air traffic
Drones have so far only taken off very occasionally in Germany
A drone starts to fly over a field in the Hassberg district in Bavaria. photo
© Pia Bayer/dpa
Unmanned air taxis and delivery drones for parcels remain a dream of the future in German airspace for the time being. Among other things, there is still no legal framework for expanding operations.
The mass use of commercial drones is only slowly gaining momentum in Germany. “The drone industry is about to go into regular operation,” says Jan-Eric Putze, head of Droniq, a company founded in Frankfurt in 2019. The joint venture between Deutsche Flugsicherung and Deutsche Telekom has set itself the goal of making unmanned aerial vehicles visible to other air traffic and thus making many applications possible in the first place. A helpful and free app for private drone pilots is just one of the first tangible results.
Private flight pleasure at low altitudes is only a small and economically insignificant part of the long-awaited boom. Commercial drones can fly over power lines and railway lines, monitor industrial plants, container ports or construction sites, search for missing persons, transport blood samples and medicines or survey runways.
For all these and other purposes, an industry has formed in the world’s fourth-largest drone market, which includes not only service providers but also manufacturers such as Wingcopter from Weiterstadt in Hesse or Quantum from Oberpfaffenhofen in Bavaria. So far, however, the drone operators have had to apply for each flight individually, as in manned flight, while only authorities and security forces are able to quickly get powerful drones into the air with special permits.
Little commercial use
According to a market study commissioned by the Unmanned Aviation Association from 2021, only one in ten of the approximately 431,000 drones in Germany were used commercially. The industry consists primarily of small and medium-sized companies, which together had around 14,000 employees. By 2025, every third drone will be used for business purposes and the sector’s turnover will double to more than 1.6 billion euros.
Droniq boss Putze praises a drone system as a “game changer” that potential customers don’t have to deal with technically if they don’t want to. The drone is delivered in a ground station (drone-in-a-box) that monitors the aircraft and keeps it operational. It can be started and controlled at any time from an external control station. A pilot on site with eye contact is no longer necessary.
“Most of our customers are pedestrians or drivers who are not familiar with the airspace. That is our expertise,” said the Droniq boss. The clients would then only receive the images and data from their systems evaluated using artificial intelligence. But it is also possible, for example, to enable the operators of industrial parks to use the drones themselves on a regular basis.
Data flow to China
A possible catch: Like most devices for commercial use, the new “Drone-in-a-box” comes from the world market leader DJI in China. If the devices are flown with the original operating system, there is a risk that all data will flow to the People’s Republic. This is not only an impossibility for official users and is already the reason for the first bans in the USA. Droniq wants to refute the reservations and, according to its own statements, has adapted European software to the drone.
Freedom in the sky is by no means unlimited, but rather closely regulated by international agreements. With the increasing performance of unmanned flying objects, an international race has broken out to see who can implement the new possibilities the fastest. According to experts, European countries such as France, Spain or Portugal are adopting a more casual practice of allowing drone flights by general decree. Switzerland and Norway are also resolutely driving drone flights forward.
The great wait
The Germans, on the other hand, have so far relied on the single flight permit. For the time being, they are leading the way in setting up dedicated airspaces where drones can move safely under the care of a provider and be electronically visible to others. But after the milestone of a safe airspace (U-Space) in the Port of Hamburg that has been in operation for several months, the long wait has begun.
A legal framework for such U-Spaces has been in force in the EU since January. The Federal Ministry of Transport is working on adapting the German regulations to European law. “Our goal is for Germany to be one of the first countries to introduce national U-space regulation,” said Minister Volker Wissing (FDP), who sees Germany as a driver in unmanned aviation. A draft for a “U-Space law” should therefore be available at the end of this year.
The Leipzig aviation law expert Martin Maslaton warns against establishing an excessive designation procedure for the U-Spaces, as it is already doing, for example, for the approval procedures for wind turbines. In addition, care must be taken to ensure that the provider fees to be paid by the users are not driven to uneconomical heights. Droniq boss Putze does not expect a permanent area of application in Germany until the end of 2024 or 2025. Until then, Droniq will be involved in every project nationwide and will also seek cooperation with other service providers.