.
About AX Enterprize
Founded in 2011, AX Enterprize is an Airspace Intelligence company dedicated to helping governments, regulators, and operators build trusted, interoperable, and scalable digital airspace services. Since 2016, the company has continuously matured its CLUE-X™ Airspace Intelligence Suite, integrating SAFIRE-X™ Air Domain Awareness, CLUE-X™ UTM, AeroInSite™ operational analytics and playback, DART™ algorithmic threat analysis, secure Remote ID, DRIP-enabled trusted identity, and sensor-agnostic integration into a unified operational ecosystem. AX is an FAA-approved UTM Service Provider (USS) through the FAA’s Near Term Approval Process (NTAP), operates the FAA-designated New York UAS Test Site, is an active member of the U.S. Shared Airspace Consortium (SASG), and has successfully demonstrated interoperability through the InterUSS ecosystem, supporting trusted UTM services in the United States while contributing to the advancement of global interoperability.
For more information, learn more about AX Enterprize or connect with Abby via her LinkedIn page
