Geometry over negotiation
Most conflicts at intersections are resolved by the altitude assignment itself, not by message exchange. Negotiation is reserved for the small minority of cases where geometry alone is insufficient.
About
A protocol authored by a single inventor, filed Pro Se.
VerSky™ exists because the bottleneck for new aerospace standards is no longer technical — it's authorship bandwidth. This is a deliberate experiment in solving that bottleneck.
Inventor
Jittapol Prukpatarakul.
Engineer by training. Builder by disposition. Based in Bangkok, Thailand.
Came to aerospace not by industry affiliation but by recognising that a generation of low-altitude vehicles was being built without the protocol layer they would need.
Filed both VerSky patents Pro Se with USPTO on February 27, 2026 — without a patent attorney, without a startup, without a team. Authored the specification, claims, drawings, and IDS through many rounds of internal review.
“The hardest part of an open protocol isn't the protocol — it's the patience to publish it before the standards body asks for it.”
Based In
Bangkok, TH
Training
Engineering
Mission
Make the protocol layer of low-altitude airspace open and adopted.
The next decade will see an order-of-magnitude increase in low-altitude flight density — drones, eVTOLs, autonomous helicopters, hobbyist quadcopters — all sharing airspace that was never designed for them.
Without a shared protocol, the industry defaults to vendor-locked stacks (one operator, one fleet, one airspace) — which doesn't scale, and which incumbents will use to entrench.
VerSky exists to make sure the alternative — an open, patent-protected protocol with a permissive reference implementation — is on the table when regulators and standards bodies decide.
01
Open
License terms to be determined ahead of reference implementation release.
02
Auditable
Hash-chained logs. Court-admissible.
03
Adopt-able
Vendor-neutral. Reference implementation in Phase 2.
How VerSky Differs
Four design choices that set the protocol apart.
Not a list of features. A list of decisions the protocol made differently from classical air traffic management.
Constant-cost coordination
Reserving airspace involves a fixed-cost lookup against a hex-cell × floor × direction × time-slice tuple — not a combinatorial scan across the fleet. Coordination cost is independent of fleet size.
Deterministic fallback before AI
Every AI negotiation is backed by a deterministic resolver that produces identical resolutions on both vehicles given the same input parameters. Safety does not depend on negotiation converging.
No physical infrastructure
No towers, beacons, ground-marked corridors, or sky-painted boundaries. The protocol is implemented entirely in software — every layer.
Phase Plan
Four phases. Multi-year horizon.
VerSky is a long-horizon protocol project, not a startup quarter. The plan below is the structural shape, not a calendar commitment.
01
Prosecution
USPTO examination, office action responses, continuation applications. PCT international filing window closes 27 February 2027.
02
Strengthen
Reference implementation maturation. Standards-body engagement (ASTM F38, ICAO RPAS Panel, ITU-R). Independent technical evaluations.
03
PCT + National Phase
International filings in priority jurisdictions. Continuation applications drawn from the original 70+ claims that didn't fit the first non-provisional pair.
04
Standards Adoption
Engagement with adopting bodies. Reference implementation licence finalised. Certification programme operational.
Why Pro Se
Filed without a patent attorney — by design.
The cost of a US non-provisional patent application drafted by a top-tier firm is ~$15,000–$30,000 per application. For two protocol patents that would be roughly $50,000 before the first Office Action.
Filing Pro Se cost $800 in USPTO fees for two applications under Micro Entity status.
The point isn't the cost saving. The point is proof of method: if a single careful inventor can author a 100+ page patent specification with 40+ claims, then the protocol can be authored — and adopted — by anyone.
The standards-body engagement plan in Phase 4 is built on the same assumption.