Breaking new technical and regulatory ground
Today, almost every commercial drone mission is flown using a pilot on site. Scaling this model requires building and coordinating a large team of geographically dispersed drone pilots and managing their travel to and from mission sites. As a result, consistent quality is challenging and expensive to achieve.
We are pioneering a new model: breaking new technical and regulatory ground to enable the remote operation of drones on industrial and urban sites from a central control room. This new model will introduce economies of scale, scope and learning – resulting in significantly improved quality, capability and efficiency. As such, we believe centralisation is inevitable – and the key to the next phase of growth of the multi-billion dollar drone industry.
Our solution has been designed to facilitate the widest range of missions – from simple repeated missions (e.g. monitoring), to complex one-off missions in challenging environments (e.g. flights just meters from electricity grids, road & rail bridges, complex industrial assets – with GPS-denial, magnetic interference, poor comms), to reactive missions, designed on-the-fly (e.g. supporting the emergency services; responding to a security or safety incident; or facilitating inspection with remote expert in the loop).
In Sept 2019, we joined as one of only eight entities selected into the UK Civil Aviation Authority Regulatory Sandbox exploring “BVLOS Operations in non-segregated airspace” alongside Amazon and Boeing. We were also one of only four entities selected into the UK Government Drone Pathfinder programme. And the only entity selected into both.
In March 2021, we became the first company in the UK to secure authorisation from the UK Civil Aviation Authority to trial a concept for routine Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, securing ourselves in the UK’s most advanced regulatory position for BVLOS permission.
