More than 40 flight trials were conducted in three days to validate a critical piece of drone safety

Cloud-based computational engineering company Zenotech and autonomous drone developer Flare Bright have successfully completed flight trials at Cardiff Airport for the partners’ SafeZone project, aimed at improving the safety and effectiveness of UAVs in the urban environment.

The project has received funding from the UK Government’s Future Flight Challenge, designed to provide support to those projects that will create the aviation system of the future.

According to Zenotech, “UAVs have the potential to ease congestion and reduce the carbon footprint caused by deliveries, improve efficiency via remote maintenance and extend the capability of the emergency services.”

The project at Cardiff Airport was designed to research how wind moves around buildings and how this ultimately affects drone flights. The research included using Flare Bright’s wind-measuring Nanodrone and Zenotech’s computational techniques to create a model of wind around the British Airways hanger and other buildings at the Welsh airport.

The technology will be used to deliver a new live data service to provide real-time information about aerodynamic hazards in urban environments, improving safety and public confidence in UAV flights. The data may also be used by a range of other operators such as by helicopters.

After the success at Cardiff Airport, SafeZone will be looking to assess other use cases such as urban areas, industrial sites or other sites where knowing wind strength at height is useful.

David Standingford, director and co-founder of Zenotech, said: “We are proud to be partnering on SafeZone with Flare Bright to deliver safer and more effective UAVs in the cityscape, transforming urban mobility. It is rewarding to use our CFD and supercomputing tools to make a real impact in this ground-breaking field. We are delighted that Cardiff Airport has allowed these on-site flight trials and that they have taken off with such success.”

Rob Elias, head of airfield operations at Cardiff Airport, added: “We are pleased to have played a key part in facilitating these successful flight-trials at [the] Airport, and be part of such an exciting project. Thank you to the team at Zenotech and Future Flight Challenge for reaching out to us to participate in the trials, and we look forward to seeing how the SafeZone project progresses.”