Certiflight completes BVLOS flight around Bari, protects against airspace infringement

Certiflight took part in the Drones Beyond 2023 congress held at the Fiera del Levante in Bari. In its third edition, Drones Beyond has proposed as its main topic “Unfolding Innovative Aerial Services for the Smart City”.

The Certiflight consortium has chosen this scenario to present to the public the first prototype of the UTM box and the Certiflight software platform. The Certiflight UTM box uses the Galileo OSNMA service to authenticate the flight tracks of drones and ultralight aircraft inside VLL airspace.

According to the press release, the UTM box was integrated with U-space services provided by the Italian U-Space service provider d-flight, a partner of Certiflight. Similar integrations will be implemented and tested with the other two USSP that are partners of the Certiflight consortium, Unifly and Upvision.

In addition, the data was also acquired in real time by the Certiflight platform prototype that processed the authenticated tracks and the data collected by the camera during the flights to generate a certified flight report, including the flight parameters and the data processed.

To test this setup, we performed two flights:

• A BVLOS flight to perform a simulated inspection of a channel in an urban environment near the limits of the Bari airport CTR. The demonstrated the utility of Certiflight to ensure that no airspace infringement took place during the demonstration.
• A flight over a simulated traffic accident to gather legally binding evidence by producing images with a certified timestamp and location, thus ensuring that they correspond with the accident being investigated.

With these demonstrations, the Certiflight consortium showed that their proposed solution is adequate to achieve the goals established in the project.

Drones Beyond 2023 has focused on understanding the applicability of drones in different operational sectors and as a tool for public administration. During these two days, panels and keynote speeches discussed different topics and a series of live tests have been performed.