Estonian drone ecosystem takes first steps towards implementation of U-space

The drone market is already growing rapidly and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are used for everyday activities. This requires user- system for both manned and unmanned traffic and all this with flight safety in mind.

“One of our strategic goals is to develop a U-space framework and to support the state activities on advancing unmanned aviation sector in Estonia. EANS will take the role as a single Common Information Services (CIS) provider in Estonia, which offers a secure open protocol for data exchange between all stakeholders, enabling a competitive, innovative, and open market for U-space service provision,” says Teve Rahula, EANS Head of Business Development. “This will enable the drone services to thrive as we are able to increase efficient and safe access to airspace. For this reason, EANS is collaborating with Frequentis to realise the implementation of U-space in Estonia to advance the emerging uncrewed traffic management (UTM) UTM ecosystem.”

The cloud-based UTM system is provided as a managed service in the Frequentis cloud environment, allowing validation of use cases and business cases. The cloud architecture also enables a fully optimised deployment process, without the need for on-site activities. The UTM system complies with the requirements of Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/664 (draft) on a regulatory framework for the U-space.