Thales Group Seeks to Extend UAV Operations

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing significant roles in diverse applications such as delivery, inspection, and surveillance; the importance of such roles is expected to increase rapidly over time. The applications are expanding for commercial, industrial, and military users and the Thales Group of companies has worked closely with government organizations such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the U.S. and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to ensure effective air traffic management in all cases.

As the use of UAVs becomes more prevalent, a major concern has involved the safety of the air space for other vehicles operating around these drones, including in congested urban areas in what is known as urban air mobility (UAM). To minimize the dangers of multiple air vehicles in low-altitude spaces, Thales has developed its ScaleFlyt identification and tracking system for small drones as well as for long-range UAVs. The ScaleFlyt system supports visual line of sight (VLOS) operations that require remote identification modules compliant with global standards to beyond VLOS (BVLOS) operations for specific operations risk assessment (SORA) applications. It can be used with UAS applications in restricted “geocaging” areas (see the figure) in accordance with EASA regulations, with complementary positioning resources when Global Positioning System (GPS) signals are being jammed.