4 January 2023
The plan to build 165-mile drone superhighway connecting Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry, and Rugby – Project Skyway – has received a £5m boost.
Part of BT’s digital unit called Etc., announced today that it has entered into a £5 million deal with Altitude Angel, a leading UTM (Unified Traffic Management) technology provider.
The two businesses say they will “scale the UK drone industry and support the development of the UK’s drone superhighway, set to be the largest and longest network of its kind in the world”.
The £5m investment is intended to accelerate Altitude Angel’s roll-out of its ARROW technology, which detects and identifies drones. Altitude Angel says this technology will “enable drones to share the airspace with crewed aviation safely and securely”.
The drone delivery industry is said by the companies involved to be worth £45bn by 2030.
Under the deal, BT Group says it will provide connectivity, network infrastructure and its scalability experience to deploy and maintain Altitude Angel’s ARROW tower network.
Richard Parker, CEO and founder of Altitude Angel, said, “With BT Group, Altitude Angel has a partner which shares its ambition to make automated commercial drone operations at scale in the UK a day-to-day reality.
“Combining our ARROW technology, which allows crewed and uncrewed aircraft to share the same skies, safely and securely, with BT Group’s significant communications infrastructure, we can quickly bring ARROW to the masses.
“This will provide the UK with the first nationwide drone superhighways, unlocking the potential of this new and innovative technology and revolutionising business operations in countless industries.”
An Airspace Change Proposal to allow Altitude Angel to create a Temporary Danger Area for testing its drone detect technology appears to have stalled with no recorded progress since February 2022.
