Receiving a delivery from an unmanned aerial vehicle might seem like something out of science fiction. But ‘motorways in the sky’ could soon be a step closer to reality, as a pilot to test beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) drone flights nears its conclusion.

For the past two years, Project Skyway, a consortium involving several companies including UK telecommunications giant BT, has been testing drone flights along a corridor spanning from Coventry to Reading in the south of England. Innovate UK, a British government body, provided 70% of the funding for the scheme under its Future Flight Challenge.

Although drones are already used commercially for various functions, further usage remains limited by the need to mitigate collisions. Because drones share airspace with light aircraft, helicopters, hot air balloons and gliders, they are generally required to remain within sight of their operators in the UK.

In practice, this places a severe limitation on what drones can be used for — ruling out, for example, drone deliveries over long distances.

Project Skyway could change this. “It’s very difficult to scale the management of airspace because you need people,” says Stephen Farmer, head of corporate communications at Altitude Angel, the company spearheading the project. “So ... we’re automating many of the tasks that are needed to keep aircraft safely apart.”

The company has built its Arrow ‘deconfliction’ towers along the length of the corridor, making use of BT’s telecommunications infrastructure. The cameras and sensors on the towers cover a 4km radius; when they spot a potential collision, they alert the drones and instruct them to change course.

“This will be critical infrastructure for the UK,” Mr Farmer believes. Altitude Angel hopes to receive full approval from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), which regulates UK airspace, to roll out the technology more widely in July. 

Long-distance flight

“It’s the holy grail of drone operations to be able to routinely fly BVLOS,” Mr Farmer adds. Providing the company receives CAA approval later this year, he says that Altitude Angel will be in a position to start installing towers wherever drone users require it. 

A spokesperson for the CAA told fDi Intelligence that it is also conducting several other trials into BVLOS drone flights, as part of its efforts to establish ways to safely share airspace between drones and other users. “Our airspace is too busy and too small to be able to allocate areas specifically for drone use as a long-term solution — so we need to safely integrate everyone together,” the spokesperson said. “That means a combination of better technology on the drones, increasing use of technology by other airspace users and setting up procedures to share the airspace.” 

There are a host of potential economic benefits of being able to carry out BVLOS drone operations. “Being able to transport items over longer distances is key to providing services to more remote communities,” says Simon Masters, deputy director of the Future Flight programme at Innovate UK. “The UK geography lends itself to this type of service with many areas where lengthy road transport or the use of maritime transport are needed.”

Mr Masters adds that Innovate UK is also funding several other projects in different parts of Britain, including in the remote Highlands and islands of Scotland. The agency is also “focusing on use-cases such as medical logistics and supporting the UK’s maritime sector”, he says.

Medical benefits

Some of the clearest potential benefits are likely to be found in the healthcare sector. Delivering organ donations from one hospital to another, for example, could be made much quicker and cheaper by using drones. 

The UK would not be the first country where drones have been used in this way — San-Francisco-based start-up Zipline has been using drones to deliver blood supplies in Rwanda since 2016. A review in The Lancet found that delivery times could be cut from an average 139 minutes by road to an average 41 minutes by drone.

Consultancy PwC published research in 2022 that estimated that BVLOS drones provide a £45bn lift to the UK economy. PwC’s head of drones Craig Roberts does add the caveat, though, that this is a best-case scenario and requires several barriers to widespread adoption being removed.

He notes that activities, such as power line inspections, could achieve cost savings of up to 35% through using BVLOS drones. Yet Mr Roberts emphasises that these savings would vary from case to case, depending on the volume of inspections being conducted. “Technology stands or falls based on pounds and pence: the cost savings depend on volumes.”

‘Not above my backyard’

One of the main barriers to adoption, Mr Roberts says, could come from public perception. Surveys suggest that the public consensus is highly positive about using drones for vital medical deliveries and ambivalent about functions such as inspecting power lines. But he warns that the situation could be “completely different” with delivery drones, especially in urban areas. “It’s not a use case that people are clamouring for”.

The risk of an airborne version of nimbyism will grow if people are concerned at the prospect of noise and disturbance. “The social license to operate becomes critical,” Mr Roberts notes.

In practice, however, it is unlikely that drone deliveries to the doorstep will become commonplace, at least in the near future. To begin with, drone deliveries are more likely to occur between nodal points in a network; a drone might deliver an item to a distribution point, from which it would complete its journey by land.

Altitude Angel’s Mr Farmer is certainly optimistic that the benefits will outweigh any drawbacks, and that the public will come to welcome the possibilities offered by BVLOS drones. “Once it’s commonplace, I don’t think people will notice drones — they’ll be a part of everyday life.”

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This article first appeared in the December 2023/January 2024 print edition of fDi Intelligence