Five on Friday: AutoSpray, Dassault Systèmes and Elfly

This week the UK Civil Aviation Authority issued an operational authorisation to AutoSpray Systems to conduct beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations with its 120kg (265lbs) agricultural drone.

This is not the first BVLOS authorisation from the UK CAA, but it is the first for agricultural purposes in an Atypical Air Environment* (AAE) that is scalable – something AutoSpray director Andrew Sproson says the company will “pursue aggressively”.

The authorisation certainly begins to catch the UK up to the BVLOS operations maturity seen elsewhere in regions such as Australia, the US and Middle East. Previous restrictions limited operations to within 500m (1640ft) of the remote pilot.

Secured in partnership with DronePrep and a collective of drone operation proponents known as SEAD Artists, the authorisation permits AutoSpray to operate in AAE anywhere in the UK, subject to location-specific risk assessment from the regulator.

The first task at hand will be reseeding a 400-hectare area of peat bog in an area between Manchester and Liverpool in the northwest of the UK. But Sproson tells us the plan is to secure sites thousands of hectares in size and increase the services offered.

“This is a pivotal moment. You might have BVLOS authorisations in other countries, but they are not necessarily scalable. We’re limited by our own imagination now that the CAA is willing to discuss and let us justify a BVLOS location. We’ve justified a massive area. We’re going to justify bigger areas,” says Sproson.“So much so, we see the operator as the limiting factor to expansion, not the CAA.”

Gareth Whatmore, CEO of DronePrep and Open Skies Cornwall told us: “Until this point all BVLOS operations in the UK have been temporary, which posed a significant barrier to end user adoption. It is exciting how our location based, sensor informed, methodology can be scaled to not only benefit our environmental clients but also how it can be adapted to serve our existing key clients like the NHS and Royal Mail.”

AutoSpray, DronePrep and SEAD Team are holding an open day to conduct live demonstration flights at the site in Greater Manchester on Monday 28th April.

*Conditions that enable a drone to fly in areas of airspace that are never/or only very occasionally used by other aviation users.