Airspace of the Future

The vision for the Airspace of the Future (AoF) project is to enable routine operational drone services in a safe coordinated environment on a regional and national basis in cognisance of realistic end user requirements; validated by robust business cases, simulation, stakeholder and public engagement; underpinned by an integrated transportation model with aviation at its core and an exploitation roadmap for the UK.

The key deliverables of AoF are as follows recognising that activities will transition from the development into demonstration phase:

1. Develop the rules, system of systems and operational safety cases to allow mixed use airspace by manned and unmanned traffic,
2. Develop a virtual experimentation environment and digital twins to test new rules, processes, systems, technology and operating concepts rapidly at scale,
3. Establish a national test and evaluation facility for commercial unmanned vehicles with representative operational environments which are digitally trusted and secure,
4. Develop customer use cases for large-scale virtual and live demonstration in an expanded and open access environment during Future Flight Challenge (FFC) Phase 3, and
5. Develop a blueprint for the future national airspace structures and ground infrastructure.

The innovative and new capabilities to deliver the AoF project are:

1. Enable unsegregated Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) and complex autonomous flights,
2. Establish a Live, Virtual and Constructed (LVC) test environment at Cranfield to support the regulatory system of system safety case,
3. Commission an incremental national test environment with the regulatory and local authorities at Cranfield and expand to explore more complex ground and airspace challenges for the use cases to enable commercially viable operations at scale,
4. Develop innovative surveillance and traffic management capabilities to safely manage airspace interaction with current systems, and
5. Develop a future airspace blueprint while balancing the existing Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems, future Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) systems, digital trust of users and equipment, cyber resilience of infrastructure and data connectivity.

The AoF builds on investment in UK Digital Aviation Research and Technology Centre and UK National BVLOS Experimentation Corridor. Research by the members includes Open Access UTM Framework project for the DfT and regulatory activities in the CAA Innovation 'Sandbox'.

The AoF consortium has the capacity, skills and world-leading domain expertise, knowledge and facilities to deliver this innovative project which has export potential.

This project will drive growth, innovation and accelerate adoption of the air mobility sector and the clean growth challenge.