UK BLUEPRINT project aims to demonstrate BLVOS drone operations in shared airspace

Project BLUEPRINT was one of the winning consortium projects of the UK Research & Innovation Future Flight Challenge Phase 3 to take part in the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) Temporary Reserved Area (TRA) Regulatory Sandbox, coordinated by the CAA’s Innovation Advisory Service.

Project members work closely with the subject matter experts within the CAA to progress towards the objectives of successfully trialling integrated BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line Of Sight) drone operations within UK airspace.

The BLUEPRINT team is led by Neuron Innovations, and includes Ebeni, Cranfield Airport, Cranfield University, University of Southampton, DroneCloud, ANRA Technologies, Sky-Drones, Distributed Avionics and Future Aerial Innovations.

he aims of the Sandbox are to:

• Demonstrate and validate specific technologies, airspace management procedures, and flight operation procedures needed to enable the safe, efficient, and managed integration of BVLOS drone operations and crewed aircraft.
• Enable the CAA to validate the use of the airspace policy concept with real-world use cases to evidence how it supports and enables the accommodation phase of integrated operations within a Temporary Reserved Area (i.e., accommodation phase).
• Through the TRA, enable participants to scale beyond segregation towards integration of BVLOS drone flights with crewed aircraft (i.e., integration phase).

ANRA’s Project BLUEPRINT focus is effective Air Traffic Management (ATM), UAS Traffic Management (UTM) and digital communication systems. ANRA’s approach is to build an interconnected ecosystem of technologies connected in an open and standardized way. This will be developed for both controlled and uncontrolled airspace and the interface between them, using the airspace around Cranfield Airport as a testbed. ANRA will develop an Air Traffic Control user application to meet the strategic and tactical information requirements to support drone operations.

Further details here

The two- year BLUEPRINT project, which concludes in 2024, will create an open-source blueprint for how to solve the BVLOS drone problem, and allow anyone to use it to create their own drone zone within their local area.