SOARIZON – Opening up Enterprise Airspace

By Karim Cosslett

For organisations with large-scale responsibility for infrastructure and land, managing flight requests from unmanned aircraft can be a challenging manual task.

From energy providers and public services, to critical national infrastructure, managing the lower airspace and requests to fly, as well as internal drone operations can be burdensome.

Sometimes, the drone industry refers to this as UTM or UAS Traffic Management; however, it is simply the ability keep track of unmanned traffic above your site or those using your property for take-off and landing.

We believe that there are several key steps to ensuring drone operations remain compliant, whilst offering more efficiency and scalability for organisations and businesses:

How do land operators ensure consistency?

Inconsistencies in the method of requesting access to fly can place extra burden on the operations manager.

Whether pilots are in-house, subcontracted to operate on your behalf or external operators wishing to fly over or near your area of responsibility, the method of requesting access to airspace varies greatly. This makes decision making about who, how, when and where flying operations can take place difficult to align to make the safest decisions.

SOARIZON provides clear, defined workflows for operator requests and airspace managers that offer strategic deconfliction with minimal manual processes. Through a simple submission process, pilots and operators can submit their requested mission plans through SOARIZON and request approval from the airspace manager in a streamlined and consistent way.

This approach ensures a dynamic and accurate approach to managing low altitude operations within a defined area of responsibility.

How do I deconflict flying operations in the airspace around me?

We believe that by providing an intuitive tool sets that allow managers to have visibility of airspace volumes and traffic requests and workload, we support the decision-making cycle to allow strategic deconfliction, i.e. the prevention through transparency of airspace usage during the planning phase.

Currently, airspace managers manually deconflict airspace requests – often a paper-based process or simple database or spreadsheet. This is a cumbersome and error-prone method that may work in the short-term for low numbers of requests, but what about scaling those operations through hundreds, maybe even thousands of requests a year?

Receiving requests through a secure digital portal, with accompanying mission plans and risk assessments, allows managers to assess and approve requests in a standardised way, visualise the airspace and deconflict based on area and date of the request.

How do I make sure that all flights are compliant with regulations and legislation?

Regulations and legislation surrounding UAS operations are ever-evolving and it can be challlenging to maintain an up-to-date view. You want to make sure that all operations flown on or near your site are flown safely and legally.

Deriving benefits from drone data to make better decisions should not be a tiresome task. Automating the process to make things easier for pilots, managers and ensure the quality of the end data output.

How SOARIZON can help

We understand all of these challenges. That’s why we’re facilitating Low Airspace Access and Flight Management – a suite of services and capabilities accessed via SOARIZON that work cohesively to enable safe, scalable flights from both the operator and the approver, to open up airspace for tomorrow.

SOARIZON’s structured workflows ensure adherence to UK and European regulations, giving the manager full confidence that the operation is being carried out safely and in accordance with the law.

With a full product roadmap and new features and developments, SOARIZON empowers scaled UAS operations and airspace management through its secure, compliant and efficient ecosystem.

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