InterUSS is the open-source project providing interoperability infrastructure for uncrewed aircraft traffic management — a Discovery and Synchronization Service that lets independent UAS Service Suppliers find and coordinate with each other, plus automated conformance test suites that verify an implementation actually behaves as the standards require.
InterUSS Platform
InterUSS solves a coordination problem that has no central operator: multiple UAS Service Suppliers, each serving different drone operators, need to know about each other’s flights in shared airspace without any one of them owning the registry. The Discovery and Synchronization Service (DSS) is the distributed answer, and the project’s automated test suites are the part worth studying beyond aviation.
- Federated, not centralised - the DSS lets independent service suppliers discover overlapping operations without a single authority holding the data.
- Conformance is executable - InterUSS ships automated test suites that run against a live implementation. A regulator can require passing them rather than requiring a self-declaration.
- Open source and openly governed - the specifications, the reference implementation and the tests are all public.
- Regulator-adopted - civil aviation authorities reference it as the conformance basis for national drone traffic platforms.
What the evidence shows
The State of Australian Travel APIs found exactly one open conformance suite in the entire travel quartet, and it belongs to a safety regulator rather than a commercial operator. CASA — the Civil Aviation Safety Authority — conforms its RPAS platform to the open-source InterUSS test suite, scores 35.8, and is also the only self-serve organization in the Australian travel market and the only one with a documented bulk export.
That combination is the finding. Across sixty-four scored organizations, the sector produced certification claims in abundance and executable conformance almost nowhere. Flight Centre holds IATA NDC Level 4 certification and scores 15.6 with its terms pages returning 404. WestJet has held NDC Level 2 certification since 2017 with the channel still not live. Transat claims NDC publicly and ships a proprietary SOAP API. A certification is an assertion about a past assessment; a test suite is a statement anyone can re-run today.
The transferable lesson, and it reaches well past aviation: when a standard ships with an executable conformance suite, “compliant” becomes a checkable claim rather than a marketing one. That is the gap between InterUSS and NDC certification levels, and it is the single change that would do most for trust in this sector.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Australian Travel APIs
CASA's RPAS platform conforms to the open-source InterUSS test suite — the only open conformance testing found anywhere in the travel quartet.
