Autonomous Drone Flight Trials at Heathrow Airport’s Flight Restriction Zone

End of last year, Carmenta joined Thales, in collaboration with Herotech8 and Cranfield University, in successfully delivering a series of drone flight trials, as part of the HADO (High-intensity Autonomous Drone Operations) project within Innovate UK’s Future Flight Challenge (FFC) programme. These trials, conducted within Heathrow Airport’s Flight Restriction Zone (FRZ), aimed to demonstrate drone operations using an innovative UTM-based approval and deconfliction process.

The results showcase operational benefits such as increased automation and faster turn-around times. The two-week trial programme was based on the principles of Live-Virtual-Constructive (LVC) testing, progressively introducing complexity and capacity through the use of live and simulated flight requests.

• Carmenta’s UAS Geospatial Technology: Integrated into TopSky – UAS powered by AstraUTM – a Thales Company to enhance safety and situational awareness—supporting real-time emergency landing site identification, obstruction heights volumes, safety buffer zone validation and compliance and multi-object routing.
• Herotech-8 performed live flights safely within the FRZ, maintaining a safe distance from the airport’s runway.
• Cranfield University’s DARTeC generated synthetic drone and air traffic challenges for testing in a high-integrity ATC Synthetic Environment. This milestone in the hashtag HADO project brings us one step closer to enabling safe, efficient BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) operations at scale in mixed traffic environments.

Working to make autonomous drone operations possible and safe in complex environments, such as highly congested urban environments and airports, has been both challenging and extremely rewarding.

Read more in this blog post from Thales