The Seamless Skies Awards crossed many topics and it wouldn’t be possible to detail all of them in this article, so we will only focus the ‘building the lower airspace economy’ category which was defined as – With drones, eVTOLs, and personal flying vehicles about to take to the skies in increasing numbers, this award acknowledges the work that has been done to prepare lower airspace for safe and efficient new entrant operations, including integration with current ATM systems and procedures.
Wing builds the lower airpsace economy
Wing was the runner-up in this category. In 2025, Wing achieved a critical commercial inflection point, demonstrating that its highly automated drone delivery model works securely and efficiently at scale. By driving unprecedented delivery volumes, forging historic retail partnerships, and innovating ground infrastructure, Wing laid the definitive groundwork for the lower airspace economy.
Key achievements in 2025
- An additional 100 Walmart stores added
- Hundreds of thousands of orders in 2025, celebrating the 500,000th ever residential delivery in June
- In May 2025, Wing and Walmart averaged over 500 drone deliveries per day in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) area alone
- Wing set a new industry standard with an average total fulfillment time of under 19 minutes
- Once a drone takes off from the store, it usually reaches the customer in less than 4 minutes.
Beyond delivery
These are some pretty impressive results, but the story is bigger than drone delivery. One key topic Global Airspace Radar discussed with Tom Kuhn, Head of Communications, Wing, was an impact to the local economy beyond the actual delivery revenue and that is related to real estate. Similar to the concept of telecom companies leasing unused space for cell towers; Wing is leasing unproductive space – empty fields or parking lots for example – to place their drone nests. These are the locations the drones are stored and charged. This is an opportunity for additional economic development in the areas they are doing business.
You can’t talk about drone delivery without talking about public acceptance. Our industry faces the challenge that the news tends to cover drones causing something bad to happen and not drones causing something good to happen. It might not be that everyone in a community is interested in delivery by drone, but everyone in a community is interested in ‘what that drone flying over my house is doing.’ As a result, I asked how Wing addresses this?
Wing puts a lot of effort into educating the communities they will be launching in by going to the city council, attending community events where they demo their drones if possible and educating people on what the drone is and how it works and sounds.
Wing’s UTM is interoperable with any operator – whether delivery, first responder, infrastructure, or other – that onboards to the FAA’s US UTM Implementation.
Open Skies, Safe Skies: Canada’s dual approach to lower airspace
NAV CANADA, Unifly, Transport Canada were the winning team in this category. Pardon the hockey slang in the title but when a player scores three goals in a hockey game it’s a hat-trick, so why not the winning team of three?
In 2025, NAV CANADA delivered two landmark achievements shaping Canada’s approach to lower airspace management. Through Project Evolution, alongside Unifly, NAV CANADA advanced Canada’s national UTM system NAV Drone, expanding automated access to controlled airspace. Simultaneously, collaboration with Transport Canada, airport authorities, and law enforcement resulted in Canada’s national Drone Incident Response Protocol – a first-of-kind national framework establishing how Canada responds when drone operations go wrong.
Operational impact in 2025
- Drone authorisations processed in 2025: 60,000+
- Automated approval rate: 78% (up from ~72% in prior years)
- ATS workload saving per authorisation (through automation): 30+ minutes.
When drones fly outside the rules
NAV CANADA spent several years developing a streamlined national response protocol with Transport Canada, aerodrome operators, the RCMP, Police of Jurisdiction, and other federal and local partners. This resulted in the publication by Transport Canada of the Drone Incident Response Protocol for Canadian Airports – a first national guidance framework establishing standardised, scalable procedures for responding to drone incidents at airports. The Protocol defines a four-level incident classification system, with proportionate response procedures, ranging from low-risk single-drone sighting to a national-coordination response.
Bringing it together
Global Airspace Radar spoke with Alan Chapman, Director, RPAS Traffic Management, NAV CANADA, Ryan Coates, Executive Director, Strategy and Emerging Technologies, Transport Canada and Andres Van Swalm, CEO, Unifly during Airspace World to gain more direct insight to the project.
From the perspective of Alan Chapman, “the solution has been well-received by user, NAV CANADA is meeting the needs of Transport Canada and the the ATCO workload has been decreased.” If drones are flying in controlled airspace they must register to fly. That said, any drone pilot flying in any location can register and 65-75% of flights can be processed in an automated fashion.
Ryan Coates also felt, “the co-creation with NAV CANADA has resulted in a solution that users find good to use and this has resulted in an increase in automation for both operations teams and pilots.” Unfortunately, the registration level is still not at 100% in controlled airspace. Part of this is due to awareness, there needs to be more education and outreach to the public regarding this topic. Hobbyists tend to not register as there is a fee required, but many pilots still don’t know about the tool. This is going in the right direction, but still needs more promotion.
Unifly provides the UTM solution in use as the foundation for this programme. Andres Van Swalm discussed the process to get here, “starting five years ago with VLOS flight and evolved over time by involving the users and looking at better ways to develop the solution going ahead.”
In Canada, the regulator is looking at a special flight operations certification for certain low risk BVLOS flights. U-space doesn’t exist in Canada, but they are watching to learn how this works in other locations as the number of drones increases with a resulting increase in traffic. The next step with be remote-ID and they are watching the FAA and EASA as to how they proceed on this topic.
In summary, the possibility to have every flying object conspicous is the goal.
