Drone corridors are an increasingly popular way for unmanned aerial vehicles to make remote deliveries without fear of colliding with manned aircraft or other drones.  Some drone corridors – also known as drone “highways” – are being tested over long distances.  The FAA-approved NUAIR drone corridor in upstate New York is 50-miles long with an extension that includes two-way drone flights between Syracuse Airport and a vertiport located across the Canadian border in Quebec.  An even more ambitious project – “Project Skyway” – envisions a 165-mile “superhighway” across central England, connecting towns from Coventry to Reading, and eventually extending south to Ipwich.

Both of these corridors envision remotely-piloted drone fleets conducting Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations in a wide range of commercial and public safety niches.  While the corridors have received formal regulatory approval, it will take some time for each to become fully operational.  For now, these corridors are planned to operate near less populated  areas but once they’ve demonstrated their effectiveness from a technical and safety perspective, efforts will be made to bring them closer to major urban centers.

In the interim, some smaller drone corridors operating primarily in the medical supply niche are already getting underway.  One of the most notable is Zipline’s drone project linking hospitals and clinics outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.  Zipline is already famous for having pioneered medical supply deliveries in several African countries and in remote island areas of Japan and Finland.  The company has also conducted life-saving drone flights to remote rural villages in North Carolina, especially during the COVID pandemic.

Zipline’s latest project is closer to a major population center and will eventually give the company an opportunity to fly medical supplies across Utah as a whole.  Because of its past track record, Zipline has won the confidence of the FAA to begin operating autonomously with ground sensors providing the necessary in-flight safety technology and vertiports allowing for battery-recharging and launching pads to support continuous long distance flights.

Another recent example is the new drone medical corridor being established in the northwestern region of the Netherlands.  In this case a consortium of suppliers have teamed up with Dutch air traffic management authorities to allow for autonomous flights between two hospitals in two small cities, Meppel and Zwolle, a distance of 16 miles.  Altitude Angel, one of the spearheads behind Project Skyway in Britain, will provide for the integration of manned and unmanned traffic control. Once successful, the consortium will scale up its operations to nearby Rotterdam, Holland’s second largest city and the largest seaport in Europe.

Because of their humanitarian and life-saving importance, medical supply flights are an excellent way for the drone industry to begin easing into drone corridors and obtaining the necessary regulatory authority to expand them to major population centers.  Last October, Project Skyway in Britain conducted some of its first autonomous BVLOS trial operations with medical supply deliveries between government hospitals in Coventry and Rugby, two of the nodal points in the drone corridor, a distance of roughly 22 miles.  So far, more than 1,400 miles worth of BVLOS flights have been completed during the trial, without any technical faults or safety failures reported.

Another long-distance drone corridor – measuring 113 nautical miles – is still being contemplated for communities around Tulsa, Oklahoma, with overall management of the project in the hands of the Osage Nation and its affiliated research and business groups.  Known as Skyway36, the project is intended, in part, to benefit Osage economic and social development.  The corridor will link Tulsa to Oklahoma City and towns in between, and will eventually allow for a wide range of drone commercial activities, including badly-needed medical supply delivery, to be conducted unfettered, thanks to the planned integration of manned and unmanned air traffic management along the entire route.

Finally, India is planning to establish a new drone medical corridor between two hospital research centers in Delhi and Jhajjar, a distance of some 33 miles. The corridor will allow for the speedy transit of blood supplies and other emergency medicines that would normally take at last 90 minutes by road vehicle to deliver.  In the case of heavy traffic, temperature-sensitive supplies – especially blood plasma and harvested organs – can spoil and become unusable, leading to wasted resources as well as higher patient fatalities. Drones are also cheaper to operate and eliminate road vehicle exhaust, enhancing the nation’s sustainability goals.  The project is still in its infancy but corridor test flights are scheduled to begin by the end of 2023.

The economic benefits of drone corridors are also undeniable.  A recent study estimated that a fully developed drone corridor in upstate New York could create more than 8,000 full-time jobs and generate $1.3 billion in income for the region by 2040.  Tulsa’s TRAM corridor is expected to do even better, with more than 30,000 new jobs created by 2025.

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