The flight plan for drone technology – cracking the chicken/egg challenge of funding and enabling innovation
My previous report on drones and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) looked at the distinct challenges that future flight technologies face in the UK – the geographical, cultural, and investment obstacles that make scaling the adoption of drones more complex than in the US, China, or even the EU. My analysis then zoomed in on regulation, with a view from the UK's Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) on how to move beyond local experiments and towards enabling a national program of change.
But other dimensions of scaling autonomous or remotely piloted electric flight are just as tricky as the technical and regulatory ones, and among these are investment, growth, and market access. As my previous report touched on, the UK’s conservative investment culture makes growth capital harder to source than seed investment, while the UK’s small – and, post-Brexit, isolated – domestic market makes decamping to California, Texas, or the EU seem...
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