A new drone demonstration project in Estonia and Finland over the next 18 months will attempt to validate the effectiveness of commercial off-the-shelf components for unmanned aircraft systems traffic management (UTM) for a variety of drone missions. The GOF U-space project will be conducted in Estonia and Finland with partial funding from the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) joint undertaking.
The GOF consortium includes U-space members ANS Finland, Estonian ANS, AirMap, Altitude Angel, Fleetonomy, Frequentis, Robots Expert, and Unifly; Finnish communication authority Ficora; drone manufacturers Avartek, Threod Systems, VideoDrone; and drone operators BVdrone, CAFA Tech, Hepta Airborne, Helsinki Police Department, Estonian Police and Border Guard, Finnish Air Rescue Society, and Volocopter.
Planned-use cases include international parcel delivery between Helsinki and Tallinn, urban police drone fleet operations in Helsinki, urban drone fleet operations in Tallinn in controlled airspace, long-range inspections flights in forestry and utility inspection in Finland, and maritime traffic surveillance combined with search-and-rescue over the Gulf of Finland. The consortium also plans to use UTM for controlling drone air taxi traffic on a demonstration flight from Helsinki-Vantaa airport to downtown Helsinki.
GOF is one of six SESAR U-space demonstrations in rural and urban Belgium, Estonia, Finland France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain designed to demonstrate the ability of U-space services to manage a broad range of drone operations and related services and their capacity to interact with manned aircraft.