Naviair: Designing Denmark’s future drone infrastructure

The drone market is taking flight. While the media excitement is around package delivery and logistics, drones can be used for a myriad of use cases. However, without a well-defined infrastructure in place, drone operations could interfere with air travel, create other safety risks and potentially compromise community life. We helped Naviair, the independent public organisation that controls and facilitates the Danish airspace, develop a broad-ranging report that analysed the opportunity to build out a country-wide infrastructure for the drone industry.

Key successes

Creating a vision and a common language for Naviair as the organisation works to develop and facilitate a Danish drone infrastructure
Evaluating the commercial opportunities and capabilities needed to create this infrastructure
Providing clear strategic considerations and next steps for the drone journey

Racing to capitalise on a disruptive market opportunity

Commercial drone operations will transform the ways goods are transported, improving public life. Drones can deliver prescription drugs to the elderly within 20 minutes or drop supplies to remote locations during bad weather or natural disasters. They can help guide firefighting or search and rescue operations, directing resources to the points of need and saving lives. In addition, they can be used to monitor public and commercial infrastructures and improve agriculture yields and animal husbandry. These use cases are why the Danish Government has published a comprehensive National Drone Strategy with six key ambitions, including promoting drone research, development, testing, education, standards, and industrialisation of Danish drone innovations.

$46B by 2025

size of the global drone market

$9.6M Danish Government funding

for the country’s National Drone Strategy

7M drones

expected by 2050 in the European Union

Leading drone infrastructure development

Naviair wants to play a leadership role in the development of the drone industry in Denmark by developing an Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) platform. The platform needs to encompass the new airspace, regulations, customer and user base, workforce skills and technology required to support companies as they test new applications and operate their business within and across Denmark. With a drone infrastructure in place, Denmark will be able to register drones on a centralised platform, help facilitate capacity and traffic management to drive throughput and avoid collisions and geofence key areas drones aren’t allowed to enter.

“Naviair is well-poised to play a leadership role in the drone industry,” says Søren Stahlfest Møller, CFO of Naviair. “We were excited to partner with PA to explore how best to build out the critical infrastructure needed to ensure safe and effective drone operations and enable innovative use cases that will benefit commercial enterprise and the public.”

Creating a drone market report in just six weeks

We helped Naviair understand its options for developing Denmark’s future drone infrastructure. Together, we co-created a full strategic analysis of the opportunity. This included holding stakeholder workshops; developing an overall vision for the UTM platform based on the latest industry research and concept designs; defining different possible future operating models; assessing the capabilities needed to develop and drive the UTM platform; prioritising six customer segments from 12 options; aligning 13 services to customer segments; developing service pricing; recommending key technology companies for partnerships; and estimating revenues and profitability over a five-year period.

PA was incredibly focussed and relentless in helping us understand and quantify the market opportunity and create the business case for Naviair to play a leadership role. We’ve already won executive approval to proceed with further development work

Steen Myhre Taschner Erichsen,
Head of UTM Development and Strategy, Naviair

We helped Naviair:

co-create a strategic report with a business case and next steps in just six weeks
secure management buy-in to continue the journey towards becoming the Danish drone infrastructure provider
outline a roadmap for a minimal viable product (MVP) to build and test with customers.

Naviair is now well-positioned to help develop Denmark’s drone industry and provide a model that other countries can follow as they build their own UTM infrastructures. By so doing, nations can increase the quality of life for communities around the globe.

This story was published in January 2020.

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Paul Adamson

PA implementation expert

Naviair