Drones are already being used in several trials for making deliveries such as transporting Covid-19 medical supplies and Royal Mail post to remote UK islands.
The 'Digitise the Skies' report suggests that the government would need to fund around £10m worth of upgrades to make the UK’s recreational aircraft electronically visible to drones in order to overcome safety issues.
The report also calculates that doing so would “unlock” the UK’s drone economy, which could be worth £42bn by 2030, a separate report by PwC has claimed.
Currently, drones and commercial manned aircraft are made visible to each other and to novel traffic control systems by small onboard electronic devices that communicate their location to minimise the risk of collision.
The UK’s 20,000 recreational aircraft - which typically operate in the same sub-10,000-feet 'Class G' airspace as drones - are not required to be electronically conspicuous, which makes mass rollout of commercial...