Story ID: 132March19
Drone Roadmap Revealed at Davos
By: Mark Huber
Caption: Internationally developed toolkit will assist countries to safely integrate drone operations. 
Word Count: 204
In January the World Economic Forum (WEF) unveiled its Advanced Drone Operations Toolkit during its annual economic summit in Davos, Switzerland. The toolkit—developed in partnership with 41 government agencies, private enterprise, research organizations, and civil aviation organizations—is a playbook on how to create a framework to integrate drones into a national airspace.

It stresses nimble, performance-based regulations to create airspace access on a mission-specific basis: the government specifies the safety standard for the mission and the drone operator specifies how the standard will be met. The toolkit was developed in collaboration with the Drone Innovators Network and that organization’s pilot projects in Africa and Europe.

The Indian state of Andhra Pradesh announced it would use the toolkit to enable a pilot project for statewide drone delivery operations. “Now governments can learn from world-leading drone delivery projects in Africa and Europe to develop their own national oversight,” said WEF’s Harrison Wolf, who served as project lead on development of the toolkit. “This toolkit means governments don’t have to start from scratch and can begin societally important, socially responsible operations. We are really looking forward to the initializing of the pilot project in India.”
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