Spanish air navigation service provider Enaire presented the company’s plans to safely integrate drones into airspace with the rest of conventional traffic at the International Aeronautical and Aerospace Congress in La Gomera, being held on the island under the theme of “Canary Islands, the sandbox that looks to the sky” on 24-25 November 2022. Javier Delgado, Enaire’s Canary Islands Regional Director, and Raquel Moldes, from the Drones Business Development Department Javier Delgado and Raquel Moldes took part in “Roundtable III: Legislation and use of UAS in Spanish airspace”, where they shared how unmanned aircraft flights affect Enaire’s air traffic control service, how UAS flights are coordinated, if an airspace area has to be reserved while aerial work is being done, and other topics. In addition, in “Roundtable V: R&D in other air and space settings. Unmanned aircraft, the creation and transition to vertiports”, Raquel Moldes presented the projects Enaire is carrying out to test the integration of drones with other air traffic.
According to the Enaire press release:
The growth of these operations demands that they be safely integrated with all other traffic. In the Canary Islands alone, Enaire coordinated 1,185 operations in the Canary Islands through October, out of over 9,200 in all Spain. The Canary Islands ranks second behind Catalonia (2,006), and ahead of Madrid (1,174), in the number of drone operations managed by Enaire.
The European Commission has set up a regulatory framework that will allow UAS traffic to be automatically managed and integrated with manned aviation. This concept is known as U-space. U-space is the set of services and procedures that are being developed in a coordinated manner to enable a high number of operations with unmanned aircraft, especially complex operations, in a way that is orderly, fluid, safe and attainable.
In order to comply with this European regulation, the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and the Urban Agenda (MITMA) has set up a National Action Plan for the Deployment of U-space (PANDU). The document was developed under the leadership of the Civil Aviation General Directorate (DGAC), and jointly authored by the National Aviation Safety Agency (AESA) and Enaire. The Ministry of Defence also played a key role in its creation. This plan calls on all the parties involved in the sector to promote the development of infrastructure and the implementation of U-space services in a coordinated and efficient manner throughout the country.
As part of the Plan, Enaire aims to be certified as the sole common information services provider (CISP) to disseminate static and dynamic data that will allow U-space services to be provided. Enaire, through various projects and with European financing, is studying how the benefits of the U-Space system in controlled airspace will allow processes that are now manual to be automated, and response times to be improved. Similarly, the desired safe integration of drones and manned traffic will be subject to coordination between air navigation service providers.
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