UK Drone Deliveries Are One Step Closer with NATS & Altitude Angel Deal

NATS, the UK’s leading air traffic services provider, and fast-growing UK-based drone traffic management solutions company Altitude Angel, have entered a strategic partnership that lays the foundation for a future whereby drones and manned aircraft could safely co-exist in the UK’s busy skies. The two organisations have entered a long-term partnership to develop unmanned traffic management solutions that can be integrated and interact with conventional air traffic control. Efforts to create an automated UK drone-tracking system pave the way for commercial operators to fly unmanned aircraft regularly over longer distances than is currently possible. At present, owners are required to keep drones within their own line of sight unless they have been given special permission to do otherwise. They aim to launch it in 2019 or 2020and want to keep the lower-level air space, to which drones would still be restricted, safe. The biggest and perhaps most lucrative of these cases would be the ability to use the drones to make Amazon style deliveries to UK homes.