On October 21 this year ANRA Technologies, Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service, Manna Air Delivery and Wing will organise a public demonstration in Chorley, in the northwest of the UK, of multiple beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) drone operations in shared airspace supported by UAS traffic management systems (UTM), sharing data via the ASTM F3548-21 UAS Service Supplier (USS) Interoperability standard. The event is supported by the UK Civil Aviation Authority’s (CAA’s) Airspace Modernisation Support Fund and is the clearest indication yet that the UK could be moving away from a monolithic approach to implementing UTM service via a single air navigation service provider (ANSP) model to more federated, decentralised service provision pioneered by the US Federal Aviation Administration and partners in Dallas.
“Collectively we are managing around 5,000 drone deliveries a day in Dallas,” said Alan Hicks of Manna, one of the drone delivery companies using the federated UTM system in Dallas, speaking at Drone X, alongside Wing, CAA and UK Department for Transport speakers.
The next few months will also see the CAA start to finalise some of the regulatory instruments needed to underpin this new approach, according to speakers at the event. In its July 2026 “Airspace Architecture Concept of Operations for Enabling BVLOS Operations” the CAA laid out its concept of operations, as part of its new airspace modernisation strategy, for an integrated airspace UTM approach and is currently reviewing feedback to its proposals for an Electronic Conspicuity Mandate.
Less publicised at the event, though another important indicator of this change in direction, the national ANSP NATS is understood to be restructuring its NATS Services UTM team. According to a statement from the national ANSP to Unmanned Airspace: “NATS Services and Searidge are being brought together as part of a newly integrated business focused on technology and innovation. We are now finalising plans and will announce what this means to our customers and the market soon.”
Also at DroneX the Satellite Applications Catapult (a government backed research agency) announced a new national drone testing facility – the National Autonomy and Drone Innovation Centre (NADIC) – to trial drone operational position, navigation and timing (PNT), satellite communications integration and test laboratory and a remote operations control centrewhere operators can train, simulate missions and validate remote command-and-control procedures under realistic operating conditions. “NADIC is designed primarily for small and medium-sized companies and component builders,” said the organisation in a press statement. “These are the firms developing the navigation, sensing, communications and autonomy systems the wider sector depends on, and which face the evidence burden earliest as their equipment must be proven safe before operators will design it in.”
“Technology is ready. Regulation is progressing at pace. But we’re doing it all in silos – small, limited pilots often testing a single drone operation or use case,” says Chris Brook, Mission Manager for Space-Enabled Autonomy at the Satellite Applications Catapult in a recent blog. “We never actually fly things together, so we never learn what the separation distances need to be, what the closing speeds are, what the buffers should look like”.
That could soon be about to change.
Image: Alan Hicks of Manna, Ashwini Chhabra of Wing, Colin Chesterton of the Civil Aviation Authority and Kamil Faltynowski of the UK Department for Transport speaking at DroneX
