Airservices Australia signs Frequentis for drone air traffic control

Airservices Australia has taken the next step in its four-year-old project to create an air traffic management system for drones, signing Austrian-based Frequentis to develop a flight information management system (FIMS) for the project.

Frequentis came out ahead of three other companies, ANRA Technologies, Altitude Angel and OneSky Systems, which all signed up to build FIMS prototypes and run field trials in 2022.

Announcing the contract, the agency said FIMS will form the core of an uncrewed aircraft systems traffic management (UTM) system that will allow Airservices Australia to share flight information between air traffic control and traditional aircraft as well as uncrewed airspace users.

CEO Jason Harfield said Airservices Australia will need to integrate “millions of drone flights with other users”, with a report commissioned by the agency [pdf] predicting the current 1.5 million annual movements to reach 60 million by 2043.

“Drones are the biggest growth area in aviation and our partnership with Frequentis to develop a FIMS will enable us to integrate traditional and new airspace users into increasingly busy airspace”, Harfield said.

Airservices Australia has been working on drone FIMS since 2020, when it kicked off a project with the Queensland University of Technology working on automated flight approval processes.