Port of Hamburg to become Germany's first test site for drone airspace. (picture alliance / dpa)
The Port of Hamburg will become Germany's first test site for a drone airspace in the coming months. The state-owned company Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS) and Droniq GmbH, a holding of DFS and Deutsche Telekom, want to find out how drone flights can be carried out "easily, safely, and in coordination with manned air traffic", the companies involved announced. The German Federal Ministry of Transport, which wants to establish drones as an everyday mode of transport in just a few years with an action plan, is funding the project with just under half a million euros.
"Construction site inspection, route aerial surveys, fabric transport: drones are being increasingly used commercially," the companies' press release stated. "For this, drone flights must be easy to carry out at short notice. A requirement that is not always feasible due to sometimes lengthy flight approval processes, especially in areas with a high volume of drones." The concept of a "U-Space" is intended to provide a remedy. According to the concept, in this spatially delimited airspace "special rules and procedures coordinate drone traffic and make it possible to carry out drone flights quickly, safely, and without the need for lengthy approval processes - even beyond the pilot's line of sight."
Germany's Transport Minister Andreas Scheuer, a member of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), expects the project to provide a boost for his plan to make Germany an international pioneer in drone technology: "With the U-Space real-time lab, we're taking drone innovations made in Germany out of their niche and into the air."
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