The "0–18 km" tagline at UAMKT is correct. The operational friction sits in the bottom 500 metres. This note explains why and what the implication is for software.
Why the 0–500 m layer was historically neglected
Conventional aviation owns above ~500 m AGL. ATC, flight rules, IFR charts — all built around that altitude band. Conventional military owns above ~150 m AGL — fixed-wing operations, rotor lift envelopes, air-defence radar coverage.
The 0–500 m envelope falls between them. Too low for ATC's traffic model. Too cluttered for military air-defence. Historically, the layer was not contested — there was nobody operating in it at scale apart from helicopters and birds. The doctrine ran out before the airspace did.
That has changed.
The new occupants
Five threat classes share the 0–500 m layer:
- Birds — civilian airport approach, vertiport corridors
- Delivery drones — last-mile, within 150 m AGL
- eVTOL / UAM — vertical funnel + transition arc
- Adversary UAS — hostile small UAS, irregular launches
- Balloons / lighter-than-air — historical (Fu-Go) and contemporary (DPRK 2024-25 campaign) atmospheric corridor weapons
These look like five different problems. They share one airspace, one schema, and (it turns out) one set of analytical primitives.
One schema, four threat classes
The Lattice catalog already encodes most of what is needed: TEMPLATE_TRACK
for moving entities, TEMPLATE_GEO/CONTROL_AREA for hazard zones,
TEMPLATE_ASSET for sensors. The _uamkt_extensions namespace adds
Animal-class, pre-indicator timestamps, and doctrine-tagged source
citations — primitives that work across the threat classes rather
than per-class.
A bird at 200 m AGL is platform_type: Animal. A small adversary UAS
at 200 m AGL is platform_type: Surface (Vehicle) with hostile
disposition. The schema differentiates them; the analytical layer above
the schema treats them as occupants of the same layer that need to be
detected, identified, and resolved.
Whoever encodes this layer first sets the standard
The 0–500 m layer will be encoded — that is no longer in dispute. The question is whose schema it is encoded against. Vendors who maintain private extensions will encode it for their own customers. Vendors who ship into a partner namespace will encode it for the alliance.
We are running on the second model. We picked early because the first model creates 50 inconsistent encodings and the alliance has to reconcile them later. The reconciliation cost is the second-order incident equivalent of CBRN runoff.
What this means for K-UAM
K-UAM specifically faces the layer head-on. Vertiports operate inside the layer; eVTOLs cross it on every sortie; the regulatory envelope is still being written. The window for K-UAM to land on a documented, audit-able schema is open and likely closes within ~24 months.
We are open to contributing to that codification. The schema is already running.
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Inquiries: ceo@uamkt.com
Primary reference: ICAO Doc 9863 — UAS Traffic Management Framework (Edition 2025).