Executive Summary
In North Dakota, distance shapes everything.
It influences how emergency responders reach those in need, how infrastructure is monitored across vast geographies, and how government delivers services to rural communities.
For years, advanced unmanned aircraft systems promised new ways to solve those challenges, but like most states, North Dakota faced a significant barrier: operational scale.
Without trusted, real-time awareness of surrounding airspace, drone operations remained constrained by line-of-sight limitations, narrower mission capability, and operational complexity.
North Dakota chose to solve the harder problem.
Through exceptional collaboration among federal, state, and private-sector partners, North Dakota became the first non-federal entity in the nation to securely access unfiltered Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) radar data, creating a trusted operational foundation for advanced beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) unmanned aircraft operations.
This was not simply a technical milestone. It was a governance, infrastructure, and trust milestone.
At the center of this effort was North Dakota Information Technology (NDIT).
As the state’s technology agency, NDIT designed and implemented the secure digital infrastructure required to support sensitive real-time federal aviation data integration. That included secure network architecture, protected computing environments, cybersecurity controls aligned with strict federal requirements, operational monitoring, and resilient infrastructure capable of supporting real-time decision-making.
The complexity extended far beyond technology.
This multi-year initiative required collaboration among the FAA, Northern Plains UAS Test Site, North Dakota Department of Commerce, strategic technical partners, state leadership, and multidisciplinary NDIT teams spanning cybersecurity, networking, enterprise architecture, systems administration, and project management.
Because no non-federal entity had done this before, there was no implementation playbook. North Dakota and its partners built one.
The result is a framework for advanced unmanned operations with practical public-sector implications, from emergency response and infrastructure resilience to rural service delivery and economic innovation.
More importantly, it offers a replicable model for how state governments can responsibly operationalize emerging technologies through trusted infrastructure and cross-boundary collaboration.
