FLYTE: Early Flight Trials Success

Volant Autonomy enjoyed a successful three days in the field last week and, despite the best efforts of the great British summer to rain it off, achieved a significant milestone en route to delivery of Flyte.

Flyte is Volant's solution to autonomous flight. It is able to simultaneously consider both mission conformance and conflict avoidance producing a proportionate human-like response to hazards. Flyte is a safe and certifiable solution for the integration of uncrewed aircraft into the airspace system which offers users reduced cost, increased revenue and a route to scalable operations.

These were the first flight trials as part of the ALIAS project. We successfully integrated Volant Flyte with SkyLift’s SkyFleet platforms. In practical terms this means that we could see Flyte making mission conformance suggestions, both through the SkyLift control centre and our own Vision system which allows us a realtime view of the autonomy's decision-making process.

The data collected throughout these flight trials will be collated and analysed, providing the basis for the next phase of development, enabling Flyte to control SkyLift’s unmanned aircraft vehicle.

As well as testing Flyte we had a preview of Dronecloud 's plans for integrating Via into their Unmanned Traffic Management system. Real-time flight planning which conforms Specific Operational Risk Assessment (SORA) classifications is a step closer to enabling unmanned aircraft and general aviation flying together in shared airspace. In concert, Flyte and Via deliver an unparalleled level of risk visibility for the next generation of crewed and uncrewed aircraft.

Thanks to our partners, SkyLift , who joined us for the flight trials, working with us on the integration of our software with their platform and enabling us to complete this valuable data-gathering exercise.

A huge well done to Volant Engineers Helio Silva , Freddie Sherratt and Sean C. whose hard work has really paid off.

We are looking forward to progressing to our next phase of integration and more hours of successful flying.