If you’re planning to fly your drone near a dangerous or restricted area, or in a crowded airspace, it helps to have an angel watching over you.

UK-based Altitude Angel is the world’s premier technology company offering a seamless integration of manned and unmanned aircraft in the same airspace.  Best known recently for its role in promoting Project Skyway, a planned 165-mile drone “superhighway” across central England, the firm has been busy teaming up with telecommunications companies in Sweden and South Korea to expand the scope of its services worldwide.

In Sweden, Altitude Angel recently signed a deal with Saab to integrate its state-of-the-art UTM technology platform into Saab’s Digital Tower (r-TWR) infrastructure.  The partnership will draw upon Saab’s video processing, visual presentation, and automation technology to allow uncrewed and crewed aircraft to communicate authorization, clearance, and in-flight instructions instantaneously to establish the airborne situational awareness needed to avoid collisions and ensure aircraft and passenger safety.

Saab’s r-TWR is already being deployed at civil and military airports in Sweden, the UK, US, and Germany while additional installations are planned for Belgium, Netherlands, Ireland, and Romania.  Through its partnership with Altitude Angel, the two companies will be establishing the most extensive and scalable integrated UTM system operating anywhere in the world, creating a model for similar partnerships elsewhere.

In South Korea, Altitude Angel is partnering with Mopiens to establish a similar integrated model for 200 of the country’s airports where Mopiens currently assists with manned aircraft management.  The partnership also includes Synerex, Inc., which offers some of the world’s most advanced GPS positioning systems for unmanned road and air vehicles alike.  Together the three firms are equipping businesses throughout the Korean peninsula to begin planning and safely deploying Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) inspection and delivery services in construction, mining, and medical supply delivery.

Meanwhile, Altitude Angel’s leadership  role in Britain’s Project Skyway just received another big boost with the acquisition of $6.2 million in investment from the BT Group’s Digital Division.  BT Group and Altitude Angel previously partnered in the development of Project Xcelerate. Their latest deal will accelerate Altitude Angel’s roll-out of its next-generation ARROW technology, which can detect and identify drones and enables UAVs and manned aircraft to share common airspace safely and securely.

ARROW supports the construction of UTM air traffic control towers along the entire route of the Project Skyway drone corridor.  BT Group’s new financing will allow Altitude Angel to extend the planned corridor to additional towns and cities running south to coastal towns like Southampton  near Ipswich and eventually, nationwide.

All of these initiatives, while still in their infancy, are clear indications that the infrastructure is now being laid for a rapid expansion of the commercial drone industry across Europe – and more recently, into Asia, beginning with Korea – with Altitude Angel leading the way.  A Price Waterhouse Cooper report claims that Project Skyway wll add $45 billion a year to the UK economy by 2030, accounting for nearly 2 percent of the nation’s GDP.  The report also estimates that nearly 300,000 new jobs will be created by the project over the same period, with another 650,000 jobs generated indirectly thanks to its spin-off effects.