Breaking new technical and regulatory ground
Today, almost every commercial drone mission is flown using a pilot on site. This approach relies on having a distributed team of pilots and hence is expensive, inconsistent and very difficult to up-skill and scale.
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. close-quarter flights near infrastructure assets, under oil rigs, inside tunnels – 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).
As of January 2021 we are one of only ten entities selected into the UK Civil Aviation Authority Regulatory Sandbox alongside Amazon, Boeing, NATS and Volocopter – and one of only four entities selected into the UK Government Drone Pathfinder programme (and the only entity selected into both). We are aiming to secure routine permission to operate BVLOS in non-segregated, controlled environments in 2021.
