10106003Lift OffClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKLift Off is a project to support the activities of Digital & Future Technologies Limited, post the successful culmination of the Morecambe Bay Medical Shuttle project - MBMS2\. MBMS2 worked to establish the business model and technical requirements for flying drones across Morecambe Bay between the hospitals of Furness General (Barrow), Westmorland (Kendal) and Lancaster Royal Infirmary, to carry and load share pathology samples moving between the three hospitals and their respective pathology departments. Owing to bureaucratic intransigence on the part of the Civil Aviation Authority, as discovered by all Phase 3 "demonstrator" projects, on the Future Flight Challenge, the CAA were not up to the task of facilitating the airspace necessary for the drones to fly. Furthermore after 3 years of the Future Flight Challenge, the CAA are only just making it possible for 6 "sandbox" projects to fly Beyond Visual Line of Sight in 2025! Commercial roll out of drones operating Beyond Visual Line of Sight of the operator is therefore limited in the UK, and operators must wait and sit on their hands, whilst the CAA catch up with the rest of Europe and the world. The Lift Off project is an internal project within Digital & Future Technologies Limited, with some external support, to define a league table of drone innovation across nations and to ascertain if the realisation of the business strategy, technologies and IP developed as part of the Morecambe Bay Medical Shuttle project may be faster to revenues through export deployment to markets that can accept the technology. We plan to run a 6 month programme of drone territory analysis, looking to see which countries have BVLOS facilitating legislation in place coupled with medical infrastructure to create a deployment landscape map and to start contacts and negotiations for our export technology roll out. The Lift Off project will blend commercialisation plan development with impact management and customer validation and testing and will provide a detailed roadmap of technological roll out to fill in the void left by the Civil Aviation Authority's inability to grasp the future and provide effective airspace and regulatory routes to enable BVLOS flight across the board within UK airspace. Price Waterhouse Coopers report "Skies without limits" estimates a contribution to the UK economy of £45Bn by 2030, it does not provide any guidance on factoring in the UK regulators intransigence, nor show how we are falling behind other nations.