UK to get world’s largest drone superhighway – find out if your house is underneath it

The next two years could see thousands of UK homes placed under the flight path of the world’s largest drone army.

The government-backed Skyway project is set to install a 164-mile drone ‘superhighway’ across major UK cities and towns.

The £12m project is due to go into operation by 2024, and could see drones used to deliver post, medicine, parcels, and packages.

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While this will take some of the strain off of Britain’s busy roads, it could also make the skies above quiet rural areas much busier, and even put some homes at risks of crashing.

Homes in and around Cambridge, Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Coventry, and Rugby will be under the flight path of the drone highway, which was announced by Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng today.

Chris Forster of the aviation company Altitude Angel said the superhighway will have tons of different uses.

Forster told the BBC: “Whether it be a business doing logistics, all the way to the police and medical deliveries of vaccines and blood samples, there’s a real demand to have access to this airspace.

“We’ve done a few projects in Africa where the road infrastructure was not good for ground vehicles, and the delivery of vaccines was provided by automated drones.”

The drone highway will use a combination of smart sensors and AI-powered air traffic control to guide the drones and prevent collisions.

It’s unlikely that drones could drop from the sky and injure anyone, but they are at risk of crashes during take-off and landing.

Professor Steve Wright at UWE Bristol said: “It’s about the first and last bit of the flight. The problem is what happens when you’re 10 feet away from people. That’s the bit I spend my time worrying about.

“When it’s up in the air I know it’s stable and it’s not going to hit something. People are looking at lowering packages down from the air—in other words you keep the drone well away from people. There’s a lot of very bright people out there working on flight plans that deliberately avoid built-up areas.”

The scheme follows a trial by Royal Mail to deliver the post using 500 AI-powered drones to remote areas of Britain.

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