An investment of £ 10million to make recreational jets visible to drones would remove a major obstacle to innovation and pave the way for a 420,000% return, while the ministerial appointment would represent an important signal of intention to capitalize on the intersectoral potential of drones

London, October 20 – An investment of just £ 10million to enable all leisure jets in the UK to become ‘electronically visible’ could be crucial in unlocking the £ 42 billion in potential contributions of drone technology to the economy British. This is the conclusion of a report – Scan the sky – published today by the think tank The network of entrepreneurs, which also calls on the government to appoint a

“Minister of drones” to oversee the growth of the drone economy.
The drone economy is expected to be worth £ 42 billion in the UK by 2030, according to a separate report from PwC. However, this will not be achieved without government intervention to make all recreational aircraft electronically visible to drones, say Scan the sky‘co-authors Sam Dumitriu and Anton Howes.

Drones and manned commercial airplanes are made visible to each other and to new traffic control systems by small on-board electronic devices that communicate their location to minimize the risk of collision. The UK’s 20,000 pleasure craft, which typically operate in the same airspace less than 10,000 ‘Class G’ as drones, are not required to be electronically visible – making deployment in mass of commercial drone applications unsustainable for safety reasons – but could be at a cost of just £ 500 each.

“Unmanned passenger transport is still a long way off, but drones have the potential to make a huge contribution to the UK economy. It is ludicrous that further testing – and ultimately mass adoption – of potentially extremely impactful applications can be delayed or prevented altogether, and the economic benefit lost, as a result of something so trivial, ” noted Dumitriu, Research Director at The Entrepreneurs Network.

Scan the sky highlights a multitude of potential drone applications, including in the immediate inspection of airports, railways, roads, buildings, power lines and other critical infrastructure, where the use of drones would significantly reduce costs and improve efficiency by allowing problems to be identified and resolved more quickly. Drones could also reduce costs and environmental impacts in agriculture by making it easier to identify specific crops that require special attention.
More complex – especially since UK airspace is already one of the busiest in the world – but already being tested, is the use of drones to improve access to hard-to-reach places for delivery of food, medicine or even just mail. Even in densely populated and well-connected areas, drones could help the NHS move tests on children, vaccines, blood bags or even organs more quickly to where they are urgently needed.

Scan the sky calls on the government to pay the one-off £ 10million bill to equip UK pleasure craft with electronic visibility devices, noting that the minimal investment could remove a major obstacle to the advancement of drone technology and drone-led services and help make projections of a £ 42 billion drone economy by the end of the decade a reality. It would then become compulsory for new recreational pilots to equip their aircraft at their own expense.

“The Department of Transportation was already offering recreational travelers a 50% discount on sight-seeing electronics as part of a program that expires at the end of March. innovation. This would only topple the first domino in the chain, but the government will be hard pressed to find another place where an investment of this magnitude could deliver such a huge 420,000 percent return,” Dumitriu noted.

Government responsibility for the drone industry currently rests with the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Aviation, Navy and Emergency Planning. The Department of Transport currently has a Secretary of State, two ministers – one for railways, cycling and walking; another for HS2 – and two more under secretaries, one covering roads and the other the future of transportation, including decarbonization, autonomous vehicles and spaceflight.

“Our recommendation to create a subordinate ministerial post with specific responsibility for the drone economy stems from the desire to see this exciting and important sector treated with the seriousness it deserves, with obstacles to innovation that can be addressed quickly and decisively. The UK has the potential to be the first nation with already congested airspace to make drones a key part of its infrastructure, but that vision will never come true if the sector’s responsibility remains so deeply buried in DfT. It has to be a much higher priority ”, noted Howes.